What Is A Technical Audit (And Why Does My Company Need One?)

Companies that are scaling quickly face a nice problem. Business is growing, orders are flowing, teams are expanding, and opportunities are everywhere. But as you level up, your technical execution needs to level up as well. In all the commotion, it’s tough to choose the right scalable technical solutions for long-term (or even short-term) growth. 

In short, can your website and backend services handle what’s coming? What systems do you need to update in order to ensure both a seamless customer journey AND an efficient CRM? What can you afford, and what’s a must-have? What’s your current platform’s viability as a long-term scalable solution? 

Informed choices: they’ll make you money and save you heartache. That’s why organizations moving at light speed need an objective audit of their technology stack.

What happens in an audit, exactly?

What do you get when Small Planet does an in-depth audit of roles, systems, integrations, and processes? Overall, we…

• Create a concise overview of the technologies at work and the architecture of your systems 
• Develop a runbook of critical documentation for development teams and stakeholders
• Flag critical security and availability concerns in your existing architecture
• Understand your future business vision and catalog areas for optimization and improvement
• Identify improvements that can be addressed immediately
• Plan for future scalability

How do we start?

First, we dive into the existing frontend design, customer journeys, and overall experience. We review internal resources and external vendors, then chart the flow of approvals, code deployment, report generation, and product updates.

• Security Assessment
• User Journey Mapping
• Platforms Evaluation
• Architecture + Integrations 
• High Availability Architecture and Disaster Recovery Plan
• Performance Investigation
• Analytics
• Basic-level SEO analysis  

What answers can an audit provide?

Every company is different, of course, and recommendations for even the smallest changes could have a huge impact. For instance:

• Adding out-of-the-box monitoring solutions to your site means you can flag issues early
• Adding HTML structured data and incorporating open graph data to standardize metadata can get you richer and higher-ranked search results
• Addressing high-priority security concerns will save you a tremendous amount of risk and admin hassle when dealing with malicious sites and users

But larger questions, and answers, come into view more easily during a technical audit. For instance, if you’re a retailer and you’re not on a headless SaaS eCommerce platform, should you be? Is your CRM ready for the next two years of growth? Are your analytics telling you what we need to know?  Are your admin tools optimized to make your staff effective and efficient?

How long does it take, who does it, and what does it cost?

We can typically complete a technical audit in 4-6 weeks, but it really depends on the size and complexity of the organization. It’s not the kind of information you want to sit on, so we stay on schedule and keep it concise.

Audits are typically led by a technical director and supported by a senior engineer, and often involve a project manager and senior UX researcher. Costs can vary, but it isn’t uncommon for audits to price out in the $40K-$60K range.

Then what happens?

You can take the audit findings and build your own team to implement changes, hire another development agency to do the work, or ask Small Planet to propose a design and development project plan. That plan will incorporate key findings from the audit, as well as feature priorities that have been defined by the product team and business.

Want to learn more about how tech audits work? Contact us.

     

Small Planet

Small Planet creates award-winning mobile and web products. We provide full UX design, development, QA, team support, and product management services. Follow us @smallplanetapps.