How to Replace Legacy Software With a New Product?
The process to replace a legacy software product with a new one is a significant undertaking that requires a well-structured approach and a clear understanding of the underlying reasons for the change. This article explores the strategic considerations and practical steps involved in making such a transition, from identifying the need for replacement to implementing the new system effectively. By exploring various aspects of the replacement process, including technological obsolescence, maintenance challenges, and adapting to market shifts, it aims to provide a guide to navigating this complex process.
Understanding the "Why" Before You Replace a Legacy Software Product
When contemplating the idea to replace a legacy software product with a more modern solution, it is imperative to precisely articulate the rationale behind such a decision. This clarity ensures that the considerable investment in terms of both effort and resources yields the intended benefits and aligns with the strategic objectives of the organization.
Although not an exhaustive list, the examples below are possible reasons for considering the replacement of a legacy software product with a new one.
Addressing Obsolete Technology
One primary motivator for transitioning away from legacy systems is the obsolescence of the underlying technology. Initially, these systems might have represented the cutting-edge of technology, but over time, they become outdated. This obsolescence manifests in several ways: diminished support from the community or vendors, a scarcity of developers proficient in the older technologies, or the complete deprecation of the technology stack. In some cases, it’s a combination of these factors.
Resolving Maintenance Challenges
Another critical concern with legacy systems is the complexity and fragility of their codebases. Often developed under tight deadlines with an emphasis on rapid delivery, these systems become cumbersome and unwieldy as the organization evolves. This complexity can significantly impede the onboarding of new developers and burden experienced engineers with maintenance challenges. The architecture’s brittleness complicates the introduction of new features or improvements, leading to prolonged development cycles. Such inefficiencies can frustrate stakeholders and negatively impact the company’s ability to respond to market demands, potentially jeopardizing its competitive edge.
Adapting to Market Shifts
In some instances, the need to replace legacy software product arises from a strategic pivot in response to market evolution. This could entail targeting a different market segment, serving a new customer persona, or even venturing into a different industry.
Measuring Success
Regardless of the motivations to replace a legacy system, it is important to define what success looks like. This involves setting clear, measurable objectives that reflect the intended outcomes of the transition. Whether it’s enhancing operational efficiency, reducing maintenance costs, or achieving better market alignment, establishing these benchmarks is crucial for evaluating the effectiveness of the replacement strategy. Without such metrics, it’s challenging to ascertain whether the transition has adequately addressed the identified problems.
Ultimately the decision to replace a legacy software product must be preceded by a well-defined understanding of the problems it aims to solve and the benefits it seeks to achieve. By carefully evaluating the drivers for change, such as technological obsolescence, maintenance difficulties, and market evolution, and by setting clear success criteria, organizations can ensure that their efforts in transitioning to modern software solutions are both justified and aligned with their strategic goals.
How Will the New Software be Different From the Legacy Version?
When considering the transition from a legacy software product to a new one, it is important to understand the distinctions and enhancements that the new software will introduce. This understanding is essential for effectively ensuring that the new product meets or exceeds the expectations set by its predecessor. The differences between the new software and the legacy version can be categorized into several key areas:
New Functionality
The introduction of new features and capabilities is a common reason for updating software. The new version may not only achieve feature parity with the legacy product but also introduce a wide range of additional functionalities.
Improved Architecture
Changes in the software’s architecture are often aimed at improving the development process, maintenance, and scalability of the product. A shift from a monolithic architecture to a more modular approach, such as APIs, microservices, or Self-contained Systems (SCS), can facilitate easier and faster updates, feature development, and maintenance.
Technology Stack
The new version of the software may also diverge from the legacy product in terms of the technology stack used. Development teams may choose to transition from proprietary technologies to open-source alternatives, or simply update the stack to leverage newer, more efficient technologies and frameworks.
Look and Feel
Another aspect in which the new software may differ from the legacy version is its user interface and overall user experience (UX). Even if the core functionalities remain unchanged, a completely redesigned interface and UX can transform how users interact with the software.
Possible Choices When Considering Replacement
You are seriously considering the idea to replace your legacy software product with a new one. You have clearly defined the problem to solve. You know how you will measure success. You also know how you want the new product to be different from the legacy one. You have defined what you want, why you want it, and how you want it.
