My recent stint back into the agency world has brought back a lot of the memories and pains that made me leave it.  A lot of the times, technology is treated as the bastard red-headed step child in agency world.  Creative usually takes the front seat while technology is in the back seat acting as the back seat driver.  In the creative process, technology usually isn’t even involved unless it’s to act as a wet blanket (sorry, doing an interactive virtual world isn’t possible in 2 wks).  The worst is probably that client-approved-timelines are usually just thrown at you without your consultation.  “Hey this needs to get done in 2 wks.  Go for it”.

Obviously alot of this can’t be fixed in a short period of time, but as the Tech person you can usually try to mitigate the bag of turd that will ultimately be left in your hands by starting to ask ALOT of questions before you’re handed the bag.  So introducing my  Technology Discovery Checklist:
Environments – Dev, QA, Staging
- Hosting – Is this on-platform or off?
- Operating system – Version of Operating Systems (Service Packs/Libraries)
- Load Balancer Configuration – Round Robin/Availability/Sticky
- Database – Type/Version
- Application Server – Framework (.NET/JBOSS), Languages (C#/JAVA)
- Source Code Repository – Type/Access
- Content Delivery Networks – Who provides it? What services do they provide? How is it executed?
- HTTPS – Do we have access?  Is there something special we need to do? What is required to get a SSL cert?

Deployment
- Security Review/Audit – Who does it?  How long does it take?
- Code Review – How long does it take? Where/What time zone is it done in? Who is responsible for what?
- Load Testing – Who does it? What do they need to test?
- Deployment Effort – How long does it take? Where/What time zone is it done in? Who is responsible for what?

Data
- Consumer Information – What do we need to do to store it? Is encryption required?
- Media – Where are videos/images/etc stored? Is there a third party involved? Contact Information.
- Metrics – Who is the provider? Contact Information