Engineering Excellence in One Hour a Week

See what’s blocking flow. Fix what matters.

One hour a week gives you clear visibility into your engineering system: where delivery stalls, where quality breaks down, where technical debt constrains you.

You gain the insight to make better decisions about CI/CD, DevOps practices, workflow design, and team capability. Delivered through a timeboxed retainer—no hourly billing, no scope creep, full refund if you’re not satisfied.

What This Provides

One hour a week of focused technical support. You get visibility into engineering constraints, workflow bottlenecks, and quality gaps. You see what’s holding you back and where improvement will have the most impact.

This isn’t traditional consulting. You’re not buying hours or fixed deliverables. You’re retaining strategic capacity to diagnose problems, clarify options, and support sustained improvement. Delivered through a timeboxed retainer with full risk reversal.

System visibility – See where delivery flow breaks down, where technical debt creates drag, and where practices don’t match your needs.

Engineering clarity – Understand what CI/CD, DevOps, and quality systems mean for your environment. Map workflow, identify constraints, and clarify improvement options.

Decision support – Get grounded technical guidance so you can prioritise modernisation, address bottlenecks, and invest improvement effort where it matters.

Embedded capability – Build engineering discipline into your teams. Strengthen practices around testing, deployment, observability, and continuous improvement without disrupting delivery.

Focus Areas

Flow and Predictability

Helps you see where work stalls, where dependencies create drag, and where workflow design constrains throughput. Enables better decisions about flow improvement and delivery predictability.

Quality Systems

Provides visibility into where quality breaks down in your engineering process. Supports decisions about test automation, Definition of Done, and building quality in from the start.

DevOps and CI/CD

Clarifies what DevOps means for your context: CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, automated testing, monitoring, and security as code. Helps you see where to start and what to prioritise.

Technical Debt and Modernisation

Maps technical debt, legacy constraints, and modernisation options. Creates the clarity you need to make strategic decisions about refactoring, platform evolution, and engineering investment.

Capability Building

Supports team development around engineering practices, technical discipline, and continuous improvement. Builds internal capability without the overhead of traditional training programmes.

Real-World Evidence

These challenges aren’t hypothetical. NKD has worked with organisations facing fragmented engineering systems, inconsistent practices, and workflow bottlenecks at scale.

The same diagnosis and clarity that enabled those transformations is available through weekly engineering support—without the overhead of large-scale programmes.

A global energy technology company consolidated build and release processes across 90 teams in 13 countries , shifting ownership of builds to engineering teams and reducing central build team size while improving autonomy and predictability.

The same organisation unified 800+ engineering teams by consolidating DevOps systems , standardising processes, and improving visibility and collaboration across the enterprise.

How This Works

One Hour a Week

Timeboxed retainer, typically one hour per week. You retain strategic capacity without transactional overhead or financial decisions every time you need support.

High Trust, Low Friction

No hourly billing. No change orders. Upfront payment with full refund if you’re not satisfied. You get flexibility without micromanagement; we get clarity without red tape.

Context-Driven, Not Framework-Driven

Engineering support tailored to your environment, toolchain, and constraints. No cookie-cutter processes. No framework evangelism. Just practical guidance grounded in your reality.

Sustained, Incremental Improvement

Small, deliberate changes that compound over time. Maintains momentum without disrupting delivery. Builds lasting capability instead of short-term fixes.

Start with a conversation. Book a free consultation with Martin Hinshelwood.

See what one hour a week can clarify for your engineering system.

Ask about one hour a week

Our Happy Clients

We partner with businesses across diverse industries, including finance, insurance, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, technology, engineering, transportation, hospitality, entertainment, legal, government, and military sectors.