Now what? What are your choices for moving forward?
Do nothing
Opting to do nothing is a viable, although seldom ideal, choice. It’s based on the premise that, while there may always be room for improvement, the cost of change might not justify the benefits. This option, however, should be considered carefully, as it implies accepting the current limitations and challenges of the existing system and not even attempting any improvements.
Upgrade Existing Legacy System
Rather than replacing the legacy system entirely, you might decide to enhance it. This involves identifying and implementing improvements that address your needs. This way the core system can be retained while making it more efficient, user-friendly, or capable. This approach can often achieve the desired outcomes without the significant expense and disruption of a complete rebuild.
Build a New Solution
After thorough analysis and consideration, you may conclude that the best course of action is to develop a new system from scratch. This option allows for the creation of a tailor-made solution that precisely meets your current and future needs, but also comes at a higher cost and with a longer timeline.
Acquire an Existing Solution
Another route is to replace the legacy system by acquiring an existing product. This strategy can offer a quicker transition and potentially immediate access to advanced features and capabilities. However, it requires due diligence to ensure compatibility with your existing processes and systems and to evaluate the true long-term value and integration costs.
Each of these options presents its own set of advantages and challenges. The choice depends on a careful assessment of your organization’s specific needs, resources, and strategic goals. A realistic evaluation of the legacy system’s limitations and the potential benefits of new technology will also be invaluable.
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Recommended Considerations to Replace a Legacy Software Product
If you have done your due diligence and the final decision is that creating a brand new product is the best idea, there are a number of considerations to seriously ponder before moving along.
NOTE: Many of these would also apply if you choose to take the acquisition route.
Who is Responsible for Building the New Product?
Decide which members of your team will be dedicated to developing the new product. If your team comprises a 12-person engineering team and a 5-person product team for example, specify who will be assigned to the new project, and who will remain on the legacy work effort. It’s important to be clear with how you allocate your limited human resources, as you now need to split your team into two separate efforts.
Assigning Team Members to Legacy vs. New Projects
If you’re considering dividing your team to work on both legacy and new projects, determine who will take on each type of work. Typically, engineers prefer working on new, greenfield projects rather than maintaining older ones. Address how you’ll manage these preferences and maintain team satisfaction during this transition.
Legacy Product Maintenance During New Development
While focusing on the new product, decide on the level of investment in your legacy product. Will you limit work to bug fixes, or will enhancements and new features be included? Consider how these decisions will affect your business and customers.
Estimating Development Time
Be realistic about the time required to develop the new product. A prudent approach is to add an additional 30-50% to your initial time and budget estimates to accommodate unexpected challenges and avoid being caught off guard.
Understanding the Total Cost
Ensure you have a comprehensive understanding of all costs involved in launching the new product. Beyond product and engineering expenses, consider the time and financial resources required from stakeholders, Sales, Marketing, Support, and Account Management. Avoid overlooking these additional costs.
Securing Company-wide Commitment
It’s essential to have unanimous support from all key areas of the company for the project’s success. This includes buy-in from the CEO, Business, Product, Engineering, and Support departments. To solidify this commitment, consider documenting and obtaining formal agreement from all parties involved.
Committing to Retire the Legacy Product
Ensure there is a unanimous decision to phase out the legacy product completely, avoiding the scenario where both old and new products are maintained simultaneously.
Planning for Delays and Additional Costs
Challenges are expected to arise during the product development phase, and the temptation to discontinue the project might become significant. Although it’s difficult to foresee specific obstacles, preemptive discussions on how to address and manage potential difficulties, as well as on the process for making decisions about whether to proceed or alter the project plan during such times, are essential.
Skills for the New Tech Stack
If the new product requires a different tech stack, assess whether your team possesses the necessary skills. If the required expertise is lacking, consider the following strategies to bridge the skill gap:
- Training: Organize online courses or hire a coach to provide on-site training for the team, or opt for a combination of both.
- Staff augmentation: Bring in a team of external experts to collaborate with your team, offering guidance and training along the way.
- New hires: Recruit new team members who already possess the requisite skills and experience.
