IT Myths: We Don’t Need an External Review
The myth
“We don’t need anyone looking at our tech. We understand it better than anyone.” It sounds reasonable — who knows your environment more than the people who run it every day?
But familiarity can create blind spots. And those blind spots grow quietly until the wrong day… when everything depends on something nobody has checked for years.
The reality
Knowing a system is not the same as seeing it clearly. Teams live with inherited choices, assumptions and compromises that were “temporary” five years ago and are now mission-critical. When you work inside the same patterns every day, complexity becomes normal — and risk becomes invisible.
An external review isn’t about proving someone wrong. It’s about revealing what has become too familiar: dependencies nobody noticed, services stitched together by former staff, missing documentation, or processes that survive purely because one person “just knows how it works.”
Why outside eyes matter
- Objectivity: someone who isn’t emotionally attached to the system.
- Fresh patterns: external reviewers see dozens of environments — they recognise problems instantly.
- Risk surfacing: assumptions, shortcuts and “temporary hacks” become visible again.
- Simplification opportunities: things that feel essential internally are often unnecessary.
- Challenge and validation: confirming what’s solid and highlighting what’s fragile.
What typically shows up during a review
- Services running on outdated defaults nobody knew were still active.
- Complexity introduced to solve problems that no longer exist.
- Single points of failure quietly sitting behind “it’s always been fine.”
- Cloud components built by someone who left the company years ago.
- Manual processes that survived purely out of habit.
The fix
- Get a baseline. Document how things actually work — not how they were meant to work.
- Invite challenge. A review isn’t an audit; it’s a pressure test from someone without internal bias.
- Simplify first. Remove unused services, tighten access, delete the accidental complexity.
- Prioritise risks. Fix the issues with the biggest business impact, not the ones that feel interesting.
- Repeat annually. A yearly external review prevents small issues becoming major failures.
First steps this week
- Pick one system you “know well.” Write down every assumption behind it.
- Ask someone outside your team to validate those assumptions.
- Identify one dependency or configuration nobody has reviewed in 12+ months.
Bottom line
Teams don’t avoid external reviews because they don’t care — they avoid them because they’re close to the work. But clarity comes through perspective. And perspective comes from someone who isn’t looking through years of familiarity.
If you want to talk more, I can help. Let’s have a chat.