# MilUX (full content) > MilUX Ltd is a user-centred design and delivery consultancy for the UK defence and security sector. It helps suppliers and buyers build the right thing, get it into service, and keep it fit for the people who depend on it. The short index is at https://milux.co.uk/llms.txt. # Who we help ## Breaking into defence URL: https://milux.co.uk/breaking-in/ New to defence, getting established - A knowledgeable sounding board: practical, industry-experienced help to sharpen the idea, read the market, and work out where to start. - Market intelligence and signposting: what is moving in the sector, the routes in through the portals and prime supply chains, and the opportunities, frameworks and events worth your time. - Warm introductions and network access: the right people to talk to, from primes and buyers to investors and operators. - Commercial growth through our associate network: business development, bid support and investment readiness, brought in when you need to win work and raise money. - Product design and development: from concept to working product, grounded in real user need, with the user research and prototyping behind it. - Website and market presence: standing the company up so it looks as serious as it is. - Accreditation readiness for CE, CE+ and JOSCAR, handled as routine rather than crisis. - [Foothold](/foothold/), when it helps: our free, defence-native operating system, so your contacts, your research and your accreditation work stop leaking away between meetings. And [Tally](/tally/), our free public directory of UK defence companies, so the map of who is around you is one search away. We are not a bid-writer or a membership club. Introductions matter, and we make them, but the point is to build the company that is worth introducing. Two honest numbers before you start. In 2024 just 5% of the MOD's direct procurement spend reached SMEs, and the MOD's own guidance is six to eighteen months from registration to a first contract. We will not pretend otherwise. Our job is to make sure that time builds a company. ## Delivering your contract URL: https://milux.co.uk/delivering/ Won work, delivering it - Delivery discipline: demand management, flow, and service expectations your customer can see being met. - Knowledge systems: what the company knows, captured, shared and compounding. It is the [Foothold](/foothold/) discipline applied to a business that is already delivering. One in four small firms say they would close immediately if they lost a key person; this is how you stop being one of them. - Specialist capability into live contracts: user research, human factors integration and design assurance, training design and delivery, and delivery management, through our associates. - Evidence generation: the delivery record your next bid needs, captured as you go. - AI enablement once the foundations exist, and never before. We are not a body shop or a bid factory. We build capability that stays when we leave. ## Staying competitive URL: https://milux.co.uk/staying-competitive/ Established, need to level up - Delivery optimisation: end-to-end flow, explicit service expectations, and the dependency on named heroes dismantled deliberately. - Customer fitness evidence: a survey that asks your customers what they need from you and scores their experience against it, segment by segment. - Measurement frameworks: the criteria your customers judge you on, made explicit and instrumented. - Embedded coaching and training, so the capability becomes yours rather than ours. - AI enablement where the pilots stalled, starting from the foundations that stalled them. Around 95% of enterprise AI pilots produce no measurable impact, and the failures trace to foundations, not tools. We are not a transformation factory. What we change, and in what order, follows what your customers tell us. About the customer conversation, because asking a third party to talk to your customer should not feel like exposing a flank: you approve the framing and the questions before anyone is contacted. The conversation is presented as your investment in serving them better, never an audit. The questions ask what your customer needs and selects on, not how any individual performs, and named people are never scored. What comes back is the pattern, attributed only where the customer agrees. ## Commissioning capability URL: https://milux.co.uk/commissioning/ Buying capability that gets adopted - User research in military environments, with access to serving and veteran participants through our Military User Research Recruitment Service. - Requirements grounded in evidence, with option evaluation and capability assessment. - Discovery with an explicit commitment gate: the discipline that decides whether the build should happen at all. - Sharpening the problem upstream, so a clear, well-formed problem reaches your specialists instead of a vague one that soaks up their time. - Adoption-focused design through to the front line, so the valley between demonstration and use gets owned. - Adoption recovery for fielded capability: we take the journey from where it stalled. No build re-opened, no blame assigned. We are not a build shop pushing you to the commitment point. We are the discipline that decides whether the build should happen at all. And when you are being asked to contract in months rather than years, that discipline is how you go fast without buying the wrong thing. # How we help ## Product Design and Development URL: https://milux.co.uk/product-design-and-development/ We design and build defence products, from early research and problem framing through prototyping