A mix of the above approaches may be the most effective way to ensure your team is prepared to work with the new technology stack.
Infrastructure for the New Product
Determine whether the new product can be supported by the existing hosting infrastructure or if new infrastructure is needed. Assess if your current team has the skills required for this infrastructure and, similarly to the previous point, make the necessary arrangements to set your team for success.
Transition from Legacy to New Software Product
Imagine you are nearing the end of creating a brand-new product intended to replace an older, legacy system. Transitioning will not be as simple as flipping a switch to move everyone over. Beyond product and engineering efforts, several other processes are essential for a smooth launch and transition.
Timing and Method of Transition
It is crucial to have a detailed plan for moving from the old system to the new one. Will this transition occur through a single event or gradually over time? Are there specific dates set for the transition? If it’s a gradual process, how long will it take? Identifying key participants in this transition is also important. These are critical questions to consider and answer.
Customer Transition Strategies
How will customers transition to the new system? Will they be moved in groups, or all at once? Is there a timeframe during which they’ll have access to both the old and new systems, or will there be a definite switch-over point? Consider if customers will use their existing login credentials, need to create new accounts, and how the onboarding process will be structured. Planning for training on the new system and ensuring a seamless user experience throughout the transition is very important.
Data Migration Approaches
Depending on your business and product you could be in a situation where a lot of data has to be transitioned from the legacy to the new system. It is worth noting that there might be cases where the data store did not change, when replacing a legacy product with a new one. If that is your case your job is much easier. If an entirely new data store is created you have to think about when legacy data becomes read only and what you need to do in order to prevent data loss in the process.
Support Team Transition
The Support team must be prepared to assist customers with the new product upon rollout. Developing a training strategy to ensure their proficiency with the new system is vital. Additionally, assess how the introduction of the new product will impact the Support team’s internal processes and plan for possible changes.
Internal Training Requirements
Other internal teams, such as Account Management, might also require training on the new product’s features and functions to support customers effectively.
Marketing Strategy for the New Product
Informing both existing and potential new customers about the new product is crucial. Also, consider if rebranding is part of introducing the new product, what that entails, and who is needed to execute the rebranding effort. Evaluate whether internal branding expertise is sufficient or if external agencies’ assistance is required.
Implications for Pricing Strategy
Assess whether the introduction of the new product will necessitate changes in the business and pricing models. If so, determine the implications for Finance, Accounting, Sales, and Marketing departments.
Sales Process Adaptation
Finally, based on the considerations above, determine how the Sales team and their processes will need to adapt with the introduction of the new product.
Pitfalls to Avoid When Replacing Legacy Software
Hopefully by now it is clear that when you want to replace a legacy software product with a new one, the process is quite involved and many aspects have to be considered in order to ensure success.
Failing to take a thoughtful approach can result in some negative consequences. Here are some pitfalls to try and avoid:
Unintentionally Ending up with Two Products
When the idea of a new product is fresh there is a lot of excitement and energy. It is easy to underestimate the effort that will go into rebuilding a legacy product. Everyone starts with lots of hope and enthusiasm. As the months go by, unexpected hurdles keep cropping up. The market and business needs change and “more important” or “urgent” priorities emerge.
Slowly a trend begins where the focused effort to build the new product repeatedly gets put on hold in order to accommodate higher priorities. Even more time passes and now we are in a situation where we have half of a new product. All the deadlines and timelines have by now been completely blown and we are in a scramble to release this long-time promise of a new product. The business is eagerly waiting. The customers have been hearing for months and are also waiting.
So then we pivot and decide to release an MVP, so that we can give something to our customers. At the same time we promise ourselves that we will finish it after the initial release. However, more urgencies and other priorities keep coming our way, even after the MVP has been released. We are struggling to release the original vision. Yes, we have released the MVP but it is not enough to completely sunset the legacy product.
Welcome to the state of being stuck with both the old and the new. We have now reached the point that is a worse position than before we started this dream.
Now we have two code bases to maintain. Potentially worse – we may be stuck with 2 data sets/stores to maintain. Adding new features and maintaining this state is even slower and more expensive than ever before. To make matters worse, not all engineers on the team know the new code base and product, therefore we have split the skill levels across the engineering team.
