By Michael Branson, Founder/COO, i3solutions

A CFO is holding two bids for the same IT assessment and cannot tell them apart. One firm is global, with a name the board already recognizes. The other is small enough that the partner who pitched answered the phone himself. The global bid is the higher of the two, both documents list the same deliverables in nearly the same language, and the finance question on the table is whether the difference buys anything. It is answerable, and the answer is a number neither proposal contains: the share of billed hours each firm plans to staff with junior people. Nobody in the room has asked for it, which is the normal outcome, because buyers compare rates and deliverable lists rather than staffing mixes.

Is it more cost-effective to engage a boutique firm or a global consulting firm for IT strategy and assessment?

For a Microsoft-centered estate, where the assessment has to convince your own leadership rather than an outside challenger, a small senior firm on a fixed price is the cheaper route to a plan you can fund, and that is our recommendation. Note what that recommendation is conditioned on: the shape of your estate and the audience for the report, never headcount. Firm size is the wrong variable to compare on, because neither model is cheaper as a category. Cost-effectiveness is decided by four things you can check before you sign: the leverage ratio, meaning what share of the billed hours is done by junior staff rather than by the people who pitched you; the fixed price against a fixed deliverable list, rather than a rate card; named-person continuity, meaning whether the same people are on the engagement in month six; and what the firm sells next, because an assessment written by a firm that also wants the implementation has a reason to recommend a larger one. A boutique wins on the first three and on total price for a bounded, platform-specific estate, because it cannot run a pyramid and does not fund a global overhead through its rates. A global firm wins when your estate spans many platforms, geographies and legal entities at once, when you need a large team staffed next month, or when the report has to survive a challenge from someone who did not commission it. The test for that last case is specific: if the report has to persuade an audit committee, a regulator or a source-selection board, buy the name, because the author’s identity is part of what gets read.

What each model actually sells per dollar

The deck is the same in both proposals: current-state assessment, target-state architecture, gap analysis, roadmap. Those words cost nothing to write. The economics underneath them differ in ways you can see if you ask the right question and cannot see if you do not.

Leverage: who does the hours

A global consulting firm funds itself on leverage. A small number of partners and senior managers sit above a much larger base of consultants and analysts, and the model works because the senior people sell and review while the junior people produce. This is not a criticism. It is how a firm scales to a program staffed with hundreds of people and how it absorbs the cost of carrying a bench, a legal function and a global risk apparatus. But it means the seniority you meet in the pitch is not the seniority that writes your assessment.

A boutique firm cannot build that pyramid, because it does not have the bench to build one with. This is a structural constraint rather than a virtue, and it cuts in both directions at once: the person you met in the room is the person who will write the document, and there is nobody standing behind them to surge if your scope doubles in month two.

The constraint shows up in the staffing numbers rather than in the pitch. Enterprise SharePoint strategy assessment engagements typically run four to six weeks elapsed time with two to three i3solutions consultants. That team is the whole team. There is no tier underneath it, which is what a firm with no pyramid looks like on paper, and it is why our hours-by-level table is short enough to print inside the proposal itself.

You can verify this for free, on both proposals, before you sign. Ask for the staffing plan with named individuals, their years of relevant experience, and a table of total planned hours by level. Then read the response rather than the table. A firm whose seniority is its selling point hands the table over immediately. A firm that offers to renegotiate the mix instead of showing you the current one has told you what the current one says.

The rate is not the price

Buyers compare hourly rates because rates are the number on the page. Price is rate multiplied by hours, and for an assessment the hours are driven by two things: how many people are on it, and how many weeks it runs. A senior team at a higher rate working four weeks can cost less than a mixed team at a blended rate working twelve, and it usually produces a shorter document, because people who have seen the pattern before do not need to rediscover it.

Our own smallest offer is built on that arithmetic. The i3 Risk and Roadmap Assessment ROI variant is a one-week structured engagement that produces a business case anchored on the specific environment, the specific compliance frameworks, and the specific executive-cycle timing. A week of senior attention pointed at one funding decision will beat a quarter of mixed-team discovery pointed at everything.

The practical test is to ask both firms for a fixed price against a fixed and enumerated deliverable list, not a rate card and not an estimate. An assessment is unusual among engagement types in that its scope really can be fixed in advance, because the deliverables are documents. If a firm will only quote time and materials for an assessment, that tells you it is not confident it knows how long its own method takes on an estate like yours.

Ramp cost and continuity

Every firm has to learn your environment, and you pay for that learning either way. What differs is how many times you pay for it. Large engagements rotate staff, and each rotation re-acquires context that the previous person already had. Ask for a named-continuity clause: which individuals are committed, for what percentage of their time, and what notice you get before a substitution. A firm that will not commit named people is telling you the roster is fungible, which is fine for a commodity workstream and expensive for an assessment whose whole value is judgment about your specific estate.

