How much of my team's time will this take?

Almost every supplier underestimates this, because saying "not much" helps close the deal. Here are the honest figures.

Discovery

About an hour each from the people who actually do the work. Not their managers describing it — them. Plus a couple of hours from whoever sponsors it, and half a day of someone finding logins for systems nobody has touched in years. That last one always takes longer than anyone expects.

During the build

An hour a fortnight for review, and it needs to be the same person each time. Rotating reviewers is how you get contradictory feedback and a confused product.

At go-live

This is the one people underestimate. Budget half a day per team, plus a fortnight of somebody being available to answer "how do I…" questions.

This is not training in the formal sense. It is the period where people build confidence, and skipping it is the single most reliable way to waste an entire build. I have watched good software die because nobody had time to sit with the team in week one.

What happens if you cannot give this

Tell me at the start and we plan around it — longer timeline, smaller phases, more written documentation and fewer live sessions.

What does not work is agreeing to the time and then not having it. That produces a build shaped by guesses and a launch nobody was ready for.