You are accountable for an estate you did not build.
Cairn establishes where an infrastructure operation actually stands, what to do about it in what order, and the record to prove both — for the person who has to cross the ground next.
Capabilities
Scored nought to four, each with the evidence behind it and the confidence in that evidence held separately.
Work streams
Across the fifteen, each saying what observably shows it is finished. Thirty-six pay whether or not a workload ever moves.
Not one
A second model checks how the first read your people. Where they differ, you are told rather than arbitrated for.
Your documents stay yours
Most of the work is your own people answering questions inside your own boundary. We hold what the answers established, not the documents.
People arrive here two ways, and it is nearly always one of them.
Either way the next decisions are expensive and hard to reverse, and you are expected to make them without appearing not to know. That is the job this exists for.
You were hired into it
The operational problems reach you before the explanation does, and the people who can explain it have their own view of what matters.
A date is coming
A lease ends. A facility closes. A contract expires. Nobody has a plan that survives being read carefully.
Not an audit, and the difference is structural.
An audit asks people to account for the past, and people asked to account for the past give the defensible answer. That answer is accurate and nearly useless.
It omits the constraint nobody wrote down, the practice that survives a bad week, and the thing they would change if it were up to them.
Everything here is pointed forward. A gap is what to do next. A vague answer was probably the wrong question. Somebody who sounded defensive means the session failed, not the person.
That is not politeness. It is the only way to get the answer worth having.
What you can expect, before anybody agrees to anything.
These are not terms of engagement. They are the six things that decide whether the answer at the end is worth having, and they hold from the first conversation.
Three things, and the third is the one nobody expects to value most.
Where you actually stand
Fifteen capabilities scored nought to four, each with the evidence behind it and the confidence in that evidence held separately.
What to do, in what order
Eighty-eight work streams across the fifteen. Thirty-six of them pay whether or not you ever move a workload, and each says what observably shows it is finished.
Your own operating record
The artefacts an operating discipline should hold, with the holes visible. Clients without a configuration record leave with the beginnings of one.
You may contract the migration. You cannot contract being the operator afterwards — and of those eighty-eight work streams, five can be handed to somebody who then leaves.
A subscription, not a project. It ends when you say it does.
No term, no expiry, nothing to renegotiate.
Because it shows you the way without grading you for needing it.
A cairn is a stack of stones on a hillside, put there by people who went first, for whoever comes after. Nobody signs them.
They are not a monument to the person who placed the last stone — they are a marker that the route goes this way and that somebody made it.
That is the whole intent. You are not the first organisation to inherit an estate nobody documented, facing a date somebody else set. The markers are what others left.
One conversation about the estate you have actually got.
No commitment beyond it. If what you need is not this, that is a finding too, and it costs you an hour rather than a quarter.