What the firm sells next

An assessment is a document that recommends spending. A firm that also sells the implementation has an interest in the size of what it recommends. This applies to boutiques and global firms alike, and it rarely looks like bad faith from the inside. It is easier to see at a small firm because the practice list is short and you can read it in a minute.

Two questions get you most of the way there. What else does this firm sell that my assessment could recommend? And is the assessment fee credited against a follow-on implementation? A credit is a discount, and it is also a commitment, so know which one you are accepting.

Breadth you use against breadth you fund

Global firm overhead is not waste. It buys geographic coverage, a partner in the country where your subsidiary is being carved out, a risk and legal function that can indemnify at scale, and simultaneous depth across SAP, Oracle, Workday, ServiceNow and Microsoft. If your estate is genuinely that shape, that breadth is not a luxury and a boutique will struggle to cover it honestly.

If your estate is Microsoft-centered and your real question is what to do about that estate, you are funding capacity you will not use, because overhead is recovered through the rate whether you use it or not.

When the brand is part of the deliverable

There is one case where paying more for the name is the correct decision, and dismissing it is bad advice. When the assessment exists to be challenged by someone who did not commission it, the identity of the author is load-bearing. A board-mandated third-party review, a fairness opinion supporting a transaction, a regulator-facing readiness assessment, or a report going into a competitive source selection all fall here. In those situations you are buying defensibility, and defensibility has a market price. Say so out loud in the decision memo rather than pretending the choice was about methodology.

Five questions that settle it before you sign

Ask both firms the same five, in writing, and compare the answers rather than the brochures.

  1. Show me total planned hours by level, and the names. The leverage ratio is the single largest driver of what you get per dollar, and it is the number least likely to appear in a proposal unprompted.
  2. Will you fix the price against this enumerated deliverable list? Not a range, not an estimate, and the list should name artifacts rather than phases.
  3. Which named people are committed, at what allocation, and what is the substitution notice? If the answer is a role rather than a person, price the re-ramp.
  4. What do you sell that this assessment could recommend, and is the fee credited against it? Both answers are acceptable. An unclear answer is not.
  5. What does the final deliverable look like, and can I see a redacted example from an estate my size? A sequenced, costed roadmap that a CFO can fund is a different product from a maturity heat map, and the fee gap between the two is often smaller than the value gap.

The fifth question is the one that reframes the whole comparison. An assessment is cost-effective relative to the decision it enables, not relative to its fee. A more expensive assessment that produces a sequenced and costed plan your finance function will actually approve is cheaper than a free one that produces a slide nobody can act on.

The federal and regulated wrinkle

If the work is being bought under a federal contract vehicle, three things change, and all three are checkable in public sources rather than taken on trust.

First, on small-business set-aside awards for services, there is a published ceiling on how much of the award a prime may pass through to firms that are not similarly situated. The rule sits in FAR 52.219-14 and in 13 CFR 125.6. Read it before you accept a teaming structure, because it constrains who is allowed to do the majority of the work, not merely who signs the contract.

Second, whether a firm counts as small at all is not a matter of self-description. It is set by revenue or employee thresholds per NAICS code in 13 CFR 121.201, and the relevant code for this kind of work is usually 541512, computer systems design services. Look up the current threshold at the source rather than relying on a capability statement.

Third, and most useful to a commercial buyer as well, awarded labor rates on federal schedules are public. GSA eLibrary and the GSA pricing and estimating tools publish awarded ceiling rates by labor category across contracts. That gives you an independent comparison for a senior architect or a principal consultant at a boutique against the same labor category at a global firm, without either firm involved in producing the number. Most buyers do not know this exists, and it is the closest thing to a neutral referee available in this market.

What an IT strategy assessment costs, and what moves the number

Ranges are only useful with the scope attached, so here are ours with the shape of the work named. These are i3solutions figures for engagements we have actually run, not market averages.

Fixed-scope assessment engagements typically range from $65,000 to $185,000 covering the four deliverable artifacts produced within 8 to 14 weeks at typical regulated enterprise scale. The variables that move that number are the size of the system inventory, the number of compliance frameworks in scope, and how much of the current-state documentation already exists in a usable form.

Where the need is ongoing judgment rather than a document, the shape changes. Embedded advisory engagements typically range from $25,000 to $65,000 per month at 20 to 40 percent senior architect allocation against multi-quarter timelines. Dedicated Embedded Team engagements run from $35,000 to $95,000 per month over 3 to 9 months, covering 60 to 200 systems across multiple business units sequentially. At the smaller end of our own book, IT consulting costs for a mid-sized enterprise typically range from $40K-$150K annually depending on scope and engagement model.

