Thinkscoop has been building software since 2017. Business Applications is the practice that works on the platforms your business already runs on, and this page exists so you can work out whether to keep reading.
Who you deal with
Not an account manager and a switchboard. On an engagement this size you should know who makes the decisions, and be able to reach them.
Chief Executive Officer
Commercial terms, escalation and anything that needs a decision above a delivery lead. On Business Applications engagements he is the name on the contract and the person a sponsor calls when something is going wrong.
Chief Technology Officer
Technical direction and delivery standards across the practice: architecture review, the bar for what ships, and the call on whether a piece of work needs a skill we do not hold.
Chief Marketing Officer
Positioning and how the practice explains itself, including the decision to publish what we do not do alongside what we do.
The delivery bench
Three executives is who you escalate to. It is not who does the work. A programme team is composed of the roles below, each with one accountable owner and one counterpart on your side, so there is never a question about who a decision belongs to.
The plan, the money and the escalation path. Owns the schedule, the change register and the weekly position, and is the person who says out loud when a date is no longer real rather than when it has already passed.
Your counterpartYour programme sponsor and programme manager
The shape of the solution across the estate: what sits in the platform, what stays where it is, what gets integrated and what gets retired. Owns the non-functional side too, which is where most architecture arguments actually land.
Your counterpartYour enterprise architect or head of IT
The configuration and process design for one area, finance, supply chain, commerce, service or projects. Runs the fit-gap for that area, writes the design, builds the configuration and sits with the people who will use it. One named lead per workstream, so a question about the ledger has an owner.
Your counterpartYour process owner for that area
The master data model, the cleansing plan and the migration itself, including the reconciliation that proves what landed matches what left. Owns the opening balance approach and the decision on what does not come across at all.
Your counterpartYour data owner and your financial controller
Everything crossing a system boundary: interfaces, extensions, the release pipeline and the code standard. Owns the build, the code review and the handover so your team can maintain what was written.
Your counterpartYour development manager or integration team lead
Tax determination, document numbering, local formats, statutory reports and digital reporting obligations per market. Owns the country obligation register and the dates on it. Present from month one on any multi-market programme, not added at reporting phase.
Your counterpartYour group financial controller and local controllers
The test strategy, the scenario coverage and the defect register, including who signs what off. Owns the arithmetic that says whether a go-live decision is supported by evidence or by optimism.
Your counterpartYour business testing coordinator
One site, country or wave from local design through to the first close after go-live. Owns the cutover runbook, the rehearsal and the rollback decision point. On a phased rollout this role repeats per wave rather than being stretched across all of them.
Your counterpartYour local finance or operations lead for that market
The transition from project to support: the runbooks, the known issues, the response commitments and the backlog that carries over. Introduced before go-live rather than after it, so the handover is a step rather than an event.
Your counterpartYour service owner or IT operations manager
A team of this shape does not arrive all at once. Scoping and fit-gap run with the engagement lead, the solution architect and the functional lead for the area in question, and that is deliberately a small group of senior people, because the output is a design and a cost rather than volume. Build adds the functional consultants, the data lead and the integration lead. Test adds the test lead and, more importantly, your people. Deployment adds a lead per wave. Support keeps a named service lead and shrinks the rest.
On a phased rollout the deployment lead is the role that multiplies rather than stretches. One person carrying four countries in parallel is the most common way a wave plan quietly stops being a plan, so waves are sized to the leads available rather than to the calendar, and if that makes the sequence longer we would rather say so at the start.
We do not publish a headcount, a bench size or a consultant count, and you should treat any firm that does as having published a marketing number rather than a measured one. What you get instead is checkable: the named individuals for your engagement, with their CVs, go into the statement of work before you sign it. You meet the people who will actually do the work during scoping, because the people who scope it are the people who build it. If continuity matters to you, put key-person clauses in the contract and we will sign them.
Where a programme genuinely needs a skill the practice does not hold, we say so and we say whether we would bring a specialist alongside us or recommend someone else entirely. That is on our list of things we do not do for a reason: learning a discipline on your budget is the most expensive way for both of us to find out.
How we work
The team in the room during scoping is the team that delivers. No pitch team that disappears at contract signature, which is the single most common complaint about this industry and the easiest one to avoid.
If the process fix costs less than the platform project, we will say so, and we have talked buyers out of work on that basis. A partner who agrees with every requirement in the room is closing, not scoping.
Every request lands on the fit-gap register with an estimate and a phase, and a named sponsor decides. Nothing gets absorbed quietly, because absorption is how timelines slip without anyone deciding to slip them.
Full code ownership and IP transfer, documentation, runbooks and a transfer session, so your team can operate the system without us. An engagement that leaves you dependent has not finished.
The awkward section
Most firms leave this page out. It is the fastest way for you to rule us in or out, which is worth more to both of us than another paragraph about partnership.
We take no vendor commission on platform selection, which is why a selection we run can honestly end with a recommendation to keep what you have. That outcome is more common than the industry admits.
If the work needs a skill the practice does not hold, we say so rather than learning it on your budget or quietly subcontracting it without telling you.
A number produced before anyone has read your configuration is a number designed to win the work, not to survive it. Assessments are scoped and priced separately, and you keep the output either way.
No partner designation we do not hold, no client we have not delivered for, no metric without an engagement behind it. Our trust page states the position as it is, including the parts still in progress.
Position today
The questions on this site are the ones we get asked most. Bring a harder one.
