What is a concept sprint?

A concept sprint is Laveeka's two to four day fixed fee diagnostic. It measures where time and money actually go in a specific process, separates the work a system could do from the work that should stay with a person, prices the gap and sets the order of work. The client keeps the costed map whether or not anything is built.

How long does a concept sprint take?

Two to four days, depending on how many processes are in scope and how available the people who do the work are.

What do you get at the end of a concept sprint?

A prioritised, costed map of where value is leaking and what closing each gap is worth per year, written so that another team could act on it without Laveeka.

Do you have to build anything afterwards?

No. The sprint is priced and structured so that stopping is a normal outcome. If the map shows the return is not there, the engagement ends there.

Laveeka / Guides / Concept sprint

What a concept sprint is, and what it produces

Every Laveeka engagement starts with one. It is deliberately small, deliberately fixed price, and it is the only thing we will sell you until it has told us both whether there is anything worth building.

The short answer

A concept sprint is a two to four day fixed fee diagnostic. It measures where time and money actually go in a specific part of your business, prices the gap and sets the order of work.

You are left holding a costed map of what is leaking and what it is worth to close, whether or not you build anything with us. If the map says the return is not there, that is a useful answer and the engagement stops.

Why anything is measured before anything is built

Most automation is sold on a story. Someone describes a painful process, a vendor recognises the shape of it, and a quote follows. The trouble is that the painful process and the expensive process are often not the same one. People remember the work that annoys them, not the work that costs the most, and those two rarely coincide.

A sprint exists to separate them. It puts hours and dollars against each step of a real process, using how the work is actually done rather than how the process document says it is done. That is usually the first time anyone in the business has seen the number.

What happens in the days

We watch the work. Not a workshop about the work. The actual sequence, with the systems open, done by the people who do it, including the bits everyone has stopped noticing because they have always been there.
Every step gets a time and a cost. How long it takes, how often it runs, who does it and what that person's hour is worth. Multiply out and the picture stops being anecdotal.
We separate what a system could do from what it should not. Plenty of steps are automatable and should stay with a person, because judgement, relationship or risk sits in them. Those are marked and left alone.
The gap is priced. What closing it is worth per year, against what building it would cost, in the order that pays back fastest.
You get the map. Written down, costed and yours.

Why it is fixed price

Because a diagnostic priced by the day has an incentive problem, and everybody in the room knows it. A fixed fee means the only way we do well out of this is by being quick and being right.

It also means you can stop. A great many discovery engagements are structured so that stopping feels like waste. This one is structured so that stopping is a normal outcome, and roughly as often as not it is the correct one.

What you get if you never build anything

The map. It is written to be useful to somebody else: another firm, an internal team or nobody at all if the answer is that the process is already about as good as it needs to be.

That is not generosity, it is the only way a diagnostic can be honest. If the deliverable only makes sense as a step towards buying the build, then it is a sales document with a price on it, and it will find a reason to recommend the build.

What it is not

It is not a technology assessment. Nobody needs another document listing which tools exist. The question is which of your work is worth changing, not which software is on the market.
It is not a pilot. Nothing is built. Building follows the map, and only where the map says the return is real.
It is not a licence. Laveeka does not sell seats or subscriptions. What gets built afterwards belongs to you, and ownership transfers formally at handover with documentation that would let another team take it on without us.

When a sprint is the wrong thing to buy

If you already know precisely which process is costing you and roughly what it costs, you do not need one. Say so and we will skip to a build conversation.

If nobody in the business will own the result afterwards, a sprint will produce a good document that changes nothing. That is worth facing before the money is spent rather than after.