The people doing the work know where it breaks. We sit with them before we design anything.
Model the records properly at the start. Interfaces are cheap to change later, a wrong data model is not.
Retries, idempotency, reconciliation and alerting, so a partner outage does not become a silent data gap.
Short, current and written for the next engineer, not for a compliance folder.
Short cycles, visible progress and a scope you can change. You see working software every week rather than a status report.
The repository, the infrastructure code and the documentation. In your accounts, under your licence, from the first commit.
Shadow the current workflow, map every exception, and agree what stays manual on purpose.
One complete path at a time, in the hands of real users early enough to change our minds.
New system alongside the old until the numbers match, then switch with a way back.
A retainer for changes as the process evolves, or a clean handover to your team.
Yes. Reading from and writing to systems we did not build is most of this work.
Only where it clearly helps, such as document reading or classification. Plenty of these systems are better without it.
Weekly review, a visible backlog, and honest estimates. Scope changes move the date or displace something else.
Good. The code, infrastructure and documentation are yours, and we plan the handover before it is urgent.