The firm

Working with Us

How an engagement runs, from the first enquiry to the authenticated deliverable and the record kept behind it.

Most of what follows is ordinary professional practice rather than anything peculiar to this firm. It is set out plainly because a client deciding whether to engage a geoscience consultancy should be able to see how the work will run before committing to it, and because a scope conversation goes faster when both sides already agree on the shape of the thing.

Who the firm works for

Owners and operators: Directly, where the firm is retained to answer a question about a site, a project, or a portfolio of sites.
Prime consultants: As a subconsultant to environmental and engineering prime consultants, carrying the geoscience component of a larger scope under the prime's direction.

Either arrangement is normal. What does not change is where the professional responsibility sits, which is set out under authorization below.

Starting an enquiry

An enquiry is welcome at any stage, including before there is a defined scope — a short conversation early is usually cheaper than a revised scope later. Four things let the firm respond usefully rather than generically.

The question: What decision the work has to support. A water balance for a regulator, a design flow for a crossing, an aquifer parameter for a licence application, and a terrain assessment for a route each lead somewhere different.
The location: Enough to identify the setting — a municipality, a watershed, a corridor, a project name. Legal land descriptions are not needed at this stage and are not published by the firm in any case.
The timing: When the answer is needed, and what it is needed for. Regulatory deadlines and construction windows shape method selection as much as the technical question does.
What already exists: Prior reports, survey, LiDAR, borehole logs, monitoring records, correspondence with a regulator. Work already done rarely needs repeating, and knowing what exists prevents a scope that duplicates it.

Enquiries are answered directly by the responsible member, not routed through an intake desk.

Scope and proposal

A proposal states the question being answered, the method proposed, the deliverables it produces, the assumptions and data it depends on, and what is excluded. Exclusions are written as carefully as inclusions: most scope disputes come from an unstated assumption rather than a disputed one.

Where the question is genuinely open — where the method depends on what the first phase finds — the work is proposed in phases, with a decision point between them, rather than as a single estimate that cannot be honoured.

Authorization and professional responsibility

The firm holds Permits to Practice in Alberta and in British Columbia, and the professional responsibility for work issued under them rests with the responsible member. The permits, the regulators, and the firm's Professional Practice Management Plan are set out in About the Firm.

Two consequences are worth stating to a client directly:

Competence governs scope: Work is accepted only within the firm's areas of competence. Work outside them is declined, or carried with a subconsultant who holds the competence for it, and the client is told which.
Authentication is not a formality: The responsible member authenticates only deliverables he has personally reviewed and accepted as meeting professional standards, whatever the workflow by which they were prepared. Analytical work carried out on FluviOS is subject to the same review as any other.

What a client receives

Deliverables vary with the scope; what is constant is that a result can be traced back to what produced it.

The deliverable itself: A report, memorandum, figure set, or spatial dataset, authenticated where a professional opinion is offered.
The basis of it: The input data, the parameters, the method and its version, and the assumptions applied. A run recorded on FluviOS retains its inputs, parameters, module versions, and outputs, so a result can be reproduced from the version that produced it.
The formats you work in: Spatial data is issued in the coordinate system and file formats the receiving design or regulatory team uses, established at scope rather than at delivery.

Records and reliance

Records are retained under the firm's Professional Practice Management Plan, which is the document a regulator asks for in a practice audit.

Reliance on a deliverable is by the client it was issued to, for the purpose it was issued for. A third party proposing to rely on it should ask first — not as an obstacle, but because a report written to answer one question may be silent on the assumption the third party most needs tested.

What the firm publishes

No client is named in this firm's outward material, and no project is identified by a legal land description. Work appears in the Project Portfolio described by setting and method only. Client references are provided on request, with the client's agreement.

Nothing on this page is a professional opinion, and none of it varies the terms of a signed engagement. Where this page and an executed agreement differ, the agreement governs. Enquiries are welcome.