Additionally, the team has to maintain two sets of infrastructure and deployment pipelines/processes. Many changes require two separate deployments – one for the legacy code and one for the new code base.
By now we wonder if it had been the right decision to begin this journey all together. Doubt creeps in, but we are too far along. We cannot go back and are stuck in a conundrum.
Not Solving the Original Problem
Another pitfall to avoid is spending all the money, time, and effort to bring a new product to life but not solving the original problem.
Suppose we wanted a new product because the old one was not well architected and difficult to extend and maintain. We started the new architecture with new designs and plans but a few months into it reality struck – it is going much slower than expected. The pressures from the business stakeholders grew and we were forced to take shortcuts in order to deliver on our timelines. In the process we built a new product but also with a poor architecture. Therefore, we ended up with no better outcome as a whole.
Another scenario could be – we started building a new product because we wanted to pivot and address a different market need. However, we had not done enough market research to prove our hypothesis and just kept building this new product because we were excited about it. When we were done, it turned out that it was the wrong thing to build. Therefore we end up with the metaphor of: “Perfect landing. Wrong airport.”.
Replacing When Refactoring Would Suffice
The third pitfall involves opting to create a new product when the original issue could have been resolved by enhancing the existing product through serious refactoring and re-architecting.
If the underlying problems with the legacy product could be addressed by improvements rather than starting from scratch, choosing to build a new product might lead to unnecessary expenses and efforts.
Recommendations for Replacing a Legacy Software Product
When you’re considering transitioning from a legacy software product to a new one, the following suggestions can help ensure you make a well-informed and successful decision.
Clearly Identify the Problem – the WHY
Start by precisely identifying the problem you aim to solve and what a successful outcome looks like. This shouldn’t be a solo effort; involve a team to gather a range of perspectives, ensuring each viewpoint is heard, validated, and agreed upon.
Explore Multiple Solutions
Encourage your team to think creatively and propose multiple solutions to the problem, even if the solution seems obvious. Engaging in such brainstorming can lead to discovering the best solution. Creating at least 3 possible solutions would be highly recommended.
Evaluate the Costs of Each Solution
Take a holistic approach for counting the cost of each solution and again remember – the cost and involvement goes beyond Product and Engineering. In addition to considering time and money, also take into account the lost opportunities. This means, if 6 engineers and 2 Product members are working on a new product for 18 months, they will not be working on other things that could also bring value to the company and customers. Is this trade-off worth it both in the short and in the long run?
Make a Comprehensive Decision
Look at the bigger picture when making your decision, considering all factors that will influence the project’s success. It’s advisable to postpone starting the project until you’re equipped with sufficient information and realistic expectations, rather than rushing into it and potentially making a poor decision.
Document Everything
“Commitment is doing the thing you said you were going to do long after the mood you said it in has left you.” – Darren Hardy
Documenting every step of the decision-making process is crucial because:
- It serves as a reminder of the decisions and reasoning when challenges arise later in the process.
- It provides evidence of a thoughtful process when new leaders question past decisions.
- It supports discussions about continuing or prioritizing the project during tough times.
Make sure to record the initial problem and success definitions, research, analyses, conclusions, decisions, and team agreements.
Gain Comprehensive Support
Before proceeding with replacing the legacy product, ensure you have full support from senior leadership, business stakeholders, and the Product and Engineering teams. This unified support will facilitate easier discussions during challenging times.
Communicate the Plan Internally
Ensure that everyone who will be involved in the process is part of the conversations and that they are aware of:
a.) What the plan is.
b.) What will be expected of them, even if their involvement will not be till months later.
Conclusion
Replacing a legacy software product with a new one is not merely a technical challenge but a strategic endeavor that impacts every facet of an organization. The journey from recognizing the limitations of the old system to successfully adopting a new and improved software solution involves meticulous planning, a deep understanding of the organization’s strategic goals, and a commitment to addressing the core issues at hand.
By clearly defining the problems to be solved, evaluating the options available, and considering the implications of the transition, organizations can make informed decisions that not only enhance their technological infrastructure but also align with their long-term business objectives.