About to take your legacy software product through a major modernisation project? Excellent. We hope you’ll come and talk to us about it – it’s what we do best.
Remember - what’s once in a blue moon for you is our everyday. And that’s why experience matters. Although each job is different, we see patterns repeat themselves time and again. It means we can flag up the hurdles that will be thrown in your path, while supporting you to ease your organisation through change.
When we get the call from a new client to discuss software product modernisation, perhaps redeveloping a legacy desktop app as a SaaS application or building that much-needed next version of your core business system, we often see familiar events play out. Let’s walk through a simplified but typical scenario.
If you recognise yourself in it, the moral of this story could save your business.
The need for software modernisation
Having had your software product built perhaps a decade or so ago, your business has been thriving. That product has been the goose that laid a generous and reliable number of golden eggs over the years, and everything you do is entwined around it.
Your small in-house development team has quietly nurtured and cared for it, responding to changes in market demands by bolting on additions, tweaking features and refining processes.
It’s worked well, although no-one can quite remember all the changes. When you add up the tweaks and the hours of work, by multiple people, over multiple years, you’ve invested significant time and wrought countless changes.
But the problem is, no-one has added them all up. Everyone has just enjoyed the golden eggs.
Brief and budget setting
But suddenly, things are changing. Perhaps a piece of software, integral to your product, has been discontinued, causing problems. Perhaps a slicker rival is making inroads into your territory.
Whatever it is, your customers are getting restless. It’s clearly time to upgrade and modernise your product.
Your board is reluctant to spank fortunes on the project. Collectively, everyone fails to make a meaningful calculation to accommodate all the tweaks and additions. But they definitely want those golden eggs to keep coming, so they sign off on a budget that feels brave, but is actually a little shy of the real cost.
Hitting the snags
Armed with your impossible brief to build ‘a more modern version of the old one’, you look for a specialist partner to take on the modernisation project.
But when potential suppliers scrutinise the challenge and the budget, they discover there isn’t enough in the kitty to dig deep into understanding your users’ needs, motivations and frustrations.
The board is impatient for results and bullish about their understanding of your own product. Failing to grasp the implications of the additional work done to the original application, they hold tight to the purse strings and refuse requests for more cash.
Cutting research corners
This is where things really go wrong. Because no-one truly understands exactly how all your customers use your product. Skipping the valuable step of discovery and user research kills this perfect opportunity to turn your product into something bigger, better and more future proof.
We call it ‘the Kevin in the basement’ problem. However confident you are about your use cases and user journeys, there’s always something you don’t know. There’s always a Kevin, toiling quietly away in the basement, who employs an obscure function – for an important outcome. Or who has a unique set of workarounds that you’re about to destroy through your ill-informed modernisation initiative.
By failing to speak to Kevin – and all the other Kevins in all the other businesses – you’ve not only missed a magical window to delight existing customers and convert new ones, you’ve sparked disaster.
The case for deep research
For worried boards, user research can feel like an unnecessary step, piling valuable weeks onto the project timeline. But it is invariably eye-opening. It certainly was when we revolutionised the Injectable Medicines Guide (IMG), relied on throughout the NHS every day, to administer safe, effective injections to patients.
By going into hospitals to talk to and shadow nurses as they used the IMG, we gained a deep understanding of the challenges facing them. We were able to see the software through their eyes, which led to us recommending and building a number of innovative new features. Now the new version is being rolled out, those features have been warmly welcomed by users.
Or take a look at the story behind Quantum, Class Legal’s flagship application, which was slipping behind the rapid pace of legal changes until we took it online, bolstering it with real-time collaboration and change monitoring, a modern UX, and serverless hosting.
Or Perspective, an indispensable electronic information service for the pensions industry that had already foiled two attempts to shift it from desktop to SaaS. By understanding how users interact with it, we found an innovative way to match the lightning speed of the original with the modernity of a cloud-based solution.
When this tale becomes your real-life story, we can support you to persuade your stakeholders that investing in discovery is a vital step – as well as a magical opportunity for you to make something better, smarter and more future-proof.
