Why we sell a fixed-price assessment instead of hourly discovery.

Dynamics Expert Solutions · September 2026

Most D365 projects that go over budget were over budget before they started. The overrun was baked in at the moment a company committed to a full implementation on the strength of a sales demo and an estimate. Our answer to that is structural: clarity before commitment.

The problem with hourly discovery

An hourly discovery phase has no natural end and no natural output. It is billed by the hour, so its incentives run the wrong way, and it typically produces a proposal written by the same party who will bill the implementation. The client cannot take it anywhere else, so it is not really an assessment. It is the first invoice of a project that has already been decided.

What we do instead

A fixed-price, fixed-scope assessment: four weeks, with two weeks onsite for requirements gathering and RFP development and two weeks of demo preparation. It ends in two things: a project blueprint, and a solution demo built around your actual requirements rather than a generic walkthrough. You know the cost before you start and exactly what you own when it ends.

The part that makes it honest

The deliverables are portable by design. The blueprint and the RFP work with us or with any partner you choose. That single design decision changes the incentives: the assessment has to be genuinely useful on its own, because you are free to take it elsewhere. We think that is what an assessment is supposed to be, and it is why our tagline is not a slogan but a sequence: clarity before commitment.