The relay-race problem in enterprise delivery

The handoff tax

The dominant model in our market is a relay race. A strategy firm writes the deck. A delivery shop builds to the deck. A managed-services vendor runs what got built. Each leg is optimised for its own handoff, and the system that emerges carries the seams of every exchange it passed through.

One team, one accountability

We don't think strategy and engineering should be separate businesses with separate invoices. The architects who design it ship it. The strategists who advised on it stay accountable for it. There's no leg to hand off, so there's no seam to inherit. The reason relay-race systems look the way they do is the relay race itself.

Removing the handoff isn't a process tweak. It changes what you can promise a client — because the person making the promise is the person who has to keep it.