Our Co-Pilot Approach To Consulting

Real change has to be built with your organisation, not just handed over to it. The old way of consulting often ends with a heavy slide deck and an even heavier invoice, while the ability to maintain momentum walks out the door with the consultants. Frankly, we think that model is broken. It builds dependency, not internal strength.

Our copilot approach flips that script. We work alongside your team as embedded partners, digging in to find the real, often hidden, reasons things aren't as efficient as they could be. Lasting progress rarely starts with buying a fancy new platform. It starts with understanding the human factors and process gaps that are causing all the friction in the first place.

This means we get our hands dirty with you. We observe workflows, talk to the people actually doing the work, and map how information truly flows (or gets stuck) across your business. The aim is always to simplify complexity, not add another confusing layer on top.

Building lasting capability

Our main goal is simple: build lasting capability inside your organisation. When our project is finished, the knowledge, skills, and confidence to own your improved processes stay with your team. We call this digital sovereignty, and it’s at the heart of everything we do. You should never be held hostage by a vendor or a consultant just to run your own business well.

We make this happen through a completely transparent and collaborative partnership. Forget vague promises about a "digital journey". We focus on tangible results that free up time and lead to sharper, faster decisions.

This hands-on method ensures change actually sticks because your team helps build it. They understand the "why" behind every new process and feel confident using the tools to their full potential. It’s a huge shift from being told what to do to being genuinely equipped with the skills to do it better.

A transparent and scoped partnership

Uncertainty kills momentum. That’s why we’ve scrapped the old-fashioned hourly billing model. It creates the wrong incentives, rewarding consultants for time spent rather than problems solved.

Instead, all our work is broken down into clearly defined stages with scoped pricing. You know exactly what’s being delivered, what the investment is, and when it will be completed. No nasty surprises or spiralling costs.

We don’t advise and then vanish. We work alongside you to deliver practical, grounded change that frees time, strengthens capability, and leaves you in control.

All our progress is tracked in our Plans Portal, which acts as a live command centre for your project. This tool gives you total transparency, keeping leadership and project teams perfectly aligned on goals, milestones, and what’s coming next. It becomes the single source of truth, cutting through the operational fog and making progress visible to everyone.

This partnership is designed for leaders who are ready to move from talking strategy to taking action. We untangle the knots in your operations and embed improvements that last, instead of just leaving a report behind. For a broader look at how this applies to major change initiatives, have a read of our overview on digital transformation consulting services.

By putting your people first, clarifying your processes, and then aligning the right technology, our digital maturity consulting delivers a real, measurable impact. The result is an organisation that’s more open, more capable, and built to thrive.

How To Assess Your Digital Readiness

Before you can make any real progress, you need an honest look at your starting point. Any meaningful change begins with a candid assessment of where your organisation truly stands—not where last year’s strategy document claimed it would be. This isn’t about ticking boxes on a generic checklist. It’s about understanding the real-world friction your teams face every single day.

Assessing your digital readiness means looking far beyond just the tech you use. It demands a clear-eyed evaluation of your company culture, your team's skills, how you use (or don't use) data, and the way you engage with customers. Without this holistic view, you risk pouring money into shiny new solutions that solve all the wrong problems.

As the image shows, technology is just one piece of the puzzle. Your people and the overarching strategy guiding them are just as critical, if not more so.

Key dimensions to evaluate

To get a practical sense of where you are right now, you need to ask some uncomfortable but necessary questions across several key areas. These dimensions move from foundational elements, like culture, to more tangible outputs like the customer experience you deliver. A solid assessment gives you the clarity needed to focus your efforts where they’ll have the biggest impact.

There are well-known frameworks out there to help guide this process. Grant Thornton UK’s Digital Maturity Assessment, for example, uses six key dimensions—customer engagement, culture, sustainable operating models, capabilities, data, and technology—to help businesses benchmark their progress.

Thinking in this diagnostic way empowers you to pinpoint where the operational drag is most severe and where the biggest opportunities for improvement are hiding in plain sight.

A practical self-assessment framework

To get this process started internally, you can use a simple framework to plot your current state. Think of maturity as a spectrum, moving from reactive and chaotic operations on one end to proactive and optimised ones on the other. This isn't about chasing a perfect score, but about identifying patterns.

