Technology Advice From People Who Still Ship Code
Architecture reviews, technology selection, delivery assessments and technical due diligence, delivered by engineers who build systems rather than consultants who only diagram them.
What does an IT consultancy actually deliver?
IT consultancy delivers decisions and evidence rather than software: architecture reviews that identify scaling and reliability risks, technology selection with a documented rationale, delivery assessments explaining why a programme is late, technical due diligence for investors and acquirers, cost and cloud spend analysis, and interim or fractional CTO leadership. Anviam delivers these as short, written engagements with specific recommendations, and every consultant also works on delivery, so advice is tested against implementation.
- Architecture review
- 2–3 weeks, written findings
- Delivery assessment
- 2 weeks including interviews
- Technical due diligence
- 1–3 weeks to fit deal timelines
- Fractional CTO
- 2–8 days per month
- Output
- Written report with ranked recommendations
- Independence
- Advisory can be bought without delivery
The Best Test of Advice Is Whether the Adviser Has to Live With It
Pure advisory firms have a structural problem: they are rarely present when their recommendations meet reality. Reference architectures that assume a platform team you do not have, microservices recommendations for teams of six, technology choices that ignore who will maintain them after the consultants leave. The advice is not wrong so much as untested.
Everyone doing advisory work here also delivers. That changes what we recommend, usually towards something less ambitious and more likely to work: a modular monolith instead of microservices, a managed service instead of a self-hosted cluster, one migration instead of three parallel programmes. We also write down what we would not do, which is often the more useful half of a report.
IT Consultancy Services
Architecture Review
Assessment of scalability, reliability, security and cost, with risks ranked by likelihood and impact.
Technology Selection
Structured evaluation of platform and framework options against your team, constraints and time horizon.
Delivery Assessment
An honest diagnosis of why a programme is late, based on interviews, artefacts and delivery data.
Technical Due Diligence
Code, architecture, team and process assessment for investors and acquirers, on deal timelines.
Cloud Cost & Efficiency Review
Where spend actually goes, what is waste, and what changing it would cost to implement.
Fractional CTO & Advisory
Part-time senior technical leadership for teams without a CTO or between hires.
What a Consultancy Engagement Produces
Questions Clients Bring Us
Is This Architecture Going to Hold?
A system approaching a growth inflection, where the team suspects but cannot prove a ceiling.
Which Platform Should We Pick?
A decision with a long lifespan and credible internal disagreement about the answer.
Why Is Delivery Always Late?
Repeated slippage where the cause is contested between engineering and product.
Should We Invest or Acquire?
Diligence on a target's codebase, team and technical debt before a transaction closes.
Are We Exposed?
Security and compliance posture review ahead of an audit or enterprise customer assessment.
We Need a CTO but Not Full-Time
Technical leadership, hiring support and architectural governance a few days a month.
How an Advisory Engagement Runs
Frame the Question
We agree the specific decision the engagement must inform, which sets scope and duration.
Evidence Gathering
Code and infrastructure review, delivery data and confidential interviews across the team.
Analysis & Options
Findings assembled into options with honest trade-offs, cost and risk, not a single recommendation.
Report & Walkthrough
A written report plus a session with your leadership team to work through implications.
Optional Implementation
We can help execute, but the report stands alone and is deliberately vendor-neutral.
Common Questions About IT Consultancy Services
Will your advice just recommend hiring you to build it?
The report is written to be vendor-neutral and useful on its own, and a meaningful share of our advisory engagements end with a recommendation we are not involved in delivering — keep the current supplier, build in-house, buy a product instead of building. Advisory can be bought entirely separately from delivery, and we will state clearly in the report where we have a commercial interest in a recommendation so you can weight it accordingly.
What does an architecture review look at?
Whether the system will hold at your projected scale, and where it breaks first. That means data model and query patterns, coupling and deployment independence, failure modes and blast radius, observability, security posture, and cost trajectory as volume grows. We also look at the human side, since architecture the team cannot operate is a real risk. Output is a ranked risk register with a cost estimate against each remediation.
How is a delivery assessment different from a project audit?
An audit checks compliance against a process; an assessment asks why outcomes are poor, which is usually a different question. We look at how work enters the team, how much is in flight simultaneously, where handoffs stall, how estimates are produced and used, and what the ticket data actually shows about cycle time. Interviews are confidential, because the accurate explanation is often something nobody will say in a group meeting.
Can you do technical due diligence on a deal timeline?
Yes. We routinely work to one to three week windows and can compress further where necessary. Coverage includes code quality and test posture, architecture and scalability, security exposure, third-party licensing, infrastructure cost, key-person dependency and delivery capability. The output is written for an investment committee: what the real technical risks are, what remediation would cost, and which findings should affect price or warranties.
What is a fractional CTO engagement?
Two to eight days a month of senior technical leadership: architectural governance, technology decisions, hiring support and interviewing, vendor management, and translating between the engineering team and the board. It suits companies past the point where the founder can carry technical direction but not yet at the scale to justify a full-time CTO salary, and companies bridging a gap between CTO hires.
Do you sign NDAs and work with confidential information?
Yes, NDAs before any detailed discussion, and our process is ISO 27001:2013 certified. For due diligence work we operate under the deal's confidentiality terms and can work in a data room. Interview confidentiality is important to us on delivery assessments: individual attribution stays out of the report, because otherwise people tell you what is safe rather than what is true.