Architecture review
A senior, independent view of your system: what’s working, what isn’t, and what to do first.
When it helps
- Before a big commitment: a new platform, a re-architecture, or a significant build with a supplier.
- When something feels wrong: the system is slow, expensive or fragile, and nobody can quite say why.
- When you need a second opinion: on a supplier’s work, on a plan, or on an internal debate that has stalled.
What I look at
The architecture itself, and everything that decides whether it will succeed in practice: the code, the data model, the delivery pipeline, how the system is run and monitored, and what it costs. I talk to the people who build it and run it, not just the people who drew the diagrams.
What you get
A clear written report, with findings ranked by impact and effort, and a short walkthrough of it with your team. It tells you what to do first, what to leave alone, and what to stop doing. You get a recommendation, not a slide deck of options.
The length of a review depends on the size of the system, and is usually measured in days rather than weeks.
Experience
- Thames Water: hired as an independent expert to assess the architecture, development methodology and code quality of a system being built by a third-party supplier. My improvement plan helped the supplier release more often, with fewer errors.
- Virgin Experience Days: an architecture plan to modernise a suite of legacy systems, and mentoring for the developers.
- Havas Media Group: turned the concept for a new healthcare business into a technical architecture and an actionable plan, with a proof of concept in AWS.
- First Sports International: designed a new, pluggable architecture for an entire product suite, and led the architecture team that delivered it.
I’m TOGAF 9.1 certified and a Microsoft Certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert.