Halcyon · 120 consulting hours recovered

Context

Halcyon is a 28-consultant strategy firm working with French mid-caps and ETIs across multiple sectors. Their model is intensive: 6 to 8 simultaneous projects, each generating 3 to 5 formal deliverables per month. In Q4 2025, only 3 of their 6 projects met their original delivery deadline. The cause was not analytical capacity — it was document production time. A time-tracking study run by the managing partner in November 2025 put the figure at 40 to 45% of billable consultant time spent on document production: strategy notes, executive committee memos, weekly field summaries, project slides. The substantive content — the actual thinking — accounted for a fraction of that. The rest was formatting, restructuring, rewriting for audience, and version management across shared drives with no naming conventions.

Audit

Week 1 was a qualitative and quantitative audit of the production workflow. We interviewed 8 consultants across 3 active projects, time-stamped 22 deliverables from draft to final version, and mapped the toolchain: Notion for internal docs, Google Slides for client deliverables, email for version control. No shared templates. Each consultant had their own formatting habits. Findings: average time from raw notes to a validated 4-page strategy note was 4.2 hours. Executive memo: 3.1 hours. Weekly field summary: 1.8 hours. The main friction points were structure (starting from a blank page each time), reformatting for different audiences (same content, three versions), and back-and-forth review cycles with senior consultants. None of these were irreducible tasks.

What we shipped

• **Strategy note agent** · Claude Opus 4.7 + Notion MCP · generates a structured 4-6 page first draft from raw interview notes and the project brief in under 8 minutes, following Halcyon's house structure
• **Memo formatter** · Claude Sonnet 4.6 · adapts the same content to 3 audience formats (executive committee, project sponsor, working team) without rewriting from scratch, in 3 minutes
• **Weekly summary agent** · Sonnet 4.6 + Google Workspace MCP · aggregates field notes from the week, structures the key signals, outputs a 1-page summary ready for consultant review in under 3 minutes
• **LangSmith observability** · full trace of every agent run, prompt version history, output quality scoring, adoption rate per consultant and per project

Results

Over Q1 2026 (12 weeks post-deployment): 120 consulting hours recovered across 6 active projects. All 3 projects with Q1 delivery deadlines met them — a reversal from the 50% on-time rate of Q4 2025. Average deliverable production time dropped from 3.5 hours to 1.5 hours, a 57% reduction. Consultant satisfaction with the production process went from 4.1 to 7.8 out of 10 in an internal survey. The quality surprise: senior consultants initially expected to use the recovered time for more client-facing interactions. In practice, they used it to go deeper on substance — additional interviews, sharper recommendations. Three senior consultants said it was the first time in two years they felt their analytical work reflected what they were actually paid to think about.

Trajectory

Halcyon is now extending the system to commercial proposal writing. The target is to halve the time spent on pitches — currently 6 to 8 hours per proposal — by automating structuring and first-draft generation from prior project materials. A retrieval layer over their Notion knowledge base is scoped for Q2 2026. The managing partner is also evaluating agent-assisted competitive benchmarking to support the research phase of new missions.