Culture Shift

Overview

Our client was planning and rolling out a large-scale digital transformation effort across the company to completely modernize and rearchitect most of the main systems as well as replacing/removing several systems in the process, migrating existing capabilities into new versions of tools, moving to commercial or open source technologies, or wholly sunsetting some capabilities that no longer provided significant value.

Objective

The primary goal was to put together an overall system architecture and roadmap for the migration to understand the desired end state, and then incrementally deliver value and migrate away from legacy capability in an iterative and incremental fashion using the strangler pattern; where as capabilities are modernized, old pathways are updated to point to the new modern systems in production until the legacy system eventually turns into a shell of low-value functionality that can be transferred over or deprecated, at which point the legacy system is finally sunsetted indefinitely.

Challenges

The organization was divided into many divisions that largely operated independently of one another. There was a C Suite that was globally responsible for direction, but each division had a large degree of ownership over existing systems and components supported by the engineering organization. This not only ballooned the number of stakeholders weighing in on the modernization effort, but created a constant flux of requirements where stakeholders were regularly meeting to discuss minutiae, often withdrawing their support for the effort until their concerns were addressed.

Solution

Often in these large scale efforts, trying to swallow the entire elephant at once can lead to situations of conflict or pushback. Once we had designed several views of the system architecture and put together a roadmap for executing the migration effort, we segmented the organization into different constituent parts where our aim was to completely cross the finish line with specific capability migrations within one organization at a time versus trying to make progress on the entire architecture at once. We brought in a UI/UX Designer to work with key stakeholders from the specific organization we were working with to document their concerns and requirements for the new system, creating high fidelity wireframe diagrams that stakeholders could interact with to give us direct feedback. Once we agreed on a path forward, we briefed these designs together to the high level leadership team to get their concurrence. Next, we performed rapid prototyping to quickly form the base capabilities of the new system that could be used as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that we pushed to production. From there, we used the strangler pattern to start pushing over legacy capability into the new modern system, enabling the division we were working with to provide regular feedback and iterate with us on the new capability from day one. We used some surge support to push these first MVP's over the finish line quickly to showcase how quickly success could be achieved and promote the buy-in from different organizations based on the ROI and efficiency gains they had received (along with some seriously sexy new interfaces and capabilities). This created FOMO within the larger organization and sparked interest from other organizations in accelerating the modernization efforts within other organizations, where we repeated these steps.