Use the table below to get a rough idea of where your organisation fits. Be honest. Acknowledging your starting point is the first step toward building a clear, actionable plan.

Digital Maturity Self-Assessment Framework

This table provides a simple way to gauge where your organisation currently stands across key dimensions of digital maturity. Review each row and see which description best reflects your reality.

By working through these areas, you start to replace assumptions with evidence. This foundational understanding is crucial before committing time and resources to any new initiative or technology investment. A proper diagnosis ensures the cure will actually work.

‍

Common Roadblocks To Digital Maturity

Here’s one of the most common and expensive mistakes we see: businesses investing in new technology before fixing the human and process issues underneath.

It’s like bolting a faster engine onto a car with four flat tyres. All that potential is there, but you’re not going anywhere. Progress grinds to a halt, not because the tech is wrong, but because the real, foundational problems were never touched.

Leaders understandably get excited by the promise of a new platform. The thing is, a new CRM won't magically fix a broken sales process. An AI tool can’t deliver insights from data that’s messy, siloed, or untrusted. These tools are simply amplifiers. They make good processes great and broken processes even more chaotic.

The real blockers to digital maturity are rarely technical. They’re deeply human.

Resistance to change and hidden silos

Often, the biggest hurdle is cultural. It's just human nature to stick to familiar routines, even when they're wildly inefficient. When a new system gets introduced without anyone properly explaining the 'why' behind it, teams will always find a way to sneak back to their old, comfortable spreadsheets.

This resistance isn't always loud. Sometimes it’s silent, showing up as departmental silos where teams guard their data and processes like a fortress, seeing collaboration as a threat to their little kingdom. For example, we worked with a firm where the marketing and sales teams used completely separate, disconnected systems. Marketing would celebrate hitting their lead targets, while sales complained the leads were useless.

The expensive new integrated platform they bought did precisely nothing to help. Why? Because the real issue was a total lack of shared goals and a deep-seated mistrust between the two teams. It was only when we got them in a room to agree on what a "good lead" actually was that we could start to untangle the operational knot. The technology was the easy bit. Getting the people aligned was the real work.

True progress is blocked by a fear of transparency. When data is shared openly, it exposes inefficiencies and holds everyone accountable—and that can be deeply uncomfortable for teams used to working in the dark.

Mismatched skills and underfunded training

Another killer roadblock is the massive gap between the tools you buy and the skills your team has to actually use them. There's this dangerous assumption that because people use tech in their personal lives, they can just pick up complex business software. This is a flawed and costly belief.

A recent UK study in the healthcare sector shows this perfectly. The NHS, while investing heavily in its digital infrastructure, was found to have allocated less than 1% of its Digital Transformation budget to building a digitally ready workforce. This creates a chasm between the potential of the technology and the ability of staff to get any real value from it. You can dig into the findings on digital readiness in the public sector.

This isn't just a public sector problem. We see it all the time in private firms that roll out advanced analytics tools without spending a penny on data literacy training. The result is painfully predictable: rock-bottom adoption rates, frustrated employees, and a terrible return on a very significant investment. Without the right skills, the best technology on the market is just expensive noise.

Misaligned leadership and chasing symptoms

Finally, if the leadership team isn't on the same page, any transformation is dead in the water before it even starts. If the COO is obsessed with efficiency, the CFO is focused on cutting costs, and the CEO only cares about top-line growth, any digital project will be pulled in three different directions at once.

This misalignment almost always leads to chasing symptoms instead of solving the root cause. For instance, a leadership team might see slow reporting as the problem and rush to buy a new business intelligence tool. But the real problem is a convoluted approvals process that needs manual data entry from three different departments.

A digital maturity consulting partner helps you diagnose the actual disease, not just the symptoms you can see. By focusing on the foundational people and process problems first, you make sure that when you do invest in technology, it has a solid foundation to build on. It turns that investment from a costly gamble into a strategic certainty.

Building Your Digital Maturity Roadmap

A clear assessment gives you an honest starting point. But a diagnosis without a treatment plan is just information. The next critical step is translating those findings into a practical, actionable roadmap that guides your organisation from where it is now to where it needs to be.

