Intelligent Delivery – Taking the Pain out of Introducing New Software

Introducing software can be painful. Today's technology can help.?????· 8 min read

With enough work experience, you have been there, too: Some new software is being introduced in your organization – and things are anything but going smoothly. There may be delays in delivering the roll-out, there may be hiccups in operating the new software, the data may be even messier than it was before.

14 years ago, this happened to our first migration customer, when they were already halfway down the road, in pain, and asked for help. They were moving to what today is called a cloud application.

Why Introducing New Software Is So Hard

The general challenges of moving to new business applications and consolidating software landscapes have been with us even before the cloud. The business world has been dealing with this for several decades now. Yet, it hasn’t become easier. The opposite is true most of the time. Demands keep growing in times of accelerating innovation and growing diversity in available business applications. This is especially true for the large organizations conemis is serving today. Timely completion of software introduction is often vital for organizations to thrive in quickly changing markets or at least keep their overall momentum of modernization. Pressure mounts as ambitious deadlines approach.

And then, oftentimes, there are not enough experienced people to plan and run such implementation projects. Those who have done it in the past may suffer transition trauma and have moved on to other areas of responsibility. Those who haven’t done it before need guidance in this most underrated challenge of modernizing software landscapes in large organizations. Not to speak of the business stakeholders, whose contribution is crucial for success. But they can’t neglect their normal job, which tends to be a full-time obligation. So, they may struggle to bring their full attention and force to a complex migration, which is just a side-hustle for them. When whatever they have to contribute to is presented in a hard-to-digest representation for a business stakeholder, any amount of attention they can contribute is quickly overstretched.

Yes, 14 years ago, we have created software to help our first customer in his migration. Until today, when it comes to making the introduction of new software a success, we focus on helping with migration – data, metadata, and quite a bit of supporting functionality. The vast majority of customers have old solutions that are superseded by the business applications and the oftentimes significant investment in customizations as well as the data accumulated in them have to be brought over to the new world. This is probably the most underestimated tricky part of software implementation: It can make or break the perceived and actual success of new software.

Taking the pain out of all of this has been motivating me since we started working on software migrations at conemis. The vision remains: Empower people and organizations to handle speed and complexity for bringing out the beauty in innovation, potentiating progress, and delivering results.

A Pivotal Point: When a Decades-Old Challenge Meets the Technology of Today

Thankfully, alongside the demands in software implementations, the means for delivering them successfully have evolved significantly. The building blocks range from ever advancing methodology for running IT projects over growing confidence in leveraging distributed and blended teams to all kinds of day-to-day tools and fundamental technologies like remote collaboration, cutting-edge process automation, machine learning, and generative AI.

Now we are at a pivotal point. Technology has reached the potential to outpace the growing challenges from increasing innovation speed and complexity when it comes to making migrations successful.

The science and art of leveraging this potential – executing intelligent methodology based on intelligent technology – is what we call Intelligent Delivery.

Rethinking Migration with conemis Intelligent Delivery

Not only has conemis completed the foundation of delivering on our full vision by making all four essential elements for success in software migration available?—?Application Assessment, Metadata Migration, Data Migration, and Project Performance. We have also begun harnessing the power of AI, including generative AI, in conemis transition cloud.

We believe that it is the right combination of automating and managing software implementations that leads to success. Intelligent Delivery is up to the teams that run migrations, but intelligent technology is what enables them. It requires the openness to look at the delivery of implementation projects from a different angle.

Intelligent Delivery requires rethinking some fundamental principles:

Experience is good. Combining it with data is better

Those who know about the complexity of migration strive to get experienced experts on the team, which is very good. But even the most experienced experts have, at best, in-depth experience with and a vague recollection of a handful or two of complex migrations.

However, tapping into detailed conemis data from hundreds of projects of the same kind makes these experts significantly better in planning a new migration, in benchmarking it, in hands-on steering, as well as in leveraging intricate templates and pre-built processes with ease.

Tools are good. A pure-play integrated solution is better

A vast variety of tooling exists in the migration space out there: From home-grown tools for assessment and health checks over database- and Excel-based migration scripts, complex integration middleware that is misused for migration to tedious manual steps for stringing them together with shell tools, file loaders, and all kinds of make-shift solutions. I’m tempted to say there are as many individual tool setups as there are migration teams.

