Aigis in the company: who actually pays for the reading?
Before a project begins, experts spend weeks reading contracts, guidelines and requirements — paid for by day-to-day operations, shown on no invoice. A story about the project start and where the time really goes.
A contract has been won. On Monday everything that belongs to it is on the table: the contract, the client's requirement specification, their security requirements, the company's own guidelines on data protection and procurement, two standards the contract refers to, and a pile of e-mails that reveal what the client actually expects. Each of these documents makes sense on its own. Nobody has read them together yet.
So the reading is divided up. Legal takes the contract, compliance the guidelines, engineering the specification, project management the e-mails. Everyone reads carefully, marks passages, takes notes. After two weeks they meet and report. What does not come up is what lies between the documents: the deadline in the contract that the client sets differently in their security requirements. The requirement in the specification that one of the company's own guidelines rules out. The task that no paper assigns to anyone. Everyone has read their part. Nobody has read the whole.
These two weeks appear in no cost estimate, yet they are paid for: with the salaries of five or six experts, with their workplaces and with everything a company costs every day, whether people are reading or not. Add to that what is left undone in the meantime — whoever works through folders is not working on what they were hired for. The start slips, the team waits, the client waits. Running costs keep running even when the project is not running yet.
The most expensive part comes later. The contradiction nobody saw while reading will surface — usually once things have already been built, programmed or delivered. By then it no longer costs a decision but rework, renegotiation and trust.
With Aigis the same Monday starts differently. The documents do not go to a distribution list but into a project. Aigis reads them in full: each document on its own and all of them against each other — contract against specification, specification against guideline, guideline against standard. In less than two hours the result is ready. It shows which requirements contradict each other, with both passages as evidence. Where an obligation stands that nobody is responsible for. Which question to the client is open, already worded. And which decisions are pending, with the options, their consequences and the role that has to make them.
The kick-off then looks different. Nobody reports any more what they believed they found while reading. There is a list on the table, and the discussion is about the points that need expert judgement. The lawyer decides on the conflicting deadline, the security officer on the requirement that collides with the guideline, project management sends the one question to the client. Everyone who leaves the room knows what they have to do — and why.
That is the real calculation, and it is simple. On one side are weeks of experts with their running costs, a delayed start and the risk of the overlooked sentence. On the other are less than two hours, after which everyone starts from the same basis. What Aigis costs for this hardly matters in that calculation. The expensive item was never the tool, but the time of people searching instead of deciding.
Aigis takes responsibility away from no one. It does not decide, recommends no option and replaces nobody at the table. It makes sure the table talks about the right things. The best way into a project is not the fastest one, but the one in which everyone knows on day one what applies — and where it does not yet.