This isn't about creating a rigid, five-year plan that will be obsolete in six months. It’s about building a living document that prioritises action, builds momentum, and stays firmly tied to what your business is trying to achieve. A great roadmap provides clarity, not just a long list of tasks.

The focus has to be on creating a realistic, phased plan that respects your resources and your team's capacity for change. While mapping out your journey, it can be helpful to review broader strategies for building a digital transformation roadmap.

A phased approach to build momentum

Real, lasting change is a marathon, not a sprint. We structure roadmaps in logical phases designed to deliver value quickly and build the confidence needed for bigger, more foundational shifts. This phased approach stops teams from feeling overwhelmed and shows tangible progress early on.

It typically breaks down like this:

1. Phase 1: Quick Wins and Stabilisation. We start by identifying and tackling the most immediate pain points, often called 'low-hanging fruit'. These are small, high-impact changes that can free up time and reduce frustration almost immediately—think automating a repetitive manual report or fixing a broken data sync. These wins are crucial for earning trust and proving that change is actually possible.
2. Phase 2: Foundational Process Improvement. With some momentum on the board, the focus shifts to untangling core processes. This means mapping out key workflows, getting rid of bottlenecks, and standardising how work gets done. It’s here that we embed the people-first changes that make any future technology investment a success.
3. Phase 3: Strategic Technology Integration. Only once the people and processes are aligned do we look at introducing or optimising significant technology. This ensures any new platform is brought in to solve a well-understood problem, not just for the sake of having new tech.

This structured progression is vital for creating sustainable change. You can explore a detailed breakdown in our article on creating a practical digital transformation roadmap.

Defining what 'better' looks like

A roadmap is useless without clear measures of success. Vague goals like "improve efficiency" are impossible to track. Instead, we work with you to define tangible metrics that everyone can understand and get behind.

Success isn't just a new system going live. It's measured in reclaimed hours, sharper decisions, and a team that feels more confident and capable in their roles.

This means setting specific, measurable outcomes. For instance, the UK government has committed £8 billion by 2025 to upgrade its digital infrastructure, aiming for tangible benefits like £101 million in net savings per year. This highlights the importance of tying investment to clear financial and operational targets.

Your metrics might include things like:

• Reducing time spent on manual data entry by 10 hours per week.
• Decreasing the sales cycle by 15% through better lead management.
• Improving employee satisfaction scores related to internal tools.

This focus on outcomes ensures every step in the roadmap is purposeful, moving you closer to a more resilient and operationally sound business.

Got Questions About Digital Maturity?

We hear a few common questions from leaders trying to get their heads around digital maturity. Let's clear them up with some straight answers.

What is digital maturity in simple terms?

Think of it this way: digital maturity isn't about having the flashiest new tech. It’s about how well your people, processes, and technology actually work together to get things done.

A truly mature organisation uses technology and data to make sharp decisions, operates smoothly, and can pivot when things change—without everything falling apart.

What is the best first step to improve our digital maturity?

Before you spend a penny on new software, the best first step is to get an honest look at where you are right now. You need to understand what your team is capable of, where your current processes are causing friction, and whether you're even using the tools you already have properly.

This diagnostic phase is critical. It helps pinpoint the real bottlenecks and biggest opportunities, so you can focus your energy and investment where it’ll actually make a difference.

An assessment gives you a clear starting line. It lets you build a roadmap based on reality, not guesswork, making sure every move you make is a step forward.

How do you measure the ROI of digital maturity consulting?

We tie the return on investment to tangible results that actually matter to your bottom line. This isn't about vague promises. It’s about tracking specific, agreed-upon metrics from day one.

Typically, we measure things like:

• Time reclaimed. We put a number on the hours of mind-numbing manual work your team saves each week.
• Efficiency gains. This could be measuring fewer operational errors or seeing how much faster your teams can make key decisions.
• Improved engagement. We look at tangible improvements in employee and customer satisfaction scores that are directly linked to your systems.

The goal isn't just a one-off saving. It’s about building a smarter, more resilient way of working that keeps delivering value long after our work is done—and leaving that capability with your own team.

Ready to cut through the operational fog and build a more capable organisation? Let's Talk.