Engineering Performance Audit
Engineering costing more and shipping slower?
In 10 working days, find out where your engineering team is losing time and money, and exactly what to change in the next 90 days.
- Price
- £3,000
- Time
- 10 days
- Team
- 5–30 eng.
Fixed price + VAT. UK software companies.
Engineering score
Measured results · from inside engineering teams
21 → 3 days
Delivery cycle time
£432k → £240k
Annual AWS spend
~90%
Fewer serious production incidents
~100
Engineers hired
Who it's for
Engineering costs are rising faster than engineering output.
Founders, CTOs and COOs at UK software companies with 5–30 engineers, where engineering has become expensive, slow or hard to understand.
- 01Engineering headcount has grown, but output hasn't.
- 02Features consistently take longer than anyone expected.
- 03Cloud, SaaS and tooling spend keeps rising and nobody can say exactly why.
- 04Production incidents are becoming routine.
- 05You're about to hire more engineers and aren't sure you need them.
- 06You've rolled out AI coding tools and can't tell if anything improved.
What the audit measures
Not a code review. An audit of engineering as a business system.
Six channels, each scored from your real data and weighted into one Orber score out of 100.
Direction
Are engineers working on the right things? Strategy, prioritisation, ownership, work that never reaches customers.
Flow
How fast ideas become production software. Cycle time, deploy frequency, review time, work in progress, handoffs.
Quality & reliability
How much capacity you lose to poor quality. Incidents, change failure rate, recovery time, testing, observability.
Engineering economics
Where the money goes. Cloud, SaaS licences, observability, CI, AI tooling, contractors, with a £ figure against waste.
Team
Structure, roles, management spans, seniority mix, hiring, onboarding, performance and knowledge concentration.
Platform
The environment engineers work in. CI/CD, environments, developer experience, internal tooling, release safety.
How it works
10 working days. Start to finish.
Days 1–2
Kickoff & access
Leadership interview, business goals, read-only data access, baseline metrics.
Days 3–5
Analyse
Delivery data, costs and systems. Team interviews. Find the anomalies.
Days 6–9
Quantify & plan
Root causes, £ impact, scores across all six areas, prioritised 90-day plan.
Day 10
Playback
90-minute session with leadership. Agree what matters and what happens next.
What you get
Five deliverables. Numbers, not opinions.
- 01
Executive Scorecard
One page for the CEO and board: your Orber score out of 100, six area scores, top problems, top opportunities, estimated financial impact.
- 02
Engineering Performance Report
20–30 pages of evidence, metrics, findings, root causes and risks. Not a 100-page deck nobody reads.
- 03
Opportunity Register
Every improvement with evidence, effort, expected benefit, confidence, owner and priority, with a £ figure wherever possible.
- 04
90-Day Engineering Plan
Immediate, structural and longer-term changes, each with an owner and measurable success criteria.
- 05
Leadership Playback
A 90-minute walkthrough so the findings turn into decisions, not a PDF in a drawer.
| Opportunity | Effort | Benefit |
|---|---|---|
| Rightsize over-provisioned computeHigh | £42,000/yr | |
| Consolidate two observability toolsHigh | £18,500/yr | |
| Cap PR review wait at 24hMed | ~4 days cycle time | |
| Reclaim unused SaaS seatsHigh | £6,200/yr |
Pricing
One fixed price. No day rates.
You're buying a diagnosis, not hours. The scope is fixed up front, so the price is too.
Not included, so the scope stays tight:
- ×Writing or shipping code
- ×Cloud migrations
- ×Recruitment or line management
- ×Security or penetration testing
- ×Compliance certification
£3,000+ VAT
Introductory price. Standard price £4,500 + VAT.
- ✓10 working days
- ✓Up to 25 engineers
- ✓One engineering organisation
- ✓Up to five interviews
- ✓Read-only access to your tools
- ✓All five deliverables
Not sure yet? Take the free scorecard
After the audit, you own the plan. Implement it yourselves, or Orber can help you implement it.
Questions
- Is this a code review?
- No. It audits your engineering organisation as a business system: delivery, cost, quality, team and platform. Code is only looked at where it materially affects those.
- What access do you need?
- Read-only access to things like GitHub or GitLab, Jira or Linear, CI, your cloud bill and incident data, plus up to five 45-minute interviews.
- How much of our team's time does it take?
- About four hours in total: a kickoff, up to five 45-minute interviews and the 90-minute playback. Everything else runs from read-only access, so delivery doesn't stop.
- What happens after the audit?
- You own the plan. Implement it yourselves, or Orber can help you implement it. There's no obligation either way.
- We have more than 25 engineers.
- Book a call and we'll scope it. Larger organisations are priced individually.
Who you'll work with
Orber & Co is led by Orber Soares Bom Jesus: engineering leader, former developer, and someone who has run product and delivery.
Those three lenses are the audit. The track record comes from doing this job inside engineering organisations, not from advising them.
More about Orber →Next step
Find out where the time and money go.
Start with the free 3-minute scorecard, or book a 30-minute call to scope the audit.