Innovators, Drive your Team to Release Early and Often

#Innovators, drive your team to #release early and often 🕊️ ... particularly on tricky #systemsModernization initiatives, which have a way of dragging on and on … ⛓️‍💥

Those old #legacy tools can be quite difficult to replace! That’s why we need you to lead. And remember that reverse-compatibility will help a great deal. Read on ...

At some point in your initiative, you’ll start to see pretty new user interface designs and lots of positive buzz in testing. 🐝

Yet in the eyes of some executive leadership, your biggest win may come only when you can walk into the conference room, and state confidently that you have “turned off the old system!” That’s the rubber-meets-road moment, the tangible win that leadership may need to justify this modernization focus. 🚘

As you work module-by-module, and repoint the old navigation and user interface to the new interface — consider adding a centralized “switch” or toggle to help you do so. That will enable you to not only test, but to be ready for rollback, and to segment only certain users to be on a “Beta” release. 💡

For example, you may want to have your Customer Service teammates start using your new Order Entry module, while keeping the rest of the team on the legacy interface. Reverse-compatibility goes a long way in terms of not only easy Beta testing, but also in terms of speeding up total time to delivery by lowering barriers, obstacles and objections.

If users know that they can also flip back to the old if they get in a pinch and need to get something out the door, they’ll be much faster to say yes to trying out the new using real, live data.