Eyes wide open: Venture Capital firms purchasing an IT firm as a potential investment; Mergers and Acquisitions in IT; a business purchasing a stake in a strategic technical partner; a large, established consultancy firm looking to partner with a youthful, cutting-edge technical firm. All these scenarios and more are laden with difficulties and pitfalls. Technical Due Diligence will help to mitigate many uncertainties later on in the business relationship.
What is Technical Due Diligence?
As a buyer, during such a purchase, you might call in an auditor or a high-flying firm of accountants to run a Due Diligence exercise or Technical Quality Audit. Their remit will extend to ensuring technology is sound as well, although they may not have technical assessment skills in-house. In these scenarios, you or the auditors might need us.
Alternatively, you might be a larger enterprise with a troubled IT project or product, and look to us to identify where problems lie and how to resolve them.
Although our skills are not limited to the Microsoft platform, we are most famous for Microsoft Technical Due Diligence. When clients involve us in their dealings with software companies, typically we are asked to find answers to these questions, and more:
- Does it work?
- Does it have any serious limitations?
- Can it scale? Can it handle the load?
- Was it developed according to best practices?
- Was it developed by competent people?
- Is the source code safe?
- Is the source code theirs?
- What 3rd Party code and components are used? Is it safe?
What makes good Technical Due Diligence?
Technical Due Diligence is often high-value, high pressure and short timescale. Under these circumstances, the best way to find out what lurks within the shadows and cobwebs is to go direct to the best sources of information: the stakeholders and the developers.
Simply put, we need to ask the people who work there. Equally important is the strength of the relationship between the two organisations in question after the exercise is over. Worst case scenario is that everything was found to be good about the software, but in doing so the trust relationship is ruined.
A key differentiator of JFDI consultants is that we are… nice. Firm where necessary, but always personable, approachable, humble, honest. We take care how we ask questions. We realise when that when scrutinising a company’s products and architectures or wading through reams of code, we’re often treading through people’s life’s work. And we tread carefully.
We are also thorough. We approach each investigation with an open mind. The services or products of the company under investigation are obviously good enough to have caught the attention of the company looking to buy or use them.
A due diligence exercise, in all but the most complex of situations, often runs for a period of one to three weeks. In that time we use a mixture of techniques to understand the products and services under investigation, including key stakeholder interviews, feature walkthroughs, architecture reviews, code reviews, test reviews. Through years of experience we have built a corpus of questions that we filter according to each set of individual circumstances and unique clients. We build on this list with each new investigation. We have the collective experience to deviate from this list when an investigation takes us down an unforeseen path.
The Technical Due Diligence process usually ends with a report, which can be delivered with an accompanying presentation.
To speak to someone about our ITAS offerings, please get in touch with us via our contact page or call +44 (0)1273 358282.
