Medecins Sans Frontieres - the internationally renowned humanitarian organisation known as Doctors Without Borders - engaged me through Toptal to provide independent technical due diligence on a proposed modernisation project. Their existing development agency had submitted a proposal to modernise the organisation's .NET Framework and jQuery PWA codebase, and leadership needed an unbiased technical perspective before committing significant budget.

I deliberately requested that the agency's proposal be withheld until I had completed my own independent analysis. This ensured my assessment wasn't influenced by their framing or estimates. Over two to three weeks, I conducted a comprehensive code review and architectural assessment of the existing system.

What I found was concerning. The entire codebase existed within a single C# project file - no separation of concerns, no modular architecture. The agency's "core library," which they claimed to maintain across all their clients at no additional cost, was demonstrably outdated with unsupported dependencies and security vulnerabilities. This contradicted their claims of continuous improvement. I estimated that approximately 60% of the proposed modernisation effort was addressing technical debt that should have been the agency's responsibility to maintain - effectively, MSF was being asked to pay for the agency's failure to keep their shared components current.

My deliverables included an executive report covering the current state assessment, dependency security risks, database performance observations, and a detailed risk analysis. I also produced a business use case document with SWOT analysis, a risk register, and my own high-level migration estimate. My recommendation was to proceed with modernisation as a phased re-architecture project: stabilise the current system first, then build a new modular backend on .NET 8 with a Vue.js PWA frontend, migrating features incrementally while running systems in parallel.

The feedback was extremely positive. Leadership valued having an independent technical voice that could challenge vendor assumptions and translate technical complexity into business terms. They've requested a follow-up engagement to review the modernisation once it's underway - expected in 2026.