Engagement
Project Rescue
The build is late, over budget, and technically stuck
- Price
- From $12,000
- Turnaround
- Scoped after assessment
- Availability
- Limited slots
When this is the right call
- Eight months in, still "two weeks out", and has been for a while
- The senior engineer left and progress left with them
- Every fix creates two new defects
- The team is busy and the demo still doesn't work
- The client is asking questions nobody wants to answer
What you get
- An assessment first — what is done, what isn't, and what is salvageable
- A stabilised build with repeatable deploys and a working environment
- The critical path to shipping, with the scope cuts named explicitly
- Hands-on engineering to get it there, alongside your team
- Weekly written status that a non-technical stakeholder can read
What this isn't Not a body-shop contract and not an offshore team. Engagements are limited because they are done properly. If the calendar is full, you will be told that instead of being slow-walked.
A stuck project is almost never stuck for the reason the status report gives.
The reason is usually structural: nobody can build it locally, so nobody can test it. Or the architecture made an assumption in month one that month six has now disproved. Or scope was never cut, so a team that could have shipped something in March is still trying to ship everything in November.
How it goes
Assess. A week, sometimes two, establishing what actually exists versus what the tracker claims. This is not billable theatre — it is the only way to give you an honest number for the rest.
Stabilise. Before a single feature gets finished: repeatable builds, a working environment, deploys that don’t require a specific person, backups that have been restored at least once, and enough observability to know when something breaks.
Finish. The critical path, in order, with the scope cuts named out loud and agreed rather than quietly deferred. Working with your developers, not around them — every change lands as a pull request they review and merge, which is both how they stay able to maintain it and why they will still be able to run this thing when Salvage isn’t here.
That has one honest consequence worth stating up front: on a rescue, the schedule depends partly on your review cadence. If merges become the bottleneck you will hear it in the weekly status, in plain language, early enough to do something about it.
Scope cuts are the product
Most rescued projects ship because someone was finally willing to say which third of the feature list was never going to happen. That conversation is uncomfortable when it comes from inside the team, and much easier from someone whose entire job is to be right about it.
Expect that conversation early.
Start with Project Rescue
Describe the situation in whatever detail you have. If a different service is the better fit, you'll be told that before anyone talks about money.
First reply usually within a few business days, from a person