This morning I’ve been looking at the release schedule for a major project launching next year. Chances are that you will be affected by it somehow. No names disclosed though. It’s a replacement for an existing capability and will use an off the shelf, quasi-cloud product (that is, software that is already in use by others and so can, in theory, be configured but that, in practice, will need some development to make it do what is really needed).

The top level project plan looks like this

Spring 2019 Discovery
Summer 2019 Design and Build
Spring 2020 Testing
Summer 2020 Go-live
Spring 2021 Transition completed
Thereafter Continuous improvement

Plainly the team want to be agile. They want to iterate, adding features and capabilities and seeing how they land before improving them – going round the discovery / alpha / beta / live process repeatedly. But, at the same time, they have a major existing system to replace and they can’t replace just part of that.

They also, I suspect, know that it’s going to be harder than everyone expects, which is why they’re sticking to those nebulous seasonal timeframes rather than talking about particular months, let alone actual dates. Ever since I first joined the Inland Revenue and heard a team saying that they “hoped to be up to speed by the Autumn” I’ve laughed whenever seasons are mentioned in the context of delivery. It’s as if there are special watches issued with 4 zones marked on them – one for each season.

What do you do when meshing the need to replace an existing widely used system that is no longer doing what it needs to do and that needs radical upgrades, with a new capability that can’t be introduced a bit at a time. This is not a start up launching a new product into the market. They’re not Monzo who were able to start with a pre-paid debit card before moving into current accounts, credit cards etc.

These kinds of projects present the real challenge in government, and in any large organisation:

How do you replace your ageing systems with new ones whilst not losing (too much) capability, keeping everyone happy and not making an enormous mistake?

At the same time, how do you build a big system with lots of capability without it going massively over-budget and falling months or years behind plan?

There are some options to consider:

  • Is a NewCo viable? Can a new capability be set up in parallel with the old, and customers, users or businesses migrated to that new capability, recognising that it doesn’t do everything. This is ideal MVP territory – how much do we need to have to satisfy a given group of customers?Ideally have less complicated needs than the full set of customers, and we can shore up the NewCo with some manual or semi-automated processes, or even by reaching into the old system
  • Can we connect old and new together and gradually take components away from the old system, building them in the new world? This might particularly work where a new front end can be built that presents data far more clearly and adds in data from other sources. It might require some re-engineering of the old system which perhaps isn’t used to presenting data via APIs and has never been described as loosely coupled.
  • Is there standalone capability that will make for a better experience, perhaps using data from the old system (which can be extracted in lots of different ways from cumbersome through to smooth), with that new capability gradually expanded?

None are easy, of course, but they are all likely better than a big bang or the risk of a lengthy project that just gets longer and more expensive – especially as scope increases with time (people who have time to think about what they want will think of more things, and industry will evolve around them giving them more things to think about).

Original source – In The Eye Of The Storm

Comments closed