to a working, tested solution. ## What it is We help you design and build defence products across the whole arc, from recruiting military users and problem framing, through prototyping, to a tested solution. Most of the market picks up one part of that, we help with all of it. The outputs are your products, prototypes, tools and design systems. The centre of gravity is operational need. A capability that demonstrates well but sits unused has failed. We help you keep the user at the centre of the design and development process, from the problem statement through to adoption, so the capability paid for is the capability used. ## How MilUX does it We put a commitment gate early. Discovery decides whether the build should happen at all, before anyone commits budget to code. That protects the buyer from building the wrong thing well. Research runs in real military environments. We reach serving personnel, veterans and civil servants through our Military User Research Recruitment Service, so requirements are grounded in evidence rather than assumption. From there we support in building hardware and software prototypes, testing with real users, and iterating. Where your product needs a consistent interface across many screens or teams, we help build the design system that holds it together. We keep proof honest. Where an engagement is still maturing, we say so rather than dress it up as a finished case study. ## Delivery optimisation URL: https://milux.co.uk/delivery-optimisation/ We optimise delivery so work flows from idea to outcome with speed and predictability, dismantling the dependence on named heroes. ## What it is Almost everyone in this market sells winning contracts. Almost nobody sells being fit to deliver them. That is the work we do. We help you optimise delivery so work flows from idea to outcome with speed and predictability. Winning the contract is often treated as the hard part. Then a handful of people have to deliver at the weight of a much larger team, everything the company knows lives in one or two heads, and the customer has started asking for the hero by name. We take that dependence apart on purpose. Delivery should not rest on which named individual happens to be available. It should rest on a system the customer can see working, and the next bid can point at. ## How MilUX does it We make delivery visible and predictable: demand management, flow, and service expectations the customer can watch being met. That is the difference between delivery that runs on heroics and delivery that holds up under load. We get knowledge out of heads and into a system where it is captured, shared and compounding. This is the [Foothold](/foothold/) design discipline applied at scale to a business that is already delivering. We generate evidence as the work happens, so the record the next bid needs is being built by today's delivery rather than reconstructed later. Where the constraint sits outside any one team, we work at that level rather than reorganising for its own sake. The evidence comes first, and the next step follows it. Everything is built to stay. We are not a body shop, and we are not a bid factory. The capability remains with the client after we leave. ## AI enablement URL: https://milux.co.uk/ai-enablement/ We put AI to practical, safe use that holds up in regulated defence and security, starting from the foundations most pilots skip. ## What it is We put AI to practical, safe use that holds up in regulated defence and security. Most AI pilots produce a good demonstration and no measurable change. The reason usually has nothing to do with the tools. If your worry is more basic, are we even allowed to use this, that instinct is sound. The MOD's dependable AI policy makes compliance a shared endeavour with suppliers, your contracts police the tools you use on MOD-identifiable information, and the national guidance on public AI tools is blunt. The answer is not avoidance: most UK employees already use unapproved AI tools at work, so the real choice is governed use or invisible use. We help you build the governed kind. We start where the pilots stall: the foundations. Data maturity and delivery maturity come first. If the data is not in order and the delivery is not predictable, no model sitting on top of it will hold. ## How MilUX does it We assess the foundations before recommending anything. If the data and the delivery are not ready, we say so and look to help you fix that first. This is the opposite of leading with a tool and hoping the organisation catches up. The Fit for Purpose Assessment is that readiness check: it baselines the knowledge, data and delivery foundations AI depends on, so you know whether you are ready before anyone buys a tool. Two weeks, from £6,500. We work inside the constraints of regulated defence and security, not around them. Safe use is the point, not an afterthought bolted on at the end. Where AI does belong, we build it into the way work actually flows, so it produces measurable change rather than just another demo. And we embed the capability with the client through coaching, so it does not leave when we do. Where an AI engagement is still maturing, we keep the proof line honest rather than claim a result that has not yet landed. ## Training and coaching URL: https://milux.co.uk/training-and-coaching/ We build lasting capability through training and coaching, so the skills stay with your team after we leave. ## What it is Our training and coaching practice is how we work with you to ensure the capability stays with you after we leave. Coaching is embedded and hands-on, working alongside your team on live