Legacy Tools Modernization
As technology becomes outdated, how can businesses meet changing requirements, reduce technical risk and maintain profit margins? That was the question for E-Forms. “E-forms” is the term used by my internal client for an authoring process used to build a unique type of multi-layer electronic document. The software used to build an E-form was created in the 1980’s and was officially sunset by the producing company in 2004. Despite the software being outdated and unsupported, our ~$40M business continued relying on it for its content authoring. The need to adapt this software was driven by new authoring requirements, coupled with a changing technology infrastructure that required costly workarounds and threatened business viability.
Challenge
Identify a technology solution for the E-forms legacy tool issue; meet new authoring requirements; improve business efficiency; limit negative impact to clients; and sell the business case to a senior leadership team that had passed over similar proposals for 10 years.
My Role
As the engagement lead for the project, I was responsible for project management, stakeholder engagement, and design innovation. I had to quickly understand the technical process and business requirements. This required identifying the few key people who deeply understood the technical process and developing trust with them and their teams. I worked with these key stakeholders to identify solution options, gain organizational consensus, and build a viable business case that would convince senior leadership to find the solution. I conducted site visits, user interviews, and requirements gathering before designing and facilitating a series of cross-functional design-thinking workshops. These workshops focused on generating an innovative solution that was both technological and financially feasible. Throughout the process, I focused on developing documentation and artifacts that could be used to ensure everyone was on the same page. These artifacts included: requirements documents; financial models; fact packs; process diagrams; talking points; communication strategies; and visualizations that helped bring the teams’ ideas to life for senior decision makers.
Workflow Standardization
The mandate to reduce technology risk in order to protect and defend current revenue presented an opportunity to further standardize the business by bringing together disparate technology-driven processes and improving workflow orchestration.
Outcome
The business case was approved to invest $530K over a one-year period with a two-and-a-half-year payback period. The key breakthrough in getting this project funded was shifting senior decision makers’ understanding of the problem by quantifying and visualizing how the process worked and the cost of doing nothing. We simulated the monetary impact of known technology bugs occurring and how they would affect product lines and long-term client revenue. I created a detailed visual documentation of how the current process works and where it was broken. Then we defined a minimum valuable product (MVP) for what our best solution would look like and documented additional requirements that would build future business value beyond the MVP. The team sourced contracts and selected a vendor team to build out an existing internal proprietary tool that could meet the requirements. The MVP project was completed on time and on budget giving senior decision makers confidence to approved extended project scope for additional functionality enhancements.
Metrics
To ensure project success, clear metrics and standard process tracking mechanisms were established and presented to the team and senior leadership at regular intervals.