Our consultant led a ten-day discovery phase. This included several in-person and virtual deep-dive sessions with stakeholders and the in-house development team to understand business requirements (short, medium and long term), products, constraints (e.g. cost, in-house skills), pain points and concerns. Collaborative sessions allowed us to showcase practical application of tools and technology, improving Intuitive’s understanding and knowledge.

When developing our recommendations, we considered:

• Options that would best support Intuitive’s medium- and longer-term plans and deliver the most value
• ‘Quick win’ actions that would be easy to implement in-house, delivering benefits fast
• Alternative solutions and architecture providing cost savings, stability improvements and process efficiencies

On completion of the discovery, we provided Intuitive with a 40-page report, which included:

• A clear overview of their high-level structure and analysis of the current cloud architecture, including architecture diagrams
• Options to improve their architecture, optimise the DevOps process, and save costs. Recommendations included moving to a cloud-native database (SQL server) and switching from Kubernetes to a less-managed and less-costly system, e.g. Azure App Service.
• A clear action plan with timelines and key steps, including what could be completed by the in-house team and what needed to be outsourced.

Our consultant ran a wrap-up session to run through the report, answer questions and gather feedback.