I obviously believe that tooling is a very good idea and very important. But I also believe that a pure-play and consistent solution for automating and managing migrations is incomparably superior in speed, controlling cost, and delivering success reliably.

Throwing bodies at migration can work. Taking control from the beginning is better

One way to start a migration is to do a high-level estimate, put a team of off-/on-shore members to work, maybe let them bring their own tools, and see how it goes. When previously unknown complexities are uncovered, one can extend the timeline or add more people. When whatever tooling there may be turns out to be insufficient, one can extend the timeline to allow for more manual work or add more people. When the build in the destination application is just not reaching a stable state or the data just doesn’t find its place in there, one can try to extend the timeline or add more people. When efforts get out of control, well, one can try to extend the timeline or add more people.

While this approach may or may not work, being in control is better when it comes to a proper scope definition, measuring progress, data-driven analysis of the impact of changes, and more.

Reliable team communication is essential. Real-time KPIs and 24/7 reports help

Successful migration is a team effort. Any migration of some complexity will need the essential migration skills of project management, techno functional expertise, and business knowledge spread over more than one person. The extended migration team can easily go into a double-digit headcount. Reliable communication with a shared understanding of the key terminology, migration-relevant definitions, the project state, and current issues is essential for success. Getting all of this established for each project and keeping it up to date between all participants can be very tedious. Misunderstandings can easily creep in. I remember a project where the off-shore team reported that data migration testing on a number of objects was complete. After further inquiry, it turned out that no records had been imported into the test environment, yet. Their definition of done was that all mappings for the test environment had been configured in conemis transition cloud to the best of their knowledge.

After that, we added Project Performance, which for several years now gives the whole team detailed insight into what has been done and what not – down to the last activity and exact record counts on an object level. KPIs, like failure rates in data migration, are updated live and accessible in conemis 24/7.?

How Intelligent Are We??

First of all, it takes a lot of components to form Intelligent Delivery. It takes strategy consulting, program management, change management, requirements engineering, and real human talk with business stakeholders. This can benefit from intelligent technology to some extent already, but the core of the intelligence for these topics remains in the human experts for now. Then there are those experts who deliver the migration. They are the ones who can combine their intelligence with our technology to provide Intelligent Delivery excellence in migration. We are their supplier.

Our perspective at conemis always has been and remains that we leverage the latest technologies and techniques in a consistent way to enable delivering implementation and consolidation projects for business software faster, more reliable, and more efficient. Software-driven management, automation of migration processes, and AI are the technology ingredients for Intelligent Delivery software in our day and age. These technology ingredients are complemented by taking into account techniques for agility, collaboration support for distributed teams, and usability that focuses on guidance as well as the alignment of users and AI automation.

conemis has built the foundation for this for 14 years. We have followed the evolution of expectations and possibilities as cloud applications have gained prevalence, project teams became even more distributed, crisis after crisis has kept demanding agility all the way from strategic corporate decisions down to operational flexibility. Now demands and means for efficiency are sky-rocketing with the latest generation of AI. We have kept our focus steady. And we are excited about this moment in time.

We have learned and we have incorporated the learnings from many large and small projects, from feedback from different partners and customers worldwide. The conemis software has soaked up and reflects the experience and intelligence of many years. What results from this is our version of Intelligent Delivery cast into software: conemis transition cloud

Intelligent Delivery can benefit greatly from machine learning and generative AI. But digital learnings from past projects are required as input – as training data. We have that. A migration process needs to be cast in software to give the delivery structure and to provide an interface between humans and the machine, between project participants and the AI. We have that. Unbroken software-based support and guidance through the migration is ideal for all of this and for the users working through the migration. We have that. But we are not done learning. Our software is not done learning.

If you are curious, I invite you to follow our journey towards enabling every migration project to be successful. Start by exploring more of our version of Intelligent Delivery, benefit from it in your projects, and, most importantly – if you are in any shape or form involved in software implementations or consolidations – join us in the conversation and constant evolution of Intelligent Delivery at and beyond conemis. Let us know what you think, where the pain lies, what can be improved further, what may be needed for the future.

Comment here, write me directly, join the conemis LinkedIn page or visit the conemis website to keep learning more about Intelligent Delivery, successful Application Assessment, Metadata Migration, Data Migration, and Project Performance.

From the Series "A Moment for Innovation". First published on Medium .