work. Training is course-based, from a short workshop to a full cohort. Both do the same job: turn what we know into what your people can do. ## How MilUX does it We coach in the flow of real delivery, not in a classroom away from it, so the practice sticks where the work actually happens. We have a number of accredited trainers and coaches within our associate network, experts in all areas of product design and development and operational excellence. We can also help design and deliver your product training to defence standards, including DSAT and JSP 822. Every engagement includes knowledge transfer, so you are not left relying on us. We would rather build your team's capability than have you rent ours indefinitely. # Pages ## About MilUX URL: https://milux.co.uk/about/ MilUX is a defence-focused user-centred design and delivery consultancy, started seven years ago by Matt Odell after he left the regular army, delivering through a network of around fifteen specialist associates. ## Why I started MilUX Matt Odell, founder of MilUX I started MilUX seven years ago, not long after I left the regular army. I had spent years in defence, and I kept running into the same thing: good people handed kit and capability that had been designed for whoever bought it, not for them, then quietly working around it to get the job done. I did not want to write another report about that. I wanted to fix it. So MilUX exists for a straightforward reason. I am, genuinely, obsessed with solving that problem: putting the people who actually use the thing back at the centre of how it gets built and delivered. That is what "from insight to impact" means to us, a real insight about a real user, carried through to something they can feel on the ground. ## What we've delivered MilUX has led the British Army's first strategic digital discovery into the deployed domain, run user research and discovery for Land Special Operations and the MORPHEUS programme, led the discovery for an Army-wide design system, coached delivery and transformation from defence through to the EV sector, and worked on user research for a frontline defence medical application. Matt speaks and teaches on user-centred design and Kanban in defence, including the 1202 Human Factors Podcast, the Everyday Agile Podcast, and Kanban Edge, and sits on the steering group of the South Central Regional Defence and Security Cluster. [Connect with Matt on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/maodell/) ## What we value Six values guide how we work. - **Humility**, because we start by listening, and we are comfortable saying we do not know yet. - **Integrity**, because we tell clients the truth, including when it is not what they hoped to hear. - **Courage**, to raise the hard problem rather than the comfortable one. - **Collaboration**, working as part of your team rather than at arm's length from it. - **Transparency**, showing our working and never dressing up proof we do not have. - **An adventurous spirit**, willing to try the new thing, carefully, where it serves the mission. ## How we deliver MilUX is led by me. Delivery runs through the MilUX associate network: around fifteen independent practitioners, each running their own company, brought into engagements as named members of the delivery team rather than an anonymous bench. Between us, we have expertise in product design and development; agile and lean; delivery and business optimisation; software and data engineering; training and exercise design; and defence commercialisation and bid support. Several of us are veterans, and most of us hold some form of security clearance. It means you get senior, specialist people matched to the work, not juniors learning on your contract. We also run our own delivery on an agentic AI agent stack, and bring that way of working into client engagements, so a small firm delivers at a weight its size would not suggest. We are currently training associates through Anthropic's Claude Partner Network to bring that same way of working into client engagements. So AI reaches your work through someone trained to deliver it, not bolted on afterwards. ## Standing in the sector MilUX holds Cyber Essentials Plus, is JOSCAR-registered, is a Government Commercial Agency supplier, and is a Silver award holder in the Armed Forces Covenant Employer Recognition Scheme. We keep our proof honest: where an engagement is still maturing, we say so rather than dress it up. ## Still serving Matt is also still serving as a Major in the Mercian Regiment. This keeps him close to the people MilUX is here to serve. ## Talk to us MilUX Ltd is a UK private limited company, registered in England and Wales, company number [11937659](https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/11937659), at The IncuHive Space, 4th Floor Chantry House, The Chantry Centre, Andover, SP10 1LZ. The best next step is a short conversation with me. Book a call, or email matt@milux.co.uk. ## Agents and Skills URL: https://milux.co.uk/agents-and-skills/ The agents and skills that ship free in Foothold, MilUX's open operating system for defence founders. What they are, how they help, where each came from, and the licences. Agents and skills are how you get expert work out of AI without being the expert yourself. The ones on this page ship free inside [Foothold](/foothold/), MilUX's open operating system for defence founders, and they run on your own machine. This page explains what they are, how they help, and lists every one, with where it came from and its licence. We can work with you to tailor these, and many more that we use, to your specific use case. ## What they are