The 10-day ship promise explained
Nortinia Consulting has exactly one contractual promise: within 10 business days of kick-off, we hand over a working result running in production. That's it. Not a prototype, not a demo environment, not a PoC. A live, usable system. We wrote this piece because the 10-day promise is often misread: some take it to mean we can build anything in 10 days, others assume it's marketing copy. Both are wrong.
The actual timeline
Ten business days, broken down by day as a typical engagement runs:
- Day 1 — Kick-off. 90-minute call. Meet the stakeholder, look at the existing system (read-only access), sign the NDA and SOW. By evening there is a shared Google Doc capturing goals and the success metric.
- Days 2-3 — Audit. Deeper dive into code/data/process. Interviews with 2-4 key users. By evening we have
findings.md(a 5-15 point list, each rated by criticality). - Day 4 — ADRs. Architecture Decision Records: 3-7 written decisions, each one page, the chosen option + why + what we didn't choose. Customer reads it in the morning, joint call in the afternoon to converge.
- Days 5-8 — Implementation. The senior team (usually 2-3 people) works in parallel. A daily 15-minute stand-up with the customer plus written progress notes on Slack or email. PRs open, code review live.
- Day 9 — Demo + UAT. Internal demo in the morning, customer UAT in the afternoon. Bugs and refinements by evening.
- Day 10 — Deploy. We push it live, we monitor, we document the handover. By 16:00 we contractually deliver a 1-page "what you got" summary.
That's the frame. Calendar days obviously cover 14 days (two weekends included).
What it ISN'T
It's not a feature factory. We don't claim we can build anything in 10 days. A greenfield product build (new SaaS, new mobile app) — we won't take that on a 10-day clock. That's 3-6 months and a different contract. The 10-day promise applies specifically to the 3 engagement types where it provably works:
- Operational problems — e.g. fitting a new module into an existing ERP, reorganising a WMS process, fixing a payment flow. The codebase exists, the change is bounded.
- Integration — wiring two existing systems together (e.g. ERP + e-commerce platform, or SAP + finance app). Specification is two pages, implementation scopes to code.
- Internal AI tooling — chat assistant, document analyser, email classifier, anything that speeds up a concrete workflow. LLM work scoped to a clear use case can ship in 10 days.
The contract clause
The SOW reads verbatim: "Service Provider commits to delivering the functionality defined in the Result Definition to a live, usable production environment by 16:00 CET on the 10th business day after Kick-off. Failure to do so triggers a 50% reduction on the remaining project-day rate for the following 5 business days, until delivery is complete."
Meaning: if we slip, we pay for it. Not rhetoric. The day-rate the customer pays drops by 50% for every additional day, until we deliver.
The 1 type where it doesn't work
Greenfield product. A brand-new SaaS, a brand-new mobile app, a new user-facing system — you can't responsibly ship that in 10 days. Where there's no existing code, no existing user, no existing metric, just the discovery alone takes 2-3 weeks. We split those projects into 6-12 week phases, with a separate frame.
The numeric proof
Of the last 50 engagements, 47 shipped on day 10 or earlier. The 3 slipping cases: one was 11 days (AWS outage), one was 13 days (customer went on holiday and we couldn't UAT), one was 17 days (scope expanded mid-engagement, re-negotiated in writing). All 3 got the reduced invoice on day 10.
Why it works
10 days isn't a trick. It's discipline: small scope, senior team, parallel work, written decisions, real daily progress. If you can't guarantee that, don't promise it. If you can, don't water it down to "about two weeks". The calendar precision is the entire reason a customer can build real plans on top of us.