What we mean.
The free first call is where we find out whether the project can move. Most of the questions are technical. One question is not.
"Who decides on this call, on a Wednesday, without escalation?"
If the answer takes more than ten seconds, the project has a structural decision problem. The technology is not the constraint. The clock the decisions run on is. That clock will fight every deadline the technology has, and it will win.
The three patterns that signal trouble.
We see the same three shapes again and again.
Committee design reviews. Every technical trade-off goes to a standing meeting where the decision-makers are also the people most distant from the work. The cadence is fortnightly or monthly. The latency between decision request and decision is two cycles by default. On a twelve-week build, that is twenty-five percent of the schedule, gone.
Two-tiered sign-off. A technical sponsor in the room can decide architecture. A commercial sponsor not in the room owns the budget. Every decision that crosses the line (and most do) requires a second meeting to close. The technical sponsor cannot say yes. The commercial sponsor cannot say no without context. Decisions slip until both can converge.
Unnamed final approver. Asked who has to sign the final delivery, the room produces five names, then four, then "well, ultimately the board, but in practice…". There is no named owner. When something needs a yes, the team improvises. When something needs a no, nobody wants to be the one saying it.
None of these patterns is incompetence. All of them are structural. They emerge in big organisations because they distribute risk. They kill projects because risk-distribution and decision-velocity are the same axis.
The fix.
Three named roles, by Friday of the first week.
- Commercial sponsor with budget. One person, named, with the authority to release or hold the budget. Not "the team". Not "the steering committee". A person whose office you can walk into and whose calendar you can book.
- Technical sponsor with veto. One person, named, who can stop a build before it ships if the technical risk crosses a line. Not the same person as commercial. The veto is the point: it is the structural permission to do the right engineering decision when the commercial pressure is wrong.
- Decision SLA. A maximum time between a written decision request and a written decision response. Three working days is normal. Five is the outer edge of what a fixed-deadline project can absorb. Seven means the project is decision-starved before it starts.
This is not bureaucracy. It is the smallest amount of process required for a project to move at the speed its deadline demands. The customer's job is to set this up. Our job is to ask for it on the first call.
When the customer cannot fix it in time.
Sometimes the structure is what it is, and the deadline is what it is, and neither moves.
If we take the engagement anyway, we make the decision shape explicit in the assessment artefact. The risk register lists "decision latency" as the top item, and the recommended sequence is built around it: schedule the irreversible decisions first, build the reversible work in parallel, batch the committee asks. Sometimes the best advice is to slip the deadline by two weeks at the start in exchange for keeping it at the end.
If the project genuinely cannot work at the available decision velocity, the £9,999 assessment will say that, and the four artefacts will tell the customer's leadership exactly what to fix and in what order. That is sometimes the most useful thing we deliver.
Why we ask this on the first call.
Two reasons.
The first is selfish. A project with no named commercial sponsor is a project where every conversation about scope, schedule, or cost becomes a conversation about who should be in the meeting. We charge a fixed price. The cost of that ambiguity comes out of our delivery, not the customer's budget.
The second is honest. Eighty percent of the people we speak to on a free call book a follow-up engagement. The other twenty percent do not, and most of them do not because the project does not have the decision shape it needs to ship. We would rather find that out in thirty minutes than ten weeks.