The technology workstream in a 100-day plan

The technology workstream in a 100-day plan is where a fund decides what the portfolio company's software has to become, who will make it so, and how the board will know. It converts the diligence report into work, closes the risks that can end the investment early, and captures the measures that every later quarter is compared against.

That is the whole job. The rest of this page is the sequence, the evidence for why it is usually done late, and the mistakes that make it fail.

Why does technology usually enter the 100-day plan late?

Technology enters the plan late because most funds review it before signing and decide it after. BCG's survey of 100 senior private equity investors, published on 7 January 2026, found that 73 percent of firms run digital due diligence on most deals, while only 22 percent said a company's digital readiness influences go or no-go decisions. Nearly 30 percent integrate digital levers into the diligence phase, and a further 57 percent say digital levers are core to value creation planning.

Those numbers describe a pattern: the technology is examined, the deal proceeds regardless, and the technology work is expected to create value afterwards. That expectation lands in the 100-day plan, and it lands on a company that BCG's respondents describe as mid-table. Just 15 percent of portfolio companies claimed the top IT maturity rating in the survey, and nearly 75 percent reported "moderate maturity".

The 100-day format itself is established. A 2014 survey of 120 private equity professionals by The Deal and Pepper Hamilton LLP found 47.5 percent using a 100-day program to plan operational improvements, against 16.8 percent using a three-to-five-year plan. The technology section of that program is what this page fills in.

Reveneau builds the technology workstream from the diligence report as a fixed-scope engagement, with an evaluation suite written from each finding before any code is changed, because a 100-day plan only holds if every item on it can be shown done; the method below works the same whoever runs it. The pillar guide to technology after the deal sets out the four phases this workstream opens.

What are the three blocks of the technology workstream?

The workstream runs in three blocks of one month each. Each block has a question it answers and an output the operating partner can check.

Block	Days	Question it answers	Output
Stabilise	1 to 30	What could lose us this company in the next year?	Every finding converted to a task; access, backups, key-person risk and licence exposure closed or dated
Decide	31 to 60	What architecture, team and leadership does the investment case need?	Integration or separation decision recorded; engineering leadership model chosen; hiring or partner plan agreed
Baseline	61 to 100	What will the board compare every later quarter against?	Four delivery measures captured; technical debt scored; first quarterly report drafted

The blocks overlap in practice. A key-person risk found on day 3 may need a leadership decision that belongs to block two. The order is about priority: nothing in block two matters if the company loses its production database in block one.

What happens in the first 30 days?

The first 30 days convert the diligence report into a backlog and close the risks that can end the investment. The input is the report, and the diligence guide's page on report structure and template describes what a usable one contains. The output is a list in which every finding has become a task with an owner, a date, a cost and a measure of done.

The conversion is a numbered process:

1. List every finding from the report, including the ones marked low severity. A low-severity finding in diligence becomes a high-severity incident when the company is growing at the rate the investment case needs.
2. Sort by what can lose the company. Access control (who can reach production and with what credentials), backup and restore (with a restore that has been run), single points of failure in people, and any open-source licence exposure the report flagged come first. Everything else follows.
3. Assign an owner by name, a date, and a way to show it is done. "Improve security" is a wish. "Rotate every production credential and enable two-factor authentication on every administrative account by day 21, verified by the access log" is a task.
4. Estimate cost in engineer-weeks, so the operating partner can see the total against the budget in the value creation plan.
5. Take the list to the first board meeting as the technology section of the 100-day plan, and report against it from then on.

Turning the diligence report into the first-year plan walks through the conversion with an example of each finding type.

What decisions belong in days 31 to 60?

Days 31 to 60 take the decisions that shape the rest of the hold, and there are three of them.

The architecture decision. If the investment case includes add-on acquisitions, the fund needs an integration architecture before the first add-on closes, since each add-on integrated without one adds a separate product under the same logo. Buy and build: consolidating acquired software platforms is the page for that. If the deal was a carve-out, the same window is where the separation plan and the transition services agreement end dates have to be mapped against each shared system.

The leadership decision. The company either has an engineering leader the fund trusts, or it needs one. The options are an interim executive, a fractional one, a permanent hire, or a build partner that takes responsibility for delivery. Interim, fractional, or as-a-service CTO compares them without a preferred answer.

The capacity decision. The value creation plan will ask for features, integrations and often an AI capability. The team that exists may or may not be able to deliver them. The question in this block is whether to hire, to add a partner, or to change the way the existing team works. Adding people to a late project makes it later, as Fred Brooks wrote in 1975, and the scaling engineering teams guide covers when hiring helps.

BCG's survey gives a reason to decide these early. An overwhelming 90 percent of respondents cited competing priorities as the top blocker to digital transformation, and 76 percent pointed to unclear return on investment. A decision that is not taken in block two is a decision that competes with everything else for the rest of the hold.

What does the baseline in days 61 to 100 consist of?

The baseline is the set of numbers the board will compare every later quarter against, captured before any of the planned work has changed them.

Four delivery measures come from DORA, the DevOps Research and Assessment programme: change lead time (commit to production), deployment frequency, change fail rate (the share of deployments that need immediate intervention), and failed deployment recovery time. They are described in reporting engineering progress to the fund, and the point of capturing them in the first 100 days is that a measure with no baseline shows no trend.

The technical debt score is the second baseline. A method that produces one comparable number per company is described in technical debt across a portfolio. Capturing it once at day 100 gives the fund something to show at exit: the score then and the score now.

The first quarterly engineering report is the third output. Drafting it inside the 100 days, against the backlog from block one and the decisions from block two, means the second board meeting receives a report in the format every later one will use.

Where do 100-day technology plans go wrong?

They go wrong in the same four places, and BCG's survey measures three of them.

Measurement without linkage. BCG found that 82 percent of firms track return on investment from digital initiatives and 72 percent track cost savings, while only 11 percent explicitly link digital progress to exit narratives and 40 percent use formal digital-maturity scores. A workstream that tracks spend without a score that survives to the exit is invisible when it matters.

Outsourcing without transfer. Among the firms BCG classed as successful, 70 percent tap specialised digital boutiques and 59 percent engage strategy firms for transformation planning, but only 45 percent systematically ensure knowledge transfer from external partners to internal teams. Whoever does the work in the 100 days, the company's own team has to be able to run the result, and the plan should say how.

Valuation surprises. In the same survey, 40 percent of investors said they had experienced a valuation haircut of 5 percent or more from digital or technology issues, while only 8 percent reported no impact on valuation. The stabilise block exists to find those issues in the first month rather than at the next financing.

AI as a slide. More than 90 percent of investment professionals in BCG's survey plan to expand portfolio-level digital budgets over the next three years. That budget arrives at the portfolio company as an expectation, and the workstream has to turn it into engineering work with a measure. AI adoption in portfolio companies sets the surveys side by side.

What should the operating partner check at day 100?

At day 100 the operating partner should be able to answer five questions with a document, and each one is a yes or a no:

• Is every diligence finding a task with an owner, a date, a cost and a measure of done?
• Are access control, backup and restore, key-person risk and licence exposure closed or dated?
• Is the integration or separation architecture decision recorded in writing?
• Is the engineering leadership model chosen, with a review date?
• Are the four delivery measures and the technical debt score captured as a baseline?

Five yes answers mean the workstream has done its job. Any no is the first technology item at the next board meeting. If you want the workstream built and run rather than described, building with investors and their portfolio companies sets out how we take it on.