A customer has designed an architecture they are proud of and are asking you to validate it before presenting it to their board. The architecture has a fundamental flaw: the real-time data processing latency will not meet their SLA requirements at 5× current volume, which is their 18-month growth target. Your account team is aware and has asked you not to "complicate things": the deal is close to signed.
You have two choices: validate the architecture and close the deal, or raise the flaw now. The Trusted Advisor raises it now. The vendor closes the deal and is fired six months later.
Write the specific sentence you would use to open the conversation with the customer. It must: (a) acknowledge what they've built, (b) state the concern clearly, and (c) come with a path forward, not just a problem deposit.
A three-month migration engagement has hit a constraint that makes success highly unlikely in the current scope: the customer's data governance model is unresolved, and without it, the platform cannot go live. The customer's team has invested heavily, both emotionally and financially, and they are not ready to hear that the project needs to pause.
A vendor keeps charging. A Trusted Advisor recommends a pause, even if it means losing the current engagement because continuing without the governance foundation will produce a platform that fails on go-live.
Write a one-paragraph Red Update (Status: RED) for this situation. Use the structure from M06_Red_Update_Template: status, root cause, options, recommendation.
A customer asks you to evaluate Azure SQL Hyperscale vs. AWS Aurora for their specific workload: a globally distributed, multi-writer database for a gaming company with latency SLAs under 10ms at global scale. For this specific use case, Aurora Global Database's conflict-free replicated data type support is genuinely better suited than Azure SQL's current capabilities.
A vendor recommends Azure anyway and frames the limitations. A Trusted Advisor acknowledges where the competitor's product is genuinely better, and explains what the customer would need to trade off to stay on Azure. The latter wins the customer's trust permanently. The former loses it the moment the customer finds out through implementation.
Write what you would actually say to this customer. Do not assume you need to recommend Azure at all costs.
A customer has $500K approved for a data analytics platform. In your discovery, you've found that the real constraint is data quality: their source systems produce corrupted records at an estimated 15–20% rate. A $500K analytics platform on top of corrupted data will produce beautiful, wrong dashboards. The right spend is $150K on data quality tooling first, and $350K on the platform six months later.
Write the conversation you'd have with the project sponsor who has authority over the $500K budget. The sponsor wants the platform, not the data quality tooling.