Technology DD Plus 90-Day Plan

Take this tier when you are buying control and will own the technology outcome.

That means buyouts, majority positions, platform acquisitions where a buy-and-build follows, and carve-outs where the target has to stand up its own technology function. Private equity buyers take this more often than venture investors, for the straightforward reason that a control investor has to act on the findings and a minority investor usually cannot.

It is also the right tier where the technology is the value creation lever rather than a risk to be managed. If the thesis depends on the platform doing something it does not currently do, the plan for getting there is worth more than the assessment of where it is now.

If you are still screening, start with the Red Flag Review. If you need the assessment but will not be driving the outcome, the Standard Technology DD is the right tier at £22,000.

90 Day Plan

• A sequenced action plan for the first ninety days. Ordered by a combination of value and risk rather than by ease. What has to happen in the first fortnight, what follows, and what can wait until the second quarter. Each action has an owner type, a duration, and a cost.

• The technology budget for the first quarter. What the plan costs, split between people, remediation, infrastructure and licensing, with the items that are genuinely optional marked as such.

• The hiring and leadership plan. Which roles need to be in post, in what order, and at what seniority. Where the existing team can step up and where it cannot. Whether interim or fractional leadership is needed to bridge, and for how long. This is frequently the part that determines whether the rest of the plan is achievable.

• The decisions you need to make in the first thirty days. Usually four to six genuine forks: rebuild or extend, retain or replace a key supplier, keep or move a platform, back the incumbent technology leader or replace them. Each with the case on both sides and our recommendation.

• Mapping to your value creation plan. The technology plan is written against your investment thesis, not in isolation. Where a technology action unlocks a specific commercial outcome in your model, we say so explicitly, so the plan can be defended in a board pack.

• A working session with the deal team and, where you want it, incoming management. Usually half a day. This is where the plan stops being a document and starts being something people have agreed to.

How it runs

Weeks one to three: the assessment. As per the Standard DD. Scoping and access, then documentation, architecture and security review, structured sessions with the target's technology leadership, then analysis.

Week three to four: the plan. Once findings are settled, we sequence them. This is the part that needs the assessment to be finished, because a plan built on provisional findings gets rebuilt. We work with your deal team on the thesis and the value creation model so the sequencing reflects what you are actually trying to achieve.

Delivery. Report, plan, debrief, and the working session.

Three to four weeks assumes the plan follows the assessment. Where a completion date is tight, we can run the planning work concurrently with the later stages of assessment and compress to two to three weeks, at some cost to how settled the findings are when sequencing begins. We will tell you honestly which is better for your situation.

Who it is for

• Private equity firms taking control positions, where the first ninety days set the tone for the hold period.

• Buy-and-build platforms where the acquired technology has to become the foundation for what follows.

• Corporate acquirers integrating a target into an existing estate.

• Carve-out buyers where the target has to stand up its own technology function from a standing start.

What it does not cover

This is a plan, not the execution of it. We hand you a sequenced, costed, owned set of actions. Somebody then has to do them.

If you want the same people to carry the plan out, the CTOs and CISOs who wrote it can step in afterwards as fractional technology leadership, which is often the cleanest route because the context transfers with them. That is a separate engagement, priced separately, with no obligation attached to this one.

It also does not cover commercial, financial or legal integration planning. Our scope is technology. Where a technology action depends on a commercial or legal decision, we flag the dependency rather than resolving it.