Technology & Product Leadership for regulated industries

Decide from the business down.

Five layers. Seven habits. One Decision Review.

Stop carrying today’s workarounds into tomorrow’s platform, and agree what the system must do before anyone chooses a vendor.

See the Decision Review Book an introductory call

Why decisions go wrong

Delivered isn’t the same as transformed.

Programmes with similar budgets, similar technology and competent delivery still end in very different places. The difference is usually settled before delivery starts, in three places.

01
Habits become requirements
Workarounds, extra approvals and reports nobody reads get packed up and carried across. Once they’re written down as requirements, people defend them instead of asking what they’re for.
In the Review: layer 1 tests every inherited process for value first
02
Agreed principles, different meanings
“Standard first” or “keep the core clean” sounds settled in the boardroom. On the ground it can mean “what we keep”. The gap only shows in design, when it’s expensive.
In the Review: principles defined in plain terms and signed off at Gate 1
03
Value is an allocation choice
Every programme decides where time, skills, leadership attention and money go. Those choices shape the value far more than the delivery plan does, yet they’re rarely made explicitly.
In the Review: costs, risks and deferrals made visible in the decision record

The operating principle

Decision Layers

Five layers, from the business down. Problems surface at the bottom, in outages and failed audits. They start at the top, with a need nobody pinned down. So every decision is worked from layer one downwards, never the other way round.

1
Business capabilities
Technology & Product

What must the service do, and what should get better?

Map capabilities, not features. Like-for-like is a trap: replicate the needs, not the old customisations and workarounds.

In the Review: the capability map, signed off at Gate 1
2
Data
Governance, Risk & Compliance

Who owns which data, and is it clean enough to move?

Name data owners, set a single point of entry, and cleanse before migration. Data is the biggest migration risk and the no-regrets work.

In the Review: the data ownership and risk register
3
Integration
Delivery & Transformation

What connects to it today?

Inventory every interface. Put stable APIs in front so consumers don’t break during the swap, and decide the future of existing middleware explicitly.

In the Review: the interface inventory and middleware decision
4
Application and technology
Technology & Product

What are we choosing, and how?

Agree selection criteria up front: fit, five-year cost, group and platform standards, cloud fit, supportability and exit options.

In the Review: the options appraisal, with criteria frozen at Gate 2
5
Operations and support
Delivery & Transformation

Will it be more reliable than what it replaces?

Find the root causes of today’s major incidents. Causes in integration, data or change control travel to the new platform unless they’re fixed.

In the Review: the incident root-cause view

The How.

The habits applied within every layer: how options get weighed, decisions get made, and what gets deferred. Each one shows up somewhere concrete in the Decision Review.

Evaluating options

“If we can’t say what would change our mind, we haven’t evaluated it.”

Criteria first. At least three options, always compared against doing nothing.

In the Review: Gate 2, criteria frozen before any option is scored
Making architecture decisions

“Most decisions should be made by the principles, not by me.”

Principles answer most questions by default, so only exceptions need a forum. Decisions are recorded, and the process matches how reversible the decision is.

In the Review: the decision record
Risk, cost and commercial benefit

“A cheap option that risks revenue isn’t cheap.”

All three in one view. Ranges, not single numbers. Cost of delay included, and a named owner for each risk.

In the Review: five-year cost ranges and named risk owners
Strategic prioritisation

“If everything is priority one, nothing is.”

Every item tied to a business goal, weighed on value, cost of delay, effort and risk. Honest about capacity, with work in progress kept limited.

In the Review: must-haves separated from should-get-betters
What to defer, and why

“Deferring is a decision, not neglect.”

Defer when it’s reversible, the cost of delay is low, it depends on an unresolved decision, or waiting lets you learn cheaply. Never defer security, compliance or basic data quality. Every deferral gets a revisit date.

In the Review: the deferral log, with revisit dates
Best practice versus business need

“I’ll bend a standard for the business, but never by accident.”

Best practice is the default, not a rule. Departures are deliberate, with a recorded reason, an owner and a way back, and tracked as technical debt.

In the Review: recorded departures, each with a way back
Working with partners

“A sound integration with a poor contract behind it still fails.”

Technical alignment to the roadmap and commercial accountability after signature are managed together, not by separate teams.

In the Review: Procurement and Finance in the RACI, with exit terms in the criteria

Put the How to work

The Decision Review

Six weeks to take one core system decision through all five layers. Roles are agreed on both sides from day one, and every decision is signed off by a named person in your organisation.

Gate 1Week 2
Capability map signed off
Gate 2Week 4
Criteria frozen before any option is scored
Gate 3Week 6
Decision made and recorded

See how the Decision Review works

Beyond the Review

Three services, one operating principle.

Each can follow a Decision Review into delivery, or be engaged on its own.

Technology & architecture