A high-level systems assessment looks at whether the technical direction of your platform still supports your organisation’s long-term business goals.
Led by Jessica Brentnall, this service provides an experienced, independent architectural eye across your technical estate. It is designed to step back, evaluate the platform as a whole, and map out a practical, evolutionary path forward—without ego, judgment, or pushing for an unnecessary ground-up rewrite.
When an Architectural Assessment Makes Sense
As platforms scale, teams are often given the autonomy to make local technical decisions. Over time, however, the structures needed to keep the overall platform coherent can fall behind. Bringing in an independent assessment helps bridge that gap in several common scenarios:
Aligning Strategy with Business Goals
When the business has clear commercial objectives but lacks a defined technical path to get there, an assessment brings immediate clarity. We look at today’s platform architecture, identify where it diverges from your ambitions, and map out realistic strategic options to close the gap.
De-risking Complex Initiatives
Before you commit to a major platform refactor or launch a complex new initiative, getting a clear picture of system dependencies and technical debt upfront stops you from running into expensive dead-ends six months down the line.
Assessing Regulated & Compliant Systems
When your platform handles sensitive data or operates under strict regulatory oversight, standard architectural reviews aren’t enough. We evaluate your systems specifically against compliance expectations, whether that involves data residency, audit trails, security controls, or regulatory frameworks, ensuring your technical estate satisfies auditors without grinding engineering delivery to a halt.
Evolving Legacy & Pre-Loved Estates
Every system was built with care and dedication at some point, often under tight financial or time constraints that are no longer visible today. As business goals shift, those once-sensible decisions can leave a platform feeling neglected, slowing delivery momentum and exhausting engineering teams. We specialize in taking pre-loved, debt-heavy systems and stepping them up to a maintainable standard. That means evaluating the platform against core architectural pillars, such as security, cost efficiency, and operational resilience, to build a practical, step-by-step plan that makes your software fit to support the business again.
Engagement Format
Work starts with a scoping conversation about the current platform, its operational context, and your strategic objectives.
That discussion typically covers:
- The number of deployed services or systems.
- The approximate size and structure of engineering teams.
- Key business objectives for the platform.
- The specific outcomes required from the engagement.
While every assessment is tailored to your scope and time-frame, ranging from a focused health check to a comprehensive platform review, a typical engagement follows five clear phases:
Phase 1: Discovery & Assessment
A focused discovery phase to understand the business context, current architecture, and how the organisation is organised.
Phase 2: Gap Analysis Report
A structured look at the current landscape, highlighting architectural gaps, technical risks, and opportunities for improvement.
Phase 3: Strategy Proposal
Translating those findings into a technical strategy that directly aligns with your business goals.
Phase 4: Roadmap & Target Architectures
A high-level roadmap and the short-term target architectures needed to support incremental evolution.
Phase 5: Handover
A structured handover so internal teams can take the work forward with clarity and confidence.
Example Expected Outcomes
Specific deliverables for each phase are agreed upon during initial scoping. Typical outcomes include:
- Platform-wide architectural gap analysis.
- Technical risk and debt assessment report.
- Cost/value analysis of potential architectural changes
- Pragmatic target architectures and an actionable roadmap aligned with business goals.
Commercials & IR35
Engagements can be structured on either an inside or outside IR35 basis depending on the brief, scope of work, and operational context.
Day rates and commercial arrangements are tailored to the platform scope and agreed transparently following the initial scoping conversation.
Who provides this service
This service is provided by Jessica Brentnall.