A skill is a repeatable procedure, written as plain instructions that Claude follows the same way every time. You ask for the thing (size my market, draft a DPIA, check whether I am eligible to bid), the skill runs the steps in order, and you get a usable result instead of a blank page. Skills are Markdown files in your own vault. You can read them, change them, and they keep working with no server and no account in the loop. An agent is a configured instance of Claude, set up to do a job on your behalf using those skills. MilUX runs its own business on a stack of agents, and Foothold is how we hand the same way of working to founders. The catalogue below is skills today; agents are coming to Foothold next. ## How they help They turn a procedure an expert would charge for into something you can run yourself in minutes: a tender response built around the real evaluation criteria, a market sized properly, an investor deck red-teamed before a real investor sees it, or your contacts captured so nothing leaks away between meetings. You get a usable result quickly, and it stays yours. > **We check skills before we trust them, and we will check yours.** Every skill is a set of instructions an agent runs with real access, so an untrusted one is a way to run hostile instructions against your data. We built the **[Skill Safety Audit](https://github.com/MilUX-Ltd/foothold/tree/main/foothold/template/Skills/meta-skills/skill-safety-audit)** to check any skill or agent before it is installed, and it ships free in Foothold too. If you find a skill or an agent you like the look of and want a second opinion, send it to us. We are happy to audit it, and to pass on the good ones so everyone benefits. Email matt@milux.co.uk. ## The catalogue Everything here ships free in Foothold, grouped by what it helps with. Open a category to see its skills, and open a skill for the problem it solves and an example of what it could do set up for you. Each links to its folder in the public Foothold repository, where you can read exactly what it does before you run it. ## Something missing? If you see an area that we've missed or want us to help you build an agent or skill, drop us a line. ## Licences Everything here is **MIT licensed** and free to use, change and pass on. Foothold itself is MIT. The skills marked MilUX original are ours, released MIT under the Foothold pack. The forked skills keep their upstream copyright and licence, retained in full in each skill's folder: - The product, market and strategy skills are forked from **Pawel Huryn's pm-skills** (MIT, © 2026 Pawel Huryn), some lightly adapted for defence founders. - **Humaniser** is forked from **@blader/humanizer** (MIT), based on Wikipedia's "Signs of AI writing". - **Process Interviewer** and **Prompt Master** are forked from **Ben AI**. Provenance is shown against each skill above. If any attribution here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. ## Alexandria URL: https://milux.co.uk/alexandria/ A subscription that puts MilUX's delivery and defence judgement at your side through an AI interface, on hand when you need it rather than when a consultant is free. ## What it is Alexandria is a subscription. It gives you MilUX's accumulated delivery and defence judgement through an AI interface, available whenever you need it rather than when a consultant is free. That judgement comes from real contracts: years of getting capability into service and keeping it fit for the people who depend on it, built up across MilUX's work and its associate network. Alexandria puts it within reach the moment a question comes up. ## Why we called it Alexandria The name comes from MilUX's first contract, on the LE TacCIS programme. The army programme manager we worked with put it simply: "What I really needed was a single place to find any information I needed, a bit like the Library of Alexandria." It stuck. Alexandria is that place for defence delivery: hard-won knowledge gathered up, kept, and easy to reach. ## The problem it solves Small defence suppliers hit the same delivery questions again and again. How to shape a bid so it survives contact with delivery. What good looks like to the customer. Where a programme is about to slip, and what to do about it. Each question is real, and few of them on their own justify bringing in a consultant. So they go unanswered, or they get answered by guesswork. Alexandria answers them at the point of need, with MilUX's experience behind the answer. ## How you use it You ask a question in plain English, the way you would ask a colleague. You get an answer grounded in real delivery experience, not a general summary pulled from the open internet, and each answer tells you where it came from. You can upload your own documents for our specialist agents to review, so the answer speaks to your bid or your programme, not defence in the abstract. If you would rather it worked alongside the tools you already use, you can connect to MilUX directly through an MCP connector. ## What it will not do Alexandria will not pretend. If a question falls outside what it covers, it tells you so, and offers you a free fifteen-minute call with us rather than inventing an answer. That honesty is the point. An answer you cannot trust is worse than no answer, so Alexandria would rather show you where its knowledge ends than guess past it. ## Foothold URL: https://milux.co.uk/foothold/ Foothold is a free, defence-native knowledge system for founders breaking into UK defence, installed in an evening and yours to keep. A foothold is the secured ground on the far bank. Not the whole operation, the place you hold and push out