← All work
Independent assessment of another vendor's proposal
An independent architecture review of another vendor’s proposal, written from the customer’s side of the table, turned around in a day against the vendor’s deadline.
The challenge
Signing off the build phase under time pressure.
The customer was under time pressure from a vendor to approve the start of the implementation phase of an AI education platform, and needed a technical second opinion on whether it was safe to sign.
Our approach
First what is good about the proposal, then the blind spots.
We produced an architecture validation written from the customer’s side of the table. First what is good about the proposal: a separately priced analytical pre-phase, a thin vertical slice for phase one, audit logging designed in from the start, an API-first domain decomposition and roles authorised from day one. Then the blind spots.
✓ Multi-tenancy not addressed at all, which could mean rewriting the data layer in phase two
✓ No model of subject mastery, so what is actually being built is undefined
✓ Nine questions that must be answered before phase one is approved
✓ A recommendation to approve the analytical pre-phase, not the build