Technical Review
EAL’s technical assessment and review service can be applied to any client project or situation to provide an independent external review of an IT change. Combining structured stakeholder interviews and documentation against the backdrop of our comprehensive technical checklist, we will examine the IT solutions landscape assessing the quality and completeness against expected best practice, requirements and strategic objectives.
EAL will use our mature technical review model to assess the situation. We look at things holistically and across a wide range of assessment areas.
Our technical review model is sophisticated and automates the assessment by collecting the scores for each assessment area and those individual question RAG statuses alongside relevance to the assessment area quality stage/phase. Scoring rules are applied to each provided answer.
More than 200 data points are collected across the assessment. The core findings are documented in a technical review report alongside the implication of those findings.
Why Would You Need This Service?
Technical assessment equips CIOs and programme delivery personnel with a series of position statements, detailing issues found and what the ideal situation should really be for each area.
Indicators that a programme/project will benefit from a technical assessment and review are:
- increasing programme/project delay and run costs;
- lack of architecture and relevant documentation;
- unplanned and high spend on execution and delivery;
- poor performing suppliers;
- a backlog of high value requirements and a lack of innovation;
- increasing or unexplained system errors or outages.
How We Deliver This Service
Technical assessment and review is conducted as a structured exercise, completed in phases, over a four to eight-week period. Stakeholder interviews are beneficial; however, our analysis can also be completed off-site using available documentation.
The assessment covers the following areas: business requirements, process, application requirements, volumetric, methodology, documentation, standards, solution, RAID, design, integration, access, data, non-functional design, tooling and security.
Phases of service delivery:
Initiation: captures the required IT context in terms of documentation along with general and specific drivers for the assessment; also fixes the scope for the exercise;
Preliminary analysis: assesses the documentation received and carries out an initial inspection to work out focus areas of the assessment, perhaps custom questions to be asked; also identifies sources of information, and perhaps named points-of-contact;
Stakeholder interviews: working discretely, if required, we will interview key internal and external people; using our structured questions from the technical assessment model and co-ordinating responses.
Discovery: assesses the formal interview outputs, documentation received and carries out our independent assessment using our technical review model;
Analysis: interpretation and presentation of the assessment findings, typically expressed in terms of the assessment, implication and recommendation of each technical area, its sustainability and its contribution to the portfolio’s overall risk profile;
Deliverables
Meeting records: separate unstructured minutes of meeting (MOM) documents will be captured as a record of each stakeholder dialogue;
Technical assessments: a compilation of all programme/project answers to all structured questions across the technical assessment areas c. 250 discrete criteria, such as requirements (functional and non-functional), delivery documentation, architecture, programmatic aspects and cost captured in separate technical review models;
Benchmarking: EAL has carried out more than 50 technical assessments, and so is able to make real-world comparisons against similar businesses, facing similar challenges;
Assessment summary: exec level presentation containing a brief view of the highlights of the assessment, assessment scores, key findings, implications and recommendations with next steps and conclusions;
Technical review report: using the findings and analysis document each assessment for each assessment area and detail implications and potential remediations. Include the record of all information sources used detailing documentation reviewed referencing that immutable record.
Typical Outcomes
Benefits include:
- new insights, on which to base strategic decisions or to build the business case for change;
- greater recognition of the business risks associated with the IT portfolio.
CIOs request this service in order gain new insights, but behind this, there is almost always a suspicion that the IT programme/project is failing. A technical review and assessment can answer this question.
The technical review always uncovers new information and sometimes confirm suspicions and can be used immediately to understand implications and determine remediation paths for recommendations produced in the assessment.
Clients that have used this service have also been able to assess supplier technical performance with a view to reclaiming costs if delivery has proven to not align to what was promised.
Case Studies
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