Feed Health Check
Three weeks. A measured baseline of every external feed you depend on, and a 90-day plan to onboard new sources faster and keep data trustworthy. $9,500, fixed.
- 3 weeks
- $9,500 fixed
- Run by Nitin Saini
- Credited toward Advisory
In one paragraph
For forwarding to finance, procurement or a partner.
MethodLane’s Feed Health Check is a three-week, fixed-fee review for companies whose product depends on third-party data. It inventories every external source, measures each feed’s freshness, coverage, drift and mapping-error rate, baselines how long it takes to onboard a new source, prices the cost of slow onboarding, and ends with a prioritized 90-day plan and a leadership read-out. It costs $9,500, credited toward ongoing advisory if the client continues within 30 days.
The goal
The goal of the work: new sources live in days, not months, with quality you can prove. The Health Check doesn’t promise that. It measures how far you are from it, and tells you what closes the gap first.
What gets measured
Not a maturity score. Numbers, per feed.
- Freshness
- How old the data is when your customers see it, against when the source published it.
- Coverage
- How much of what you expect actually arrives: records, entities and fields.
- Drift
- How often a feed changes shape: renamed fields, new codes, changed types, without notice.
- Mapping errors
- How many records fail, or land wrong, on the way into your data model.
- Onboarding time
- How long a new source takes today, from first file to production, and where the weeks go.
Accuracy needs something to check against. Where a reference exists (a second source, a known total, a customer-confirmed sample), I measure it. Where it doesn’t, the plan says how to create one.
What you get
- 01
Source inventory.
Every external feed, with its owner, format, cadence and where it lands.
- 02
Feed scorecard.
Freshness, coverage, drift and mapping-error rates for each feed, measured, with the method written down so your team can re-run it.
- 03
Onboarding baseline.
How long a new source takes today, step by step.
- 04
Cost of slow onboarding.
In engineer-weeks and dollars, from your own numbers.
- 05
90-day plan.
Prioritized fixes, each with an owner and the measure it should move.
- 06
Leadership read-out.
A written report and a 60-minute session with your leadership.
Week by week
Before
Intro call
25 minutes on your sources and where it hurts. If a Health Check fits, you get a one-page scope and the fixed fee. If it doesn’t, I’ll say so.
Week 1
Inventory
Every external source: owner, format, cadence, where it lands. Short interviews with the people who onboard and run the feeds.
Week 2
Measure
Freshness, coverage, drift and mapping-error rates for each feed. How long a new source takes today, step by step.
Week 3
Plan
The cost of slow onboarding, a prioritized 90-day plan, and a read-out to leadership.
What I need from you
- One named contact who can unblock access.
- Read-only access to the feeds (or recent samples), pipeline logs and run history.
- Three or four 30–45 minute interviews with the people who onboard and run your feeds.
- An hour of leadership time for the read-out.
How your data is handled
I work with read-only access, inside your environment where possible. Nothing is copied to my own systems beyond what the report needs, and I’m happy to sign your NDA first.
Price and terms
- $9,500, fixed.
- Everything above is included. No hourly billing, no expenses unless agreed in advance.
- Payment:
- half at kick-off, half at the read-out.
- Credit:
- if you continue with Data Ops Advisory within 30 days of the read-out, the full $9,500 is credited against Advisory fees.
- You keep everything:
- the scorecard, the method and the plan are yours. Your team can run the plan without me.
What it isn’t
- Not a maturity assessment. You get measurements, not a score out of five.
- Not a build. I measure, diagnose and plan; your team keeps ownership of its pipelines.
- Not a tool sale. I’m not paid by any software vendor.