Platform engineering & delivery consulting

Get your software organization enterprise-ready.

You have a growing software organization and a product people depend on. What you may not have yet is the delivery infrastructure that makes growth safe: reproducible environments, an automated path to production, a way to recover when something breaks, and evidence you can hand a prospective customer's security team.

Start a conversation See how it works

The assessment reconstructs a 90-day baseline of how you deliver today, so later work is judged against numbers rather than impressions:

  • Deployment frequency
  • Lead time for a change
  • Change failure rate
  • Time to restore service

Outcomes

What "enterprise-ready" actually buys you

If you don't yet know exactly what your organization needs, that's normal — it's the reason the work starts with an assessment rather than a proposal. These are the outcomes it's all pointed at.

An automated path to production

Build, test, and release automation with versioned artifacts, environment promotion, and a rollback path that has actually been tested. Releases become routine instead of an event.

Environments you can reproduce

Infrastructure defined as code, with parity between environments and a repeatable path to standing up a new one — rather than a configuration that exists only in the console and in someone's memory.

A recovery you've actually rehearsed

Backup and restore validated by running it, documented recovery objectives, and a definitive answer to "what is running in production right now" at any moment.

Answers for your customer's security team

Identity and privilege handled deliberately, secrets moved out of manual configuration into managed storage with defined rotation. The questions that stall enterprise deals, answered before they're asked.

Alerts that reach a human

Instrumentation wired to alerts someone actually receives, runbooks for the failure modes most likely to hit you, and an incident practice your team has used before it matters.

A team that can run it without me

Everything documented well enough for your engineers to operate and change it on their own. Knowledge transfer is treated as a deliverable, not an afterthought — the goal is that you don't need me afterward.

Process

How an engagement works

Everything starts with a short, fixed-fee assessment, because pricing implementation work before knowing the current state would be guesswork. You are not asked to commit to anything beyond it.

  1. Assess

    Two weeks. A structured review of source control, cloud environment, deployment process, data protection, observability, security posture, and team practices — plus interviews with your engineering and business stakeholders, and direct observation of a live deployment.

  2. Get the roadmap

    A sequenced, prioritized plan written to be executable by your own team, with a measured baseline to judge it against. If you go no further, you still own a plan you can act on — none of it depends on my continued involvement.

  3. Decide how to proceed

    Continue in whichever shape fits, or don't continue at all. All the continuation options draw from the same roadmap; they differ only in how much of the work I do directly versus how much your team does with my direction.

What the assessment leaves you with

  • Baseline Report

    Current state across every domain reviewed, with measured metrics.

  • Gap and Risk Register

    Every gap found, with severity, business impact, and remediation effort.

  • Prioritized 90-Day Roadmap

    A sequenced plan with dependencies and success measures.

  • Executive Readout

    A presentation of the findings, and a discussion with leadership.

The work

Where the work tends to land

Categories, not commitments. Some of this will already be in reasonable shape at your organization — and the most valuable items are frequently not the ones either of us expects going in, which is exactly why nothing is scoped before the assessment.

Infrastructure and environments

Reproducibility, environment parity, configuration management.

Delivery pipeline

Build, test, and release automation; artifact management; promotion and rollback.

Security and access

Identity, privilege, secret management, credential lifecycle.

Data protection

Backup, recovery, migration safety, data handling.

Quality and testing

Automated verification, release confidence, defect prevention.

Observability and operations

Instrumentation, alerting, incident practice, runbooks.

Architecture and standards

Patterns and decisions that shape the applications you build next.

Enablement

Documentation, review practice, and raising your team's capability.

How scope is set

You decide what gets built

Scope for anything after the assessment is drawn from the roadmap and ordered by three inputs. Where they disagree, you decide — my obligation is to make the tradeoff explicit: what a given choice defers, and what risk that carries.

Risk severity

What the findings say is most likely to cause a costly failure, and how soon.

Your priorities

What leadership decides matters most to the business — including commitments and timelines I may not be aware of.

My recommendation

Technical sequencing, dependencies, and where effort produces the most durable benefit.

Priorities can change at any point — work not yet started is never locked in, and reprioritizing does not change the cost.

Engagements

Ways to work together

Every engagement starts here

Assessment and roadmap

Two weeks, fixed fee. It establishes where you actually stand and produces the four deliverables above. It stands alone and produces value on its own — the roadmap is written so your own team can execute it, and nothing in it depends on my continued involvement.

Afterward, continue in one of three shapes — or don't continue at all. All three draw from the same roadmap and differ in who does the work.

Foundation Build

Duration
8 weeks
Who implements
I do
You end up with
A working platform

Best when you want the platform built now, correctly, and fast.

What's fixed is the effort and the price, not the feature list — so you're never exposed to a scope estimate made before the assessment, and reprioritizing mid-engagement costs you nothing. The final week is reserved for documentation, handover, and confirming your team can operate what was built.

Fractional Platform Lead

Duration
6 months
Who implements
Shared
You end up with
A capable team and a platform

Best when you want senior platform leadership without adding headcount.

The closest analogue to hiring a senior platform engineer, minus the recruiting, benefits load, and ramp-up. I set technical direction, build the parts needing deep platform expertise, and review your team's work alongside. Priorities are revisited monthly, so what the assessment couldn't have anticipated gets absorbed without renegotiation.

Advisory Retainer

Duration
3 months minimum
Who implements
Your team
You end up with
A guided team

Best when your team will do the work and wants expert direction.

Weekly working sessions, design review before significant technical decisions, code and configuration review on request, and reference implementations for the patterns you're adopting. This option delivers direction, not delivery — the right choice when your team has the capacity to execute and the real gap is knowing what to build and in what order.

What holds regardless

True of every engagement

  • Everything delivered is production-ready and in use — not a prototype or a proof of concept.
  • Everything is documented well enough for your team to operate and change it without me.
  • No proprietary tooling, and no vendor lock-in introduced without your explicit agreement.
  • Knowledge transfer is a deliverable, not an afterthought.
  • All deliverables and work product are owned by you.
  • Work is remote, during US business hours.

Not included: 24/7 or after-hours on-call coverage · penetration testing or formal compliance certification · application feature development · hiring, recruiting, or personnel evaluation · third-party licensing, cloud spend, or tooling costs.

Why this structure

No bench. No handoff.

Dackota Consulting LLC is the independent practice of Dackota Johnson. You work directly with the person who runs the assessment and writes the roadmap — not a partner who sells the work and a rotating cast who delivers it.

A permanent hire is a fixed cost that begins before productivity does. Recruiting, onboarding, and ramp typically consume the first six to eight weeks, and a fixed-term hire often departs shortly after becoming fully effective. This inverts that: work begins immediately, cost is variable and stoppable, and the knowledge is deliberately transferred to your team rather than leaving with the individual.

You're also buying a narrow expertise — platform infrastructure, deployment automation, and cloud security — that you'll need intensely for the next six months and considerably less thereafter. That profile suits an engagement better than a headcount.

Tell me where delivery hurts.

Send a couple of paragraphs about your product, your team, and what's slowing you down. I'll tell you honestly whether I can help — and if the answer is a short email instead of an engagement, you'll get the email.

consulting@dackota.com