What an Adeo engagement is built to surface.
Three composites — a Quick-Scan, a Baseline Audit, and a single month on a Technology Advisory Retainer — written to show how each engagement runs and what it puts in front of leadership. The firms are invented; the method, the cadence, and the deliverables are exactly as we run them.
These are composite illustrations, not client work. Adeo is a new practice and has no engagement history to publish. The three scenarios below are constructed to show the shape and purpose of each engagement; the organisations do not exist, no figure is a delivered result, and nothing here is a testimonial or a record of past work. What is real is the engagement itself — the method, the cadence, the deliverables, and a qualified person standing behind every finding — exactly as we run them.
A fast read on MSP value and performance.
Picture a suburban law firm — fifty-odd staff, a few offices, content enough with the day-to-day service of its MSP, but watching the invoices climb while the scope sits still. The managing partner wants a plain second opinion in writing before the annual review, and does not want to start a fight to get it.
What this engagement examines
Microsoft 365 licence assignment, reconciled seat by seat against what is being paid for. Ninety days of ticket data from the MSP's own service desk. Twelve months of invoices, cross-walked against the master services agreement line by line. And the monthly service review written into clause 7 of the MSA — held, or let slide. Every finding is reviewed and signed off by a qualified person before the read leaves the building.
What a scan of this kind is built to surface
- Paid-but-unassigned Microsoft 365 seats — licence spend leaving the firm every month with nothing sitting against it.
- The distance between the resolution time the contract promises and the resolution time the service-desk data actually shows — and whether the credit the SLA owes was ever applied.
- Whether the monthly service review the MSA mandates is being held, or has lapsed without anyone noticing.
- Standing charges — an "extended monitoring" line, say — billed month after month with no signed change order behind them.
- Renewal indexation applied above CPI, and whether the notice the contract requires was ever given.
What the firm receives
A four-page executive brief, with a one-page MSP accountability section written to be forwarded to the account manager without an edit. The point is not to replace the MSP. It is to make the relationship measurable — a scorecard the firm can put on the table, and a clear basis for the questions worth asking at the annual review.
A Quick-Scan does not end an MSP relationship. It gives that relationship a written scorecard — forwardable, defensible, and run again only if the client asks.
A cyber-insurance renewal, defended on evidence rather than assertion.
An accounting practice — eighty-eight staff across two offices, regulated under APES 230 — is a few weeks out from its cyber-insurance renewal. The carrier's control questionnaire has gone from nine items last year to forty-seven this year. The managing partner wants the renewal answered on evidence rather than best guesses, and wants it answered before the broker gets anywhere near a price.
What this engagement examines
All five domains of a Baseline Audit: service delivery; commercial discipline; roadmap and governance; security and compliance — under which sit identity and access, endpoint posture, Microsoft 365 security configuration, backup and recovery readiness, network exposure, data-sharing and third-party access, incident-response readiness, and the carrier's own control set; and AI adoption and posture. Evidence comes from authenticated API reads against the practice's own tenants, plus document review across three years of invoices and ticket exports. A qualified person reviews and stands behind every finding before it is written down.
What an audit of this kind is built to surface
- Essential Eight maturity, control by control — whether a shared break-glass admin account is actually being rotated, for instance, even where MFA on privileged accounts is enforced.
- Whether backup restore testing is run at the cadence the insurer's own policy wording requires, or has lapsed below it.
- A Microsoft price step-up — a re-tiered Business Premium uplift, say — applied at auto-renewal with no re-negotiation conversation on file.
- Whether a documented incident-response plan, a tabletop exercise, and a Notifiable Data Breach escalation path exist in fact, or only in the answer that gets written on the questionnaire.
- Third-party integrations holding tenant-wide access — including any still granted to a vendor the practice stopped using and never revoked.
- A supplier contract — an ISP agreement, for example — auto-renewing at above-CPI indexation, with the notice arriving too late for accounts payable to act on it.
- AI showing up outside any decision the partners made — Microsoft 365 Copilot switched on in partner mailboxes and used on client correspondence, with no supervision SOP and no APES-aligned data-handling guidance behind it.
What the practice receives
A full Baseline Audit report, a one-page executive scorecard, a stand-alone MSP accountability matrix, and a twelve-month remediation roadmap with named owners and dates. The roadmap is sequenced so that every item closing before the renewal date maps to a specific control on the carrier's questionnaire — structured evidence for the broker to work from, and a defined programme of instructed work for the MSP. One document, written so the board, the insurer, and the MSP can each act on their part of it without a translator in between.
A Baseline Audit is not a scare report. It's one document a board, an insurer, and an MSP can each act on.
What the fourth month of a retainer actually looks like.
An allied-health practice group — forty-six staff, several clinics across metropolitan Adelaide, Primary Health Network funding, active NDIS-provider status. Its long-serving IT consultant retired earlier in the year, and the board is left with no independent view of what IT costs or what it risks. Adeo is engaged on the Standard tier of a Technology Advisory Retainer. The composite below is the fourth month of the first twelve — the point where the cadence has settled and the artefacts arrive on schedule.
What a month on retainer holds
- Eight advisory hours, booked by the CEO and the operations manager and drawn on as the month requires.
- One Adeo Pulse performance scorecard, issued on the first business day.
- A seat at the MSP's quarterly business review — as observer, not party to it.
- The twelve-month remediation roadmap kept current: the month's closures marked off, the month's new items added.
- Written advice on whatever commercial or technical decision the client raises that month.
- A quarterly board appendix built up month by month, so the quarterly pack is never written the night before.
What this particular month held
- The Pulse scorecard came in at 78 / 100, green, up two on month three — with two amber flags: backups (a restore-test gap) and commercial (a Microsoft price step-up detected with no re-negotiation on file).
- A short written review of a helpdesk-services RFP the operations manager had been sent by a rival MSP: scope adequate, pricing fair, but the governance and reporting clauses thin — with the points worth negotiating set out.
- A disaster-recovery tabletop run with the senior leadership team: two hours, one scenario (ransomware on the finance platform), six decisions to make, three gaps found and added to the roadmap.
- A phishing-simulation programme scoped — vendor-neutral, set to begin in month six.
- A three-page draft board appendix covering IT risk posture, roadmap status, and a single line on commercial drift.
What the retainer is not
Not a help desk, not a delivery arm, not a vendor. The MSP keeps running the environment; Adeo oversees it. The value is in the continuity — the client knows who to call before a procurement decision, a renewal conversation, or a board question — and in the fact that the voice on the other end answers to the client, not to a margin.
A Technology Advisory Retainer is not a dashboard. It's an advisor on call, measured every month, with a scorecard the board never has to chase.
If one of these sounds like your situation, the next step is a conversation.
Thirty minutes, no fee and no sales script — a plain read on whether Adeo can help, and a straight answer if it can't. We'll work out the question you're actually trying to settle, and tell you whether a Quick-Scan, a Baseline Audit, or a retainer is the right shape for it.
Email contact@adeo.au with two or three artefacts to make the first reply useful — your last MSP invoice, your Microsoft 365 licence count, and, if it's in front of you, your current cyber-insurance renewal questionnaire. You'll have a reply within one business day.
Start the conversation →See all engagements at /services.