PEA works with the client organization in conducting independent third-party audits for projects where performance is a crucial factor. We have two flavors of audits tailored for two broad categories of organizations.

Validatory Audits: Sue Bushell has written an article about the importance of independent audits in an outsourcing context. This category of audits caters to organizations who have outsourced their business-critical IT system for which performance is an important factor, and are looking for a highly qualified and experienced firm to do an independent third-party audit of the project at the vendor's end. The objective of the audit is to elicit any risks in meeting the performance expectations, guarantees or SLAs.

Bootstrap Audits: This category of audits caters to IT organizations who have taken on the task of delivering a performance-intensive, business-critical IT system and are looking at de-risking the project from a performance perspective. With PEA's specialized expertise in the area, we can help you evaluate the risks in meeting the system's performance expectations or guarantees, and identify weak areas that need to be handled appropriately.

How We Work

Our independent audits begin at the beginning - by understanding the business and technology objectives of the engagement, and understanding the key stakeholders. The audit's underlying objective is to determine the extent to which scientific approaches are used to engineer a performant system. With this in mind, we do a sampled risk assessment of the project by studying, amongst other things, the following:

• Whether the right statistical approaches have been used to translate business requirements to a workload model.
• How proofs-of-concept are designed, executed and their results interpreted.
• How performance test cases are designed and executed and the results interpreted using the relevant mathematical models

The crucial nature of these engagements mandates a high degree of expertise in the area of PE. Every audit is conducted by a team that collectively brings in over two decades of IT experience. Many audits can deliver useful learnings in as little as 3 to 5 business days.

Last updated on October 24, 2008