Insights / Ownership

Own your solution: what you should hold on day one

Why ownership comes first

Most owners assume they own what they paid for. Often they don't. The development environment sits in the partner's tenant, the configuration lives in the partner's repository, and the licenses were bought through the partner's account. Nobody planned it that way. It's just how the project started.

It becomes a problem the day you want to change direction. Small and mid-size companies regularly discover, years into a relationship, that they can't export their data in a usable form or don't hold the source code they funded, which leaves them with little leverage on price or service.^[1]

Lock-in also compounds. In McKinsey's research, CIOs estimated technical debt at 20 to 40 percent of the value of their entire technology estate, and companies pay an extra 10 to 20 percent on top of project costs to deal with it.^[2] Undocumented changes that only one outside team understands are one of the fastest ways to build that debt.

The six things to hold

• Your Microsoft tenant. Production, test and development environments all live in your company's cloud account, not the partner's.
• Admin accounts. A person at your company holds the top-level admin role. Partners get their own named accounts with only the rights they need.
• The source repository. Every configuration change, script and integration is committed to a repository your company owns.
• Keys and secrets. Passwords and connection keys for integrations live in your own Azure Key Vault, not in a partner's password manager.
• Licenses. Subscriptions are billed to your company, so you can change partners without re-buying anything.
• Documentation. A plain-language description of what was built and why, updated every sprint rather than promised at the end.

What a good partner does without being asked

Works in your tenant from the first day. Commits changes to your repository and shows you where they are. Builds with standard platform features that other teams know, instead of proprietary shortcuts. Hands over the admin role and documents as they go. A partner confident in their work doesn't need to hold your keys to keep you.

Five questions to ask your current partner

1. In whose tenant is our production system?
2. Who holds the top-level admin role today?
3. Where is the repository, and do we have access to it right now?
4. Where are the integration passwords stored?
5. If we moved to another team next month, what would they receive?

If the answers are vague, it's worth fixing now, while the relationship is good. It's much harder when it isn't.

How we handle it

At Meghoo, everything is built in your tenant and committed to your repository from the first day of pre-discovery. Every step has a fixed price and a defined end, and you keep everything it produced if you stop.