Choosing IT consulting: clear criteria, no slide theatre
If you need results in cloud, platform or AI projects, dependable delivery signals count for more than pitch slides. This page lists the criteria that let you assess consulting offers quickly and properly.
Appetizer Labs delivers founder-led, so only a few projects run in parallel — we confirm availability before writing a proposal.
What you concretely gain
A 30/60/90-day plan with concrete outcomes instead of vague roadmaps
Transparency about the actual seniority in day-to-day project work
Compliance by design (GDPR, AI Act, NIS2) built into the delivery plan
Knowledge transfer, so your team stays independent after the project ends
Trust & Proof: Clear scope definition, documented KPIs and a focus on delivery that works rather than a methodology show.
How we work together
1) Clarify objectives + risks
Capture business goals, bottlenecks, and critical dependencies in a structured session.
2) Prioritise a 90-day plan
Concrete measures ranked by impact, risk, and implementation effort.
3) Deliver with your team
Set up delivery together, ensure operational readiness, hand over documentation.
Common concerns — answered directly
"We find it hard to compare providers."
Use one scoring grid for delivery pace, seniority, governance integration and the ability to hand over.
"We don't want hidden extra costs."
Look for a transparent cost model with clear outcome milestones and named assumptions.
"We need impact fast, not just strategy."
Ask for early delivery artefacts in the first weeks: a backlog, a governance mapping and a delivery baseline.
When we are not the right fit
So nobody loses time: for these requests we are the wrong supplier. Ask and we will suggest someone who is not.
Round-the-clock operations, on-call cover and SLA-backed run responsibility
We build platforms and hand them over ready to run. Running them is a different business — a managed-service provider can commit to that, we cannot.
Certificates, audit sign-off and conformity statements
Engineering work towards ISO 27001, NIS2 or the EU AI Act is in scope. Issuing the attestation is not: that takes an accredited auditor, not an engineer.
Transformation programmes with many parallel workstreams
Past roughly four concurrent streams you need a delivery organization. We work in a small setup; anything else would mean buying in people we do not know.
A fixed price for a whole transformation, quoted before anyone has looked
Pricing an unexamined legacy estate is guesswork. We estimate after a short assessment — and we will say so when the rebuild is not worth it.
Talk about your project.
Tell us about your project and technical questions. Let us discuss what support fits your context.
What the next step actually involves
- No sales call and no qualification screen. The first conversation is there to place the problem, not to close anything.
- The reply comes from the engineer who would do the work, not from a sales layer that passes it on.
- Getting in touch does not commit to an engagement. Scope and terms are agreed before any work is commissioned.
- Scope is written down before implementation starts: the result, the boundaries, the estimated effort.