Economics of modernisation
Compare the cost of understanding an application
An assessment fee is only one part of the cost. A useful comparison also includes the time your engineers and business specialists spend reconstructing the application, checking the findings and preparing the next phase of work.
Compare the same scope
| Part of the work | What to establish before comparing quotations |
|---|---|
| Application investigation | Which source, databases and interfaces are examined, and whether the work covers an application or a portfolio. |
| Documented outputs | Whether the fee includes only an assessment summary or also application documentation, a recovered specification and a plan. |
| Customer review | Which sessions, corrections and follow-up questions are included, and what your own specialists need to contribute. |
| Technical validation | Which assumptions will be tested, what environment is needed and whether a prototype is included or separate. |
| Future work | How refreshes, deeper investigation, implementation and support will be scoped and charged. |
Separate preparation time from review time
Wayfinder provides source-derived findings for specialists to examine. That can change the work they need to do: reviewing a specific calculation or interface is different from locating it and reconstructing its behaviour from scratch.
It does not remove the need to confirm business intent, investigate production conditions or accept a change. Those activities must remain in the estimate. Time saved preparing the material is not automatically an equivalent reduction in the whole programme.
Use the PRSD-IWS output to judge the comparison
The public case study contains the documentation, recovered specification and proposed modernisation plan produced from 423,897 lines of source. Inspect those outputs and decide which parts of your planned assessment they cover, rather than comparing prices against a report title alone.
The example is not a universal timing benchmark, a measured customer saving or a completed migration. Harten does not publish a generic savings percentage from it.
Inspect the PRSD-IWS workBuild a comparison for your application
Start with the work you would otherwise commission, the specialist time it would require and the decision it must support. Compare those assumptions with the agreed Harten scope, including the review your team still needs to undertake.
The pricing page sets out the assessment fee and four-week structure. Implementation cost and the financial case for a replacement are separate decisions.