from. Breaking into UK defence is much the same: you have to get across the river, hold ground, and have somewhere to work from. Foothold is that ground. It is a free, defence-native knowledge system you install and own. You stand it up in an evening and walk into Monday with the structure, the discipline, and the public reference content that would otherwise take months to assemble. ## The problem it solves Defence is one of the hardest markets for a small company to enter, and the barriers are rarely technical. There is no map of the world: you find the organisations that matter by accident, and there is no one to call to ask the stupid question. Cyber Essentials, Cyber Essentials Plus and JOSCAR feel like an exam nobody set the syllabus for. And everything you know is scattered across a dozen tools, with you as the only person who can find any of it. Generic productivity templates do not help here. They have never heard of an RDSC, or JOSCAR evidence, or why an OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE marking matters. ![Claude Cowork and Obsidian](/assets/foothold-cowork-obsidian.svg) Foothold runs where these two meet: Claude's Cowork does the work, Obsidian holds your vault. ## What you actually get Foothold is an installable Obsidian vault: the structure, page templates and conventions that hold a defence business together, with a guide in every folder so you always know what goes where. It comes pre-populated with open-source defence reference content, the regional clusters, the frameworks, the MOD bodies, the programmes and the portals, so the map that founders keep telling us does not exist is already drawn. And it ships with skills for the jobs you do every week, from adding a contact or an organisation, to keeping up with the MOD's constant renaming, to getting your Cyber Essentials evidence in order. There is a rename command to make it your own, an update command to keep it current, and an offline installer for the many defence networks that block GitHub. ## It is yours Foothold installs on your own machine and you own the copy. It runs in Obsidian alongside Claude's Cowork app, which needs a paid Claude plan, and it keeps working if MilUX goes quiet. Your contacts, your research and your accreditation work stay with you, not locked inside someone else's platform. In a sector rightly nervous about where AI providers put your data, plain files on your own machines is not a design preference; it is the sovereignty answer. ## Free, with help if you want it The core is free and available to anyone. If you would rather not set it up yourself, or you want it tailored and your team walked through it, hands-on setup and ongoing support are there at a modest cost. You never pay for the thing you could have done yourself. ## Why trust it Foothold is the system MilUX runs its own business on, packaged for you. The structure came from our own vault, and the content and priorities came from research with defence founders who kept describing the same gaps. We ship the discipline, never our relationships. ## Get Foothold Foothold installs into Claude's Cowork app from its public GitHub repository, with a step-by-step walkthrough in the repo. Get it at [github.com/MilUX-Ltd/foothold](https://github.com/MilUX-Ltd/foothold). If you would rather we set it up with you, book a call. ## Tally URL: https://milux.co.uk/tally/ Tally is a free, public directory of UK defence companies, searchable by capability, size, location, framework and accreditation. Tally is a free, public directory of the UK defence sector. The name is the air-combat call for "I have visual", the moment the thing you were looking for comes into view. It pulls public information about defence companies into one structured, searchable place: what each company does, its capabilities, size and location, the frameworks and accreditations it holds, its website and LinkedIn, and a dated line or two of recent news. Companies only, public facts only. No people, no opinions, no rankings. ## Why we built it Finding the right defence company is harder than it should be. The information is public, but it is scattered across hundreds of gov.uk pages, trade-body directories, supplier registers and press releases. A founder in our 2025 research put it best: 'there wasn't a single map of the world'. The primes are easy to find; the micro and small businesses doing the interesting work are not. Tally puts them in one place, and makes a point of surfacing the smaller companies rather than only the big names. It is also a working example of what we do for clients: turning scattered public information into structured, AI-ready market intelligence that supports business development and outreach. If you would rather have the directory as Markdown files, or pull it into your AI knowledge base, the whole thing is on GitHub at [github.com/milux-ltd/tally](https://github.com/milux-ltd/tally). ## Search the directory [EMBEDDED VIEWER] Filter by capability, company size, location, framework and accreditation. Search returns the companies that match everything you asked for first, then the near misses underneath, so a search for a small additive-manufacturing company near Hampshire with Cyber Essentials Plus still shows you who is close. ## Open, and yours to use Tally is open. The whole directory lives in a public repository you can browse, clone, or pull into Obsidian and search offline. Get it at [github.com/milux-ltd/tally](https://github.com/milux-ltd/tally). It sits alongside [Foothold](/foothold/). Foothold is the operating system a defence founder runs on; Tally is the map of the companies around them.