Service 04
Quarterly Technology Review
Most businesses have nobody whose job is deciding about technology, so decisions get made when something breaks — the worst possible moment.
What we review
- What is being paid for
- Every subscription and licence, with annual cost and whether anyone still uses it. This section often pays for the engagement.
- What is actually used
- Tools bought for a reason that no longer applies, and seats assigned to people who left.
- Where hours still go
- Manual work that crept back or was never automated, ranked by hours per month.
- What is fragile
- Single points of failure: the process one person understands, the integration held together by a manual export.
- Access hygiene
- Who can reach what, which credentials are shared, what happens when someone leaves.
- What to build next
- A ranked list with rough costs and expected hours returned.
Why we do this
A fifteen-person company has someone accountable for money, someone accountable for people, and nobody accountable for the systems everything runs on.
So software accumulates. A tool bought for a project that ended two years ago still renews. An integration breaks and is replaced by someone doing a manual export every Monday, which becomes permanent because it works. One employee becomes the only person who understands a process, and nobody notices until they resign.
None of that is a crisis on any given day, which is exactly why it never gets addressed.
FAQ
Common questions
Is this a sales meeting?
No, and the written output is what keeps it honest. Recommending that software be cancelled, or that something not be built, is a normal result. A review that always concluded "buy more" would be worthless.
What is delivered?
A written document each quarter: findings, a ranked roadmap, and what changed since last time. It is yours, and useful to any engineer — including one who is not Cox & Co.
How does it run?
The analysis is done and the document sent ahead of time, then an hour is spent on it. Sending it first means the hour goes on decisions rather than on reading slides aloud.
What if nothing is wrong?
Then the review says so, and that is worth knowing. In practice the subscription audit alone almost always finds something, because nobody has looked in a year.