Technology Assessment
Our expert-led assessment follows a 5-step process to report actionable steps.
Technology assessments offer a clear roadmap to identify solutions that deliver profitable growth, minimize risks, and position your business as an industry frontrunner.
Based on 30 years of experience working with leading mid-market companies, we know that technical debt, high technology costs, competing priorities, and lack of capacity are commonly associated with unmet potential. A technology assessment is not just a technical exercise; it’s a strategic tool to highlight areas of investment, mitigate investment risks, and facilitate informed decision-making. It provides the clarity you need to drive growth and achieve your goals without guesswork.
An objective, unbiased, expert-led tech assessment gives you a comprehensive plan with actionable next steps — and the confidence to take them.
Why is a Business Technology Assessment Important?
Conducting a technology assessment is an investment that businesses make to strategically evaluate core technologies, products, intellectual property, and more. If you’re looking to build confidence in your go-to-market plan, improve decision-making, achieve aggressive growth goals or obtain technical due diligence for investment or acquisition, there are a number of benefits to an independent report from Ten Mile Square’s experts.
- Fuel company growth: A strategic product plan ensures your technology is ready to scale to keep pace with your growth goals, avoid costly mistakes, and maintain high levels of customer satisfaction.
- Control costs: Total cost of ownership (TCO) for cloud-based or cloud-native applications are typically driven by product development. Our technology assessment gap analysis uncovers key ways to ensure the desired state is cost-effective and profitable.
- Mitigate risks: Our team clearly identifies and documents your risks including indicating the level of importance and recommending prioritized, actionable steps for mitigating or solving risks.
- Objective product life cycle reporting: We evaluate what is working and what needs to be improved with an external, unbiased perspective as part of the technology assessment.
- Foster continuous improvement culture: Our reports provide specific action items to optimize operational processes within teams and cross-functionally so they become ingrained as a part of your culture.
- Identify security issues: While most tech firms rarely request an assessment of security issues, our expert team always identifies potential security deficits when found and includes them in our report.
Our 5-Step Technical Assessment Process
The 5-step process to completing an expert-led technical assessment is highly structured. We’ll rapidly assess product platforms, product management, product development, product operations, client onboarding, and integration capabilities. Each assessment phase is customized to ensure we meet management’s goals when producing our findings and non-biased recommendations.
Our technology assessment engagements usually take 2-3 weeks depending on the complexity of your technology, number of stakeholders, and striving to minimize the impact on your team involved.
1. Discovery
Information Request
The assessment begins with an information request to provide a comprehensive set of documentation from key areas of the business. After successfully working on hundreds of assessments, we’ve seen this background is key for our team to gain a full understanding of your business goals, product goals, and current technology state. If any documentation isn’t available or current, the topic can be addressed in the in-depth interviews. Documentation requests for full transparency may include:
- Business plan and revenue projections
- Go-to-market strategy and marketing requirement documents
- Technology investment plan to achieve revenue productions
- Organizational chart and staffing plan
- Product roadmap, release schedule, and past release notes
- Product architecture diagrams
- Project management artifacts
- Business continuity plan
In-depth Interviews
During this phase, we’ll conduct a series of in-depth interviews with key stakeholders in leadership, decision makers, product management and development, and customer support to hear about their prioritized business and product goals, operations, and product delivery. We review key documentation with contributing teams during open Q&A sessions. A typical 2-3 day interview schedule will include topics such as:
- Company background, history, expertise, market, key business metrics, and organizational structure
- Product definition, product management, analytics, packaging, technical product research and development (R&D), and product demonstration
- Intellectual property, proprietary methods or algorithms, third-party technology licenses, and patents applied for or pending
- Client and partner services, integration lifecycle, technical requirements, certification, integration surprises, client payment/reconciliation, and managed services/production operations
- Software development organization, methodologies/SDLC, information technology (IT), deployment and support processes, tools, and environments
- Product technical architecture, software requirements, use cases, data dictionary/schema, product performance requirements vs. benchmarks, and software API documentation
2. Define Problem Statement
- Statement of the ideal desired state of the technology once a solution is implemented
- Description of the current state explaining pain points that are a barrier to the solution
- Outline the potential impact on the business or product if the problem isn’t solved or improved upon
- Initial suggestions of proposed improvements to overcome the problem
3. Gap Analysis
4. Key Findings & Recommendations
A summary of our gap analysis with specific, actionable remediation recommendations and new technology needed to move from the current state to the target state is documented. These actions are prioritized based on what is most efficient to take on first or most important strategically to your business. Ten Mile Square applies the “theory of constraints” methodology to recommend effective ways to remove bottlenecks or address the limitations on your overall ability to produce high value.
5. Report & Briefing
In this final step, you’ll receive a comprehensive report that can be used by management and decision-makers to implement the plan. We conduct a live debriefing meeting with all key stakeholders to explain the key insights, review recommendations, hear feedback, answer questions and discuss how the organization plans to make decisions to implement the recommendations moving forward. The report is finalized after the meeting to incorporate final input and implementation plan details. Schedule a discovery call today >
Ten Mile Square expert-led technology assessments can also transition into helping our clients implement recommendations in a number of areas, including architecture scalability issues, digital transformation, product management, cybersecurity, and strategic innovation.
What Should I Expect During a Technology Assessment?
When Ten Mile Square works with technology organizations, we take a collaborative approach so the key team members and management should be prepared to work transparently and trust sharing the true state of the business. To conduct a comprehensive assessment, Ten Mile Square needs to deeply understand your business goals and the current state of your technology. During the documentation and discovery phases, you can expect that our team of experts will ask a lot of probing questions about the documents and artifacts. We’re interested in your customer acquisition and retention model. We’ll also deep dive into understanding your capacity to invest in your future infrastructure growth.
The Most Common Findings in Our Technology Assessment Reports
While conducting hundreds of technical assessments, our team of experts has documented common pathologies in the final reports. Our approach to working with you is to ensure we diagnose the root causes of these technology issues so that you can put a solid plan in place for your team to execute or continue to partner with our team to resolve. Typically, we uncover:
- Current systems are manually maintained and a plan for investment is needed to implement automation
- Database architecture is not scalable to meet the needs of the product roadmap
- Development teams and processes are structured inefficiently
- There is a lack of business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities
Scaled B2B Fintech SaaS Company from $30M to $100M
- Identified several gaps, including aligning the engineering team’s priorities with business goals
- Led remediation by providing a fractional CTO, technical project manager, engineering manager, scrum master, and DevOps engineers
- Completely automated their delivery pipeline, value chain, and automated testing
- Hired full-time CTO with the expertise needed to continue the work we started
- Successfully scaled revenue 3x from $30M to $100M over 3 years
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Technology Assessments We Provide
- Full-stack and full software development lifecycle
- Technical due diligence
- Product or software technology
- Cloud technology strategy
- AWS analysis
- Google Cloud Platform review
- Enterprise technology
- Source code review