Sector
Where we work
We design, improve and transform ways of working for successful operations and projects. We do that across multiple sectors, with several that stand out across our portfolio of clients.
Engineering and construction
Who we work with. Consulting engineers, architectural and geotechnical practices, contractors, and client-side project teams.
What we build.
Technical Review Framework. Decides which reviews a deliverable needs, who is qualified to carry them out, and what gets recorded.
Approval Automation. Records who approved a deliverable and against which version, inside your own Microsoft 365.
Construction Quality Management Framework. Sets quality requirements into the contract rather than leaving them to interpretation under NZS 3910 and NZS 3916.
Integrated Management Systems. Quality, environment, health and safety and information security, built as one system.
Document Management Systems. One controlled home for project documents, designed and built in the tools you already own.
Document Control. A document controller on your project, for a defined term, without hiring for a role that ends when the job does.
Auditing. Internal, supplier and contract auditing, including against NZS 3910 and NZS 3916 obligations.
Proof. Total Ground Engineering came to us for a process and controls review, then a technical review framework, then approval automation. Touchstone also designed and delivered Engineering New Zealand’s course on managing engineering reviews.
Data centres
Who we work with. Operators and their client-side project teams.
What we build.
Contract requirements into operating routines. Turning the service commitments in a hyperscale customer’s contract into the day to day routines, records and reporting that meet them. Get in touch
SLA gap analysis. Checking how the operation actually runs against what your service level agreements require, and naming where the two do not meet. Get in touch
Document Management Systems. Designed and built so records are produced as a by-product of the work rather than reconstructed afterwards, and so the evidence is retrievable when somebody asks for it.
Business Processes. Processes and frameworks that make your operating model effective and keep teams clear and aligned on what they are working towards.
Construction Quality Management Framework. Handover documentation defined during the project rather than assembled at the end of it, so operations inherit something they can use.
Auditing. Independent assurance where a customer, a board or a funder needs a view that is not the delivery team’s own account of itself.
Local government
Who we work with. Councils delivering capital works programmes, particularly where the programme has grown faster than the delivery function around it.
What we build.
PMO Frameworks. Project lifecycle, gates with written entry criteria and a named decision maker, templates, and a process library reachable in one click from where the work happens.
Document Management Systems. Project document management that holds up across a programme rather than a single job.
Business Processes. The delivery processes carrying programme risk, mapped as they actually run and documented in your own language.
Proof. Hawke’s Bay Regional Council, after Cyclone Gabrielle: a project office of about fifty people, most of them recent recruits, delivering a programme worth NZ$250 to $300 million against a previous annual figure of around $5 million. Delivered under budget, with no new software, and the framework has since been reused elsewhere in the council.
Defence
For our defence sector work, visit defenceready.nz.
Small business
For owner-operated businesses, see Small business.
In every sector
Automation and AI. Taking the routing, chasing and re-keying off your team using the software you already run, with the governance to show how the work was done. It is the one thing on this page that is not sector-specific.
Tell us what you are dealing with
Describe the problem and we will tell you how we would approach it, and whether we are the right people for it.
Common questions
Do you only work in these sectors?
No. These are where most of our work has been. The discipline is not sector-specific, and we have also worked in telecommunications and IT.
We already hold ISO 9001 certification. Is there anything here for us?
Certification confirms a system exists and was followed on the days it was examined. It does not confirm the system reflects how your work actually runs. Where the two have drifted apart, the certificate is usually maintained by a few people doing extra work around audit time.
Do you run projects, operations or site work?
No. We design and build the systems that govern how work is done, documented and evidenced. Your team and your contractors carry out the work.