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Certification

Certification exists for partners doing genuine co-delivery, not as a gate on referrals and not as a badge. Our own research says certification measures the wrong thing, so this page explains what ours actually covers and what it does not.

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Tell us what you would co-deliver. Certification only makes sense for some arrangements.

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Not required to referFree, and deliberately narrowWe publish what it does not cover
What it coversWhat it does notHow it worksQuestions

Partners

Five things certification actually covers.

Each is a capability we can assess and that materially affects delivery. Nothing here is a quiz on feature names.

The data model

How the ledger, business graph, policy engine, and agents relate, and why the ordering matters. Without this, a partner cannot scope integration work accurately.

The permission and authority model

Actors, scopes, thresholds, and the fixed ceiling on agent authority. This is the part partners most often get wrong when configuring for a client.

Reconciliation methodology

What a tie-out checks, why one clean month proves nothing, and how to run a parallel period properly.

Diagnostics

Running a data diagnostic and interpreting the findings — duplicate rates, unbalanced periods, dimension coverage — without over-claiming what they mean.

Scoping discipline

Deriving requirements from transactions rather than interviews, and writing exclusions down. This is the largest single predictor of whether an engagement lands.

What certification does not mean

Our own research on implementation failure found that the software being genuinely incapable was the primary cause in about 4% of stalled projects — the rarest cause and the most commonly blamed. Requirements, data quality, and decision authority accounted for roughly three quarters.

Certification tests product knowledge. It does not test whether a firm can settle requirements, examine data honestly, or tell a client something they do not want to hear. Those are the things that decide outcomes, and they are difficult to assess in a certification.

Certification measures product knowledge, which is the thing that goes wrong least often. We run one anyway, and we would rather say what it does not cover.

So a certified partner is a partner who understands the system. It is not our warranty that they will deliver well, and we do not present it as one. If you are a buyer choosing a partner, our guidance on what to ask is more useful than any badge.

How it works

  • Free. There is no certification fee, no annual renewal charge, and no required training purchase. Charging for certification turns it into a revenue line, and a revenue line has an incentive to certify more people.
  • Two sessions plus a working exercise. Roughly six hours total, delivered by someone who implements, not by a training function.
  • The exercise is real. Scope an engagement from an anonymised client dataset, including what you would exclude and what you would tell the client not to buy. We assess the reasoning rather than the answer.
  • Reassessed annually, because the product changes and because a certification granted once and never revisited stops meaning anything.

Why the list is short

We certify partners who are actually co-delivering, which is a small number. A long certified list makes a channel look substantial and tells a buyer very little, because the variance within any large certified population exceeds the difference between certified and not.

You do not need certification to refer a client. Referral terms are identical either way, and a gate on referrals exists to make a programme look serious rather than to improve outcomes.

What we will withdraw it for

Presenting certification as an endorsement of delivery quality by us. Configuring a client past the agent authority ceiling or attempting to work around the policy engine. Failing to disclose a referral fee to a client. Or repeatedly scoping engagements that turn out to have been sold on requirements nobody derived from data.

We would tell you first and give you a chance to address it. We would also tell the affected client, which is the part worth knowing in advance.

For buyers reading this page

Do not weight our certification heavily when choosing who to work with. Ask the partner how many deployments they completed last year for companies your size, who specifically will be assigned, and for two references whose projects overran. Those three questions predict outcomes considerably better than any badge, including ours.

Questions

Common follow-ups.

Do we need certification to refer?
No. Referral terms are identical either way. A gate on referrals makes a programme look serious rather than improving outcomes.
What does it cost?
Nothing. No fee, no renewal charge, no required training purchase. Charging for certification gives us an incentive to certify more people.
How long does it take?
About six hours across two sessions plus a working scoping exercise on an anonymised dataset. We assess the reasoning rather than the answer.
Is certification an endorsement of our delivery?
No, and presenting it as one is grounds for withdrawing it. It means you understand the system, not that we warrant your outcomes.
Why is the certified list so short?
Because we only certify partners actually co-delivering. A long list makes a channel look substantial and tells a buyer very little.

It measures product knowledge. That is all.

Which is the thing that goes wrong least often. We run it anyway, and we would rather say what it does not cover.

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