Critical Propulsion
Delivery Framework

How we deliver the Pulse

The Pulse is a 5-day delivery cadence: Discover on Monday, Build through the week, Validate on Friday morning, Learn on Friday afternoon. If your team has run Scrum, the rhythm will feel familiar. Three things make the Pulse different from agile-as-usual: we forecast probabilistically instead of with story points and velocity, you control what goes into each week on Monday morning within a fixed engagement envelope, and AI assistants do real work alongside our consultants throughout the cycle.

The Week

Four phases, one cycle

Mon AM
01 · Discover
Your priorities. Our team's commitment. The week's scope locked by Monday noon.
Mon PM to Thu
02 · Build
Continuous implementation, code review, integration, and quality gates. Daily 15-minute syncs keep the team aligned. Items are worked in priority order so that if something must slip, it is the lowest-priority item, identified early.
Fri AM
03 · Validate
A demo of every committed item against its acceptance criteria. Your Product Owner accepts or sends items back with specific feedback.
Friday PM
04 · Learn
Retro: what went well, what to improve, one or two concrete changes for next week. Metrics reviewed openly.
How We Forecast

Probabilistic banding instead of story points

Most consultancies and most internal teams use story points and velocity. Story points blur two questions that should stay separate: what kind of work is this? and how likely are we to land it as currently scoped? The Pulse separates them.

Every item in the scope register carries two bands.

Delivery Band

Describes the inherent shape of the work.

Feature
A single, independently testable outcome that one person delivers in 1 to 2 days.
Flow
Multi-part integrated work that requires coordination across the team or across systems. A third-party integration is almost always Flow.
Architecture
Cross-cutting structural work that affects how other items get built. Often invisible to end users; everything else depends on it.

Confidence Band

Describes the probability the item lands within its delivery week as currently scoped.

Committed
80 to 90% probability
Approach is understood. Dependencies resolved.
Target
50 to 70% probability
Approach mostly understood. Some open questions, no fundamental unknowns.
Stretch
20 to 40% probability
Approach has unresolved unknowns or open dependencies.
A typical week
Committed55%
Target30%
Stretch15%
The Output

Floor, plan, ceiling

Each week we run a Monte Carlo simulation across the Confidence Bands of the committed items and report three numbers: a floor (your guaranteed delivery, the Committed items), a plan (the realistic target, Committed plus Target), and a ceiling (the upside, all committed items including Stretch). You see all three in your weekly status report. We do not give you a single number that pretends to be precise.

You see the probability-weighted picture of what the engagement will produce, not a velocity chart that has the potential to be misleading.

Floor

Committed

Your guaranteed delivery

The Committed items.

Plan

+ Target

The realistic target

Committed plus Target.

Ceiling

+ Stretch

The upside

All committed items including Stretch.

Monte Carlo simulation
Distribution of outcomes across 1,000 simulated weeks
Customer Control

The Swap Window inside a fixed envelope

Every engagement has a fixed envelope: the number of delivery weeks, the total price, the team composition. The envelope is fixed. What you do with it is variable.

At the start of each Pulse, the Swap Window opens. You can reorder priorities, swap uncommitted items into the upcoming week, and add new items to the register for future weeks. The window closes at Monday noon. After that, the week's items are locked and new requests roll to the following Monday.

How it works is simple: you cannot add items to the current week after the Swap Window closes (surprises are worse than constraints). You can swap items in and out of future weeks any time. You can change priorities any time. The envelope constrains capacity, not what you do with it.

AI in the Cycle

AI assistants embedded in the cycle

AI assistants are not a sidecar; they are part of how every Pulse runs. Some examples include:

Scope register management

Classification suggestions for new items, decomposition flags when an item is too large for its band, readiness scoring before commitment.

Code generation and review

Implementation, refactoring, automated compliance checks, code review suggestions. Every output is reviewed by a senior consultant; nothing ships unsupervised.

Test authoring

Test generation, regression coverage maintenance, edge-case discovery.

Weekly status and forecasting

The Monte Carlo forecast, demo talking points, executive review narratives.
What AI assistants are not:
Autonomous deciders. Senior consultants own the commitment. The Product Engineering Architect owns the architecture. AI throughput is the lever; human judgment is the steering wheel.
Capability Transfer

Player-Coach: capability transfer at the work-item level

Some customers want their internal team to learn how to run a Pulse alongside us. We have a methodology for that: paired delivery and ceremony coaching for teams with engineers, methodology-level transfer for teams without. If capability transfer is not a goal for your engagement, we deliver and step back. If it is, we plan it explicitly in your Working Agreements.

Definition of Done

What "delivered" means

Delivered means the item is in your engagement's delivery target environment (staging or production, set in your Working Agreements) and meets all three of the following:

✓In the delivery target environment
✓Passing all quality gates
✓Accepted by your Product Owner against its acceptance criteria

Our preference is frequent production delivery, since value compounds when accepted items reach users every week. We know the transaction cost varies widely: regulated change windows, downstream dependencies, and customer-side approvals can make a weekly production cadence unrealistic. The cadence is your call.

Production target

Deployed to production Friday

  • Release gate folded into Friday Validate
  • Accepted items reach users each cycle
or
Staging target

Accepted to staging Friday

  • Accepted items land in staging on Friday
  • Release gate fires at the cadence you agree: per Pulse, every few Pulses, or milestone-driven
Every Friday

What you see every Friday

✓A demo of every committed item against its acceptance criteria, with item-by-item acceptance from your Product Owner.
✓A weekly status report with the floor / plan / ceiling outcome: forecast versus actual, with the rationale for any item that re-banded during the week.
✓Retro insights and one or two concrete process changes for next week.
✓An Adoption Scorecard refresh on the cadence we agreed at the start of the engagement.

You see how the engagement is performing every Friday, against numbers we agreed to up front, with no story-point translation in between.

30 minutes. No pitch deck. Tell us what you're working on.