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Data Ascension Consulting

How we work

Structured discovery, phased delivery, and an off-ramp at every milestone. No surprise invoices, no scope drift.

  1. Phase 0

    Discovery

    Fixed price · $10K–$25K · 2–4 weeks

    SRF (Situation / Complication / Resolution) discovery sessions, systems mapping, maturity scoring, and a written plan. You own the deliverable whether or not we continue.

  2. Phase 1

    Design & Architecture

    Milestone-based

    Reference architecture, tool selection, security review, and detailed backlog for build phases. Signed-off before anyone writes production code.

  3. Phase 2

    Foundation Build

    Milestone-based

    Infrastructure-as-code, core ingestion, staging warehouse, identity and access. The skeleton everything else rides on.

  4. Phase 3

    Pipelines & Models

    Milestone-based

    Production pipelines, dbt models, metric definitions, and the first analytics surface (warehouse, semantic layer, or API).

  5. Phase 4

    Consumption & Enablement

    Milestone-based

    Dashboards or embedded analytics, analyst training, runbooks, and the handoff that lets your team operate the platform without us.

  6. Phase 5

    Hypercare & Retainer

    Fixed retainer tiers

    Optional post-launch support for incident response, tuning, small features, and fractional CDO-style advising.

Engagement principles

  • Paid Discovery always. Free discovery trains everyone to undervalue planning.
  • Phased off-ramps. Every phase ends at a natural stopping point with a working artifact in hand.
  • NTE caps on T&M. Time-and-materials work always ships with a not-to-exceed ceiling and 80%-used alert.
  • Approval clocks. Deliverables submitted for review are deemed accepted if feedback doesn't arrive within 10 business days, so the project doesn't stall.
  • Client owns everything. Code, models, infrastructure, credentials — all transferred. No vendor lock-in to us.