Four steps, in that order, on every engagement. It is not a proprietary secret — it is published here precisely so you can hold us to it, and so another organization can use it without paying us anything.
Decide what would count as success — before anything is designed.
Most engagements fail here, quietly, by starting from a deliverable instead of a decision. We will tell you if your budget does not match your need rather than deliver less and say nothing.
Find out what is true, at the smallest scale that answers the question.
Confidence ratings are not decoration. A thin answer labelled as thin is more useful than a confident one that will not survive contact with your context.
Turn the finding into something usable on a Monday morning.
This is where most research stops and most consulting starts. Doing both is the point: the people who found the evidence are the people who build the response to it.
Leave, and have it keep working.
Dependency is a business model, not a service. The measure of an engagement is whether you can do it next time without us — which is why we ask a year later whether you did.
Consultancies usually keep their approach vague, because vagueness is commercially useful — it makes comparison hard and scope creep easy. We would rather be comparable.
Publishing it also means an organization with no budget can follow the same sequence themselves. That costs us some work and is entirely consistent with being a not-for-profit.
If an engagement with us skips a step — no scoping call, no evidence review, nothing handed over — say so. Write to contact@cometx.ca and we will fix it.
Training, an accessibility audit, an evaluation or an EDIA review all run through the same sequence. What changes is the evidence, not the shape.
This method is published under Creative Commons BY 4.0, like everything else we put out. Use it, adapt it, teach it — just credit CometX.