I work with companies that run physical things. Energy networks, data centres, industrial plant, mines, water. I find where the business is quietly relying on one person to catch its mistakes, and build the thing that catches them instead.

In operations like these the gap has a particular shape. The assets outlive the systems that describe them, often by decades. The engineer who knows which feeder trips in summer knows it because he was there in summer, and none of that reached the asset register. When a regulator asks you to justify the spend, the register is what you have to answer with.

So somewhere a person, not a system, is the last check. They remember which contractor always reports late, which reading looks wrong in March, which of the four spreadsheets is the real one. Nobody planned it. It grew around a gap.

That person is why things mostly work. They are also why nothing can be handed over, why nobody can take a month off, and why numbers drift for years before anybody notices.

Operators feel this and rarely name it, because it does not present as a data problem. It presents as “Sarah does that”, which holds right up until Sarah leaves or Sarah is wrong.

What I do:

⊹ read a system cold and find where the documented process and the operating process came apart

⊹ write the rules down in a form software can enforce instead of a person remembering

⊹ build the checks that fail loudly, so nobody has to go looking

⊹ leave the recordings and the runbook, so the next person does not start from zero

One question tells me most of what I need:

What does someone check by hand every week, and what happens the week they don’t?

Two ways in, depending on size:

⊹ Small enough to look at directly. Read-only access for twenty minutes, and I tell you what I found whether or not there is a job in it.

⊹ Larger, or regulated. A paid discovery against a named system, fixed price and fixed length, ending in a written finding you can put in front of somebody else.

Either way the build is fixed price, scoped from what the read turned up and quoted before anything starts. If it runs harder than I estimated, that is mine to wear. Anything I find outside the scope I stop and quote separately, so nothing happens that you have not agreed to.

There is no monthly retainer, on purpose. Work priced by the month has to stay manual to stay billable, and the whole point is to delete the manual work. Occasional project work six months apart is fine. Sitting on your payroll to keep a problem alive is not.

Not sure which of these you are? Start here.

William Marzella, Melbourne. hello@motis.group