“Do we need to redesign our platform?” is one of the most important questions no one wants to ask.
I can understand being quiet. Few people take the time to ask such important existential questions when they have so many other things to do. And when your development and product teams are already busy working through backlogs, sprints, and researching new features, you’re trying to muster up the inspiration and energy to rethink your organization’s core software infrastructure tools. Be a brave team leader or your CTO.
Perhaps you should. Because when your platform performs poorly, your team often performs poorly as well.
read the signs
Platforms in need of change make themselves known in rather inconvenient ways. While the specific situation will vary by company and platform, the following combination of factors indicates an underlying problem.
- Unable to release software as quickly as desired. Development is slow, and even when software is complete, it often gets stuck in the quality assurance stage.
- The software you use is do There is a problem with the release. It might be full of bugs, or it might not live up to your initial expectations. Either way, it’s a subpar release.
- Software development costs a lot of money. This may be due to the time it takes to develop, or it may be a result of the specialized skills required.
- I can’t find the developer I need. There’s no surer sign that something is wrong than having trouble finding people with the right skills to work on your platform.
- The platform cannot handle the amount of traffic it receives. The sheer volume of requests, whether from internal users or external customers, slows down platform outages.
- Unable to explain architecture to others. This is mainly due to interdependencies and not knowing what even simple changes mean elsewhere.
While these issues don’t guarantee that it’s time to consider re-engineering, they certainly portend problems beyond simple workflow issues.
delay the inevitable
Failure to heed warning signs can have dire consequences. A while back, an organization asked us to provide an assessment of their software development practices. But the more we learned about them, the more it became clear that the biggest issue facing the company was its overarching platform. Outdated and burdened, the organization’s key infrastructure was buckling at the knees.
Naturally, our conversation quickly turned away from labor practices and onto the topic of reengineering. Unfortunately, our recommendations were not adopted in this case. A year later, the company’s systems were no longer able to perform customer onboarding tasks, forcing it to shut down its entire sales function.new platform was It was introduced later, but much damage had already been done before that.
Now, hindsight is a powerful thing. While it’s easy to point to examples like the one above as evidence of why you should listen to consultants, it’s just as easy to look at things from the client’s perspective. Reengineering has a reputation for being complex and time-consuming, and it’s usually the last thing you want to think about when the platform you’re using is still working, even if it is. teeth It starts to squeak.
The problem is that its reputation is largely unwarranted. There is no doubt that reengineering requires a lot of conscious effort, but it is not as hard as it is perceived.At least that’s it I don’t It must be so. With the right approach, rebuilding a company’s core infrastructure can actually be a relatively painless experience and can be accomplished with little disruption to normal business.
A faster path to value
Let’s stop for a moment and think about what we’re really talking about here. Forget about words like reengineering and replatforming and focus on what you actually want to achieve: unlocking value faster. Whether it’s something as simple as being able to update the logo in the header of a web page or rolling out an entirely new offer to your customers, it’s all about creating value faster.
What this means is that you have to rewrite everything from scratch. Sometimes all it takes is a small change in the way the software is built. You might just want to run some tests around a particular bottleneck to figure out what’s going wrong. There may certainly be some degree of re-engineering, but it won’t necessarily mean re-engineering the entire platform.
To me, what’s really needed here is some self-reflection and the ability to figure out what’s right for the organization. Rather than worrying about whether the solution requires redesigning some of your core processes, you can look at what you have and ask yourself, “This isn’t working – why isn’t it?” It is important to do so.
The answer to this question is that, in most cases, what worked yesterday will not necessarily work tomorrow. Whether you move to a different market, add headcount, or experiment with a fundamentally different business model, the organization that built the original platform likely no longer exists. Instead, it is evolving to become something different, which requires a different approach to its architecture as well.
Although they may sound like problems, the problems outlined in the bulleted list above are actually just symptoms, superficial reflections of a larger underlying problem. As with any other type of illness, you may be able to ignore it at first. However, the longer the treatment, the greater the risk that underlying complications will begin to cause harm.
Simply put, there’s no way to know for sure when it’s time to redesign your platform. It’s just a collective indicator from across your business that suggests it might be the right time. And when it does, you can at least rest assured that it probably won’t take as long or as expensive as you think.
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