58 repositories.
One roadmap.
Real change control.
A growing services company's technology had piled up piece by piece for years, with no single document that said where any of it was going. Here is how it all came under one plan, one standard, and real oversight, in plain terms.
An estate grown by accretion
The technology worked, but it had piled up rather than been designed: 58 separate code repositories, eight cloud accounts, hundreds of cloud services, and roughly 27 different places where work was being tracked. Each was the product of a reasonable decision at the time. What did not exist was a single document that said where any of it was going, a shared standard for how software got built, or a formal way to decide on changes and keep a record of them.
The mandate: turn the pile into a portfolio: one roadmap, one standard, and a way of approving changes the whole company could see and trust.
From accretion to a governed portfolio, in weeks
- Every technology decision now traces to one document: I authored a strategic technology roadmap built on an AI-assisted review of all 58 code repositories and five of the eight cloud accounts, grounded in what the systems actually do, not what anyone remembered them doing.
- Every engineer now builds to the same rules: four engineering standards ratified, covering how developers work, which technologies the company uses, how AI is used responsibly, and how the cloud is set up. Quality no longer depends on who wrote the code.
- Every significant change now gets a decision on the record: a full decision-making structure built in weeks. It pairs a project office with a five-member steering council and formal voting thresholds, a change-review board built on industry best practice and sized to the risk of each change, and a modernized acceptable-use policy. All of it is kept with a complete history of every revision, so the official current version is never in doubt.
- Work is now visible in one place instead of 27: the way work gets tracked was modernized, with ~883 work items moved and consolidated in the flagship project and an approved plan to roll the same system out across the rest of the portfolio.
- Delivery now runs itself: tickets move forward automatically as the related work progresses, and AI reviews every code change before a person does, so reviewers spend their attention where it matters.
- Who-can-access-what is now boring, which is the goal: one master record of people and access, a move to a new HR platform done entirely by software with every e-signed document intact, one login for everything, automatic guards that catch passwords and keys before they land in the code, and live monitoring that flags errors the moment they happen.
- Signing now runs on the company's own systems instead of paying per envelope: a company-run e-signature platform (built on open-source software, carrying the company's own brand, tied into the same single login as everything else) serves as the company's signing system at ~250,000 requests a month, replacing a paid per-envelope vendor.
The discipline is the point: rules that live in documents nobody reads are theater. These live where the work happens: every vote on the record, every revision preserved, and every change checked against the standard automatically.
In plain terms
Per-envelope fees, gone
The company-run e-signature platform handles ~250k requests a month on the company's own systems: no vendor charging by the signature, and the capability is owned outright.
Delivery on rails
Tickets move forward on their own as work progresses, and AI reviews every code change before a person does. The result: less coordination overhead, faster cycles, and reviewers focused on judgment calls.
One roadmap, one view
Roughly 27 separate tracking systems collapse into one, and every application answers to one published roadmap. Leadership can see where the technology is going, because it's written down.
Identity made boring
One master record of people and access, one login everywhere, automatic guards that keep passwords and keys out of the code, and live error monitoring: protection built in, not bolted on.
A standard that scales
Four ratified engineering standards mean the ninth application gets built the same way as the first eight. New products and new teams start from written rules, not tribal knowledge.
Decisions that outlive people
Steering-council votes, change-board records, and standards are all written down with a full history of every revision. The reasoning behind every significant change survives any single person leaving, including me.
This client, like every client here, is not named: confidentiality is part of what they pay for. Every figure comes from the engagement's own records, and a reference who'll take your call is available on request.