Assessments do not have to start large. If you cannot yet tell whether a full assessment is justified, the one-week Risk and Roadmap Assessment ROI variant described earlier on this page is the cheaper way to find out.

If a proposal you are holding sits far outside these shapes in either direction, that is a scope conversation rather than a verdict on the firm. Ask what is in the number.

Where i3solutions fits

We are the boutique side of this comparison and it would be strange to pretend otherwise, so here is what that means in practice rather than in adjectives.

The staffing numbers above are our answer to question one, published before you ask it. Now question three, continuity. Senior Microsoft specialists from i3solutions typically embed in the client’s team within two to four weeks of engagement start. The people who embed are the people who scoped the work.

Does the work pay for itself? One IT systems analysis for a federal housing agency identified about $1.5 million in savings and led to processing roughly 35 percent faster by finding the real constraints. That is one engagement rather than a pattern, and we would rather give you one verifiable example than an average nobody can trace.

What we do not claim is breadth we do not have. If your estate is multi-platform across several continents, or you need a large team standing up next month, a global firm is the better structural fit and we will say so in the first conversation. Our depth is the Microsoft estate, and the buyers we serve best are the ones whose hardest question sits inside it.

Frequently asked questions

Is a boutique firm always cheaper than a global firm?

No, and the rate card will tell you the opposite of the truth. Boutique day rates for genuinely senior people match global firm rates for the same seniority and can exceed them, because a boutique has no junior bench to blend the rate down with. The saving comes from fewer people over fewer weeks, not from a lower rate. Compare total fixed price against an identical deliverable list. Comparing rates alone will mislead you in both directions.

How do I compare two proposals that describe the same deliverables?

Ask both firms for total planned hours by level with named individuals, a fixed price against an enumerated artifact list, a named-person continuity commitment with a substitution notice, and a redacted example deliverable from an estate your size. Those four requests cost you nothing and they surface almost every real difference between two proposals that read alike.

When is a global consulting firm worth the premium?

When your estate genuinely spans many platforms, geographies or legal entities at once; when you need a large team staffed quickly; when you need indemnification at a scale a small firm cannot carry; or when the report will be challenged by someone who did not commission it, such as an audit committee, a regulator or a source-selection board. In that last case the author’s identity is part of what you are buying, and that is a legitimate reason to pay more.

Does the assessment fee usually get credited against implementation?

Ask before you compare prices, because both boutiques and global firms offer it and it changes the number you are actually comparing. Our verdict: take the credit, and negotiate the exit terms in the same conversation. A credit is a discount that also creates a commitment, and a mild incentive for the assessment to recommend the work the same firm sells. That is not disqualifying. It is a term to price consciously rather than discover later.

Can we do the assessment in-house instead?

Yes, if the report only has to convince you, and neither firm will volunteer that. Here is the tiebreaker: name the person who has to be persuaded. If that person sits inside your organization and your team can stop doing operations for several weeks, run it in-house and spend the fee on the remediation instead. If that person is a board, a regulator or an auditor, go external, because an internal author has a stake in the answer and the reader knows it. If you have already compared internal cost against external cost, the tradeoff is worked through in more detail in our piece on comparing costs of in-house IT against external IT consultants.

How do I check a firm’s rates independently?

If either firm holds a federal schedule contract, its awarded ceiling rates by labor category are published. Look the firm up in GSA eLibrary and compare labor categories through the GSA pricing and estimating tools. It is not a perfect proxy for a commercial quote, since schedule rates are ceilings and commercial work is often discounted off them, but it is an independent data point neither firm controls.

What does an IT strategy assessment cost?

At i3solutions, fixed-scope assessment engagements typically range from $65,000 to $185,000 covering the four deliverable artifacts produced within 8 to 14 weeks at typical regulated enterprise scale. The variables that move that number are the size of the system inventory, the number of compliance frameworks in scope, and how much usable current-state documentation already exists. Where the need is ongoing judgment rather than a document, embedded advisory engagements typically range from $25,000 to $65,000 per month at 20 to 40 percent senior architect allocation against multi-quarter timelines.

Start from the decision, not from the firm size

Write down the decision the assessment has to support and who has to be convinced by it. If the answer is your own leadership and the estate is Microsoft-centered, a small senior team on a fixed price is usually the cheaper path to a plan you can fund. If the answer is a board, a regulator or a source-selection board, buy the defensibility and say so plainly in the memo. The firm size follows from that answer. It should not lead it.

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