Despite the clear need for modernisation, Gartner estimates that by 2025, companies will be spending approximately 40% of their IT budgets on simply maintaining technical debt. To circumvent these costs, organisations need a strategic approach that involves careful planning, stakeholder involvement, risk management, and engagement with reliable technology partners.

With the right team, knowledge, and tools, organisations can integrate their legacy software into modern IT solutions to enhance operational efficiency and drive innovation and growth. However, such projects often involve pressing managerial concerns on navigating the complex journey of updating legacy systems, ensuring they remain relevant and practical in today's fast-paced, technology-driven market.

With 20 years of experience as a tech partner and many application modernisation projects brought to a successful launch, we've devised a set of best practices for modernisation projects. This advice works in concert with the many conventions of modern software development and focuses on bridging the gap between technological innovation, effective collaboration, and business growth:

1. Comprehensive Discovery and Assessment

A common concern organisations have before modernising their legacy systems is quantifying the project's business value. More specifically, what functionalities need to be rebuilt, which ones can be integrated into more modern ecosystems, and which approach has the best return on investment?

As application modernisation is a long-term process and requires constant attention, an initial step in the process should be a discovery and assessment phase based on collaborative sessions. This approach creates a baseline to guide the complex initiative from the first mock-ups all the way to maintenance and support. We call this phase the Application Modernisation Discovery and Assessment.

The process's main benefit is ensuring a tailored modernisation plan that addresses specific pain points and aligns with the company's goals. As part of the assessment, our specialists conduct interviews, update and leverage the existing system documentation to ensure business needs are met, and perform many assessments to make sure that the modern IT solution performs well in the long term and faces no compliance or cybersecurity risks.

Therefore, the Application Modernisation Discovery and Assessment phase ensures the in-depth document review, cross-team collaboration, and data collection process of the existing documentation related to the system are correctly identified. This crucial step helps our professionals recommend the best approach for the continuous app modernisation process and healthy collaboration between teams based on communication and shared knowledge.

2. Continuous Collaboration

The success of a modernisation project is often determined by how effectively the organisation communicates and collaborates with its tech partner. Each group brings a key component to the table — internal stakeholders have insights into the company's processes and needs. In contrast, the tech team brings the modernisation knowledge and experience needed to modernise the software with minimal disruption.

It's important to note that effective collaboration involves more than just sharing feedback.

The first step is active engagement from in-house experts from the onset, ensuring that the developers get a complete overview of the infrastructure. This process is essential when knowledge is spread out across various stakeholders or the legacy software needs more documentation. During the planning phase, close communication and joint effort are instrumental in discovering requirements and envisioning the new solution. Next, actively sharing feedback, concerns, and updates helps the project stay on track while in the development, testing, and support phases.

3. Incremental Implementation

Operational downtime, slow employee adoption, and deviation from the planned functionalities are concerns many organisations have when they set out to modernise their IT infrastructure. Therefore, it is best to adopt an incremental implementation approach, which addresses each challenge by gradually rolling out updates, keeping all stakeholders updated on the project's progress, giving users time to adapt, and keeping disruption to business-as-usual at a minimum.

A fundamental principle in this approach is starting small and validating often and early. Commencing with small, end-to-end proofs of concept serves a dual purpose — it validates the capabilities of the modernisation effort and offers a realistic understanding of the business requirements.

Early and frequent validation with decision-makers is essential to avoid costly delays and ensure that priorities are set correctly. Deviation from this model often means delayed decisions and leads to serious budgetary setbacks.

Another significant benefit to this approach is that in-house specialists receive continuous learning and support, enabling them to bridge the expertise gap gradually. The intended result is to have a group of internal stakeholders ready to handle the new software's maintenance, support its users, and ideate new functionalities to provide further value to the company.

Success Story - Tailored App Modernisation for High-Tech Lab Equipment

The Accesa team has built strong and long-lasting partnerships by integrating into our customers' value chains, actively sharing our know-how, and building personal relationships with the people we help. One success story highlights the benefits of that approach very effectively as well as the best practices we mentioned above.

One of our customers is a leading supplier of high-tech measuring and laboratory equipment. They needed a trusted partner to help them build a viable and scalable solution suitable for their future business challenges.

The legacy application ran on a deprecated software framework, which led to low performance, unsatisfying user experience, and a declining pace of innovation in addressing customers' demands. The legacy code made it challenging to implement ongoing improvements, and adding new features posed high risks and costs.

To better understand our client's challenges, we organised an audit workshop, where we involved all the stakeholders and gained insights into developing a technical solution fit for their future business needs. By doing this, we came up with a scalable solution that can be applied to other future products from our client's portfolio, significantly reducing time to market.

Working closely with the stakeholders, we structured the project into phases, outlining clear objectives and setting the expected results. We strategically planned discovery workshops throughout each phase to empower product managers to make well-informed decisions, assess risks, and address challenges proactively.

Aiming to reduce possible disruption, we gradually shifted functionalities from the old to the new application, maintaining feature parity throughout releases while adding new features and keeping close communication and transparency during the transition.

The modernised application facilitates faster and more accurate measurements, enabling laboratory technicians and researchers to perform their tasks more efficiently. The user-friendly and intuitive interface enhances user adoption satisfaction. Unifying the experience across functionalities also consolidates workflows, reducing errors and improving overall efficiency.

Improvements in code quality and modularisation have significantly reduced the time between feature releases from once every two years to once every six months. Faster feature delivery accelerates the application's evolution, allowing the business to respond more quickly to market demands and stay ahead of competitors.

Ready to enhance your organisation's legacy software? Find out how a dedicated tech partner can help!