Now it makes sense
Its been a while, been a bad year personally and professionally, but I'll be posting here semi-reguarlly going forward. My company has gone through quite a lot of upset, almost all of it self inflicted. But today there was a meeting of the Product Development staff with all hands present. Half the people in the room I did not recognize which shows the level of turnover in the last 2 years. Until today I did not understand why work levels had been pushed so hard resulting in that turnover.
I'll be putting out a number of posts in the coming days showing what has been going on. But here is my take on it. Our parent company is putting together a platform that is intended to support both Banking and Credit Union core operations. All well and good, if properly executed. Until today I understood that to mean that it would function as a front-end to our existing core products (both the Banking and Credit Union back-end). Today it was stated that the new platform will replace all of the core functionality for the existing Banking and Credit Union systems. And it was discussed that we will be transitioning to the new system with the timeline bandied about of 5 years. However what was actually discussed was that the new platform should be ready to support production clients in a minimum of 5 years and at that point we would be able to start transitioning our clients to that platform. All of the decisions I will be showing as questionable make sense, if you assume our software only has to last 5 years or so and the existing staff will not be brought forward to work on the new system. You don't have to care if the existing system gets a bad reputation, we will have a new system to show the clients. You don't have to worry about burning out the existing staff because we are not going to be retained for the new system.
Now it makes sense. Some of the stupid things that have been done based on the idea we only have to continue to develop for 5 years or so on our current platform will follow in the coming days.
Note, I said to show the clients. I didn't say it would be usable for the majority of them, especially the largest ones, after that 5 year time span. The reason is that automation and customizations that don't make sense for small operations become nearly mandatory for large operations. This is for both Banks and Credit Unions. These automations and our ability to support customizations are what makes our Credit Union software attractive to our largest clients. There is also a non-trivial 3rd party ecosystem that exists for our Credit Union software. We also have to review all of the custom coded interfaces that we have built for our clients, some of which are one offs that will need to be retained. All of this will need to be reviewed and re-implemented to transition each client from the old system to the new system. Also we need to train the CUs staff on the new system and ensure there is adequate support from us to answer questions post transition. All of this for each of our 700 clients. If we transition 1 per day that would take 2 1/2 years to complete. Any way I look at this I'm thinking from the day the new system is production ready, it is only in demo mode for a very limited set of functionality today, if we convert all 700 of our clients within a 5 year time span that will be a decent result. Optimistically it is 5 years to get to that initial production stage so at a bare minimum this is a 10 year undertaking until we can retire our current core system. Pessimistically call it 15 years.
So the idea that we only have to keep developing on our existing software for 5 more years and that is what we can plan to is nonsensical.
But at least what has been going on now makes sense.
posted by MrPopman @ 10:36 PM
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