Ensemble are a new professional and managed services firm who help companies build sophisticated real-time data and analytics solutions using modern, cloud based technologies. You can read more about why we launched Ensemble here.
Though there are lots of firms providing similar services, we aspire to build something different, with a specific engagement model and dynamic with our customers. We believe that this will ultimately help us to build sustainable long-term partnerships with better outcomes for our clients.
Our partnership model has the following key pillars:
Collaboration
We work with our customers as one joined up team with dynamic ongoing communication between our delivery team and our clients SMEs.
Though we tend to work remotely, we make use of tools like Slack, Google Meet and Linear to constantly and transparently collaborate on the technology and analytics that we build.
As well as helping to ensure project success, this level of collaboration also supports skills transfer to avoid eventual dependency on us.
Agile Approach
We take a very agile and delivery focussed approach.
Though there is always value in careful planning and measured strategy, we do not believe in long discovery phases, writing big strategy documents or navigating complex political environments.
Our approach is to pick the highest value business problem, and use that as a vehicle for building the underlying technology. We will then take the learnings from that, re-prioritise, and iterate again on the next use case.
Technology Focus
Most data projects are ultimately realised by engineering some technical solution to extract, move, transform, store and analyse data.
We believe that there has been insufficient focus or acceptance of this, leading to a lack of engineering rigour in the data and analytics world. This manifests as poor quality data and platforms which fail to deliver the expected business value.
Instead, we approach our projects with a software engineering lens, ultimately aiming to build systems that deliver the expected insights, whilst being maintainable, easy to extend, secure and cost efficient.
Cost Effective
It is very important for us to be a long term sustainable partner who adds outsized value.
We don't want to be the expensive consultancy who our customers are trying to rush out of the door. Instead, we want to deliver at sustainable and predictable costs over the long term.
Much of our service is priced as a monthly managed service to make costs predictable, with transparent time and materials variations when enhancing your platform with project based work.
Build, Operate, Transfer
Our engagements typically consist of three stages, which we refer to as build, operate and transfer.
Firstly, we will rapidly build your platform and analytics, taking advantage of our accelerators and pre-built frameworks.
Next, we will operate the platform for a period whilst continually enhancing it's capability.
Finally, we will transfer the platform back to you when you have built adequate scale and capability.
Because we will ultimately be supporting what we build, this aligns all of our interest as opposed to a short term project mentality.
Suitable For Startups and Scaleups
We have designed our service from front to back with the needs of startups and scaleups in mind.
There are many organisations in the position of realising that they need help with data, but are not yet able to justify hiring a full time team of data engineers and data scientists.
At the same time, options such as traditional big consultancies are too expensive and inappaproriately heavyweight.
We believe we can fill this gap in order to help our customers immediately extract value from their data whilst building a platform that supports their future ambitions.
The five pillars above describe how we aspire to work, and we hope to find customers who are aligned with this approach and style of working. We appreciate that it's not for everyone, but we think that for many organisations it can help us jointly deliver value in an accelerated timeframe and in a long term sustainable way.
If this model is of interest, please get in touch with us to us today for an informal conversation.