You keep control of every account.
Stillmark works from accounts in your name, on your tenants and repositories. Stillmark never uses shared credentials. When the engagement ends, you disable the accounts and nothing else changes.
Approach
Before a vendor touches your production systems, you need to know how it behaves. These are the rules Stillmark works by. They are in the master agreement too, but they are easier to read here.
01 Method
How the work runs
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Map.
Stillmark writes down what you run, what connects to what, and who owns each part.
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Rank.
Risks are ranked by impact on the business, so the first fix is the one that matters most.
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Change.
One change at a time, tested, with your written approval before it reaches production.
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Record.
Every change goes in the change log. Every system gets a runbook.
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Review.
Each month, retained clients see hours used, open risks, and what comes next.
02 Deliverables
What the deliverables look like
Two of the documents every client gets. These are templates, with no client data.
Template
Runbook, table of contents
- Purpose and owner
- What it connects to
- How it runs: schedule, accounts, where secrets are kept
- A normal run, and what a good log looks like
- Known failures and the fix for each
- How to restart and how to roll back
- Change log
- Contacts and escalation
Template
Monthly review, one page
- Hours used against the block
- Issues opened, closed, and still open
- Changes made, each with its approver
- Open risks, ranked
- Decisions needed from you
- Planned for next month
03 Rules
You approve every production change in writing.
Any significant change to a production system gets an email approval before it goes in. You control deployments. Stillmark does not release payments, approve files, or bypass controls.
You see an estimate before any work over two hours.
Anything over eight hours becomes its own statement of work.
You get a runbook for every system Stillmark touches.
Documentation is a deliverable. Each system ends up with a runbook the next person can follow. Continuity means the knowledge is not only in one head, including Stillmark’s.
You know how fast an issue will be acknowledged.
Retainers state how quickly Stillmark acknowledges an issue by priority. They do not promise a fix time. A fix can depend on systems and vendors outside Stillmark’s control. Stillmark is not on site full time, and the agreement says so.
You get invoices that match the proposal.
Fees are fixed by the month or by the project. Hourly work is billed in 15-minute increments. Every invoice line is in the proposal.
