Ryan Walker on agile business and web software development
Yesterday I gave an hour talk at our company’s annual meeting, where I described how we’re going to tear down our monolithic legacy ASP app and replace over the next few months. In the afternoon, after thinking it through, I decided to name the collection of projects “Chaos 2010”.
In order to install a call center solution we need to replace our current phone system, so that’s project #1. InsideSales.com also has a CRM system that’s better than our homegrown system, so we’ll toss out that old system for all our sales team.
Problem is that breaks other parts of the monolithic legacy app, so we have to quickly follow that up with email marketing system work, accounting switchover from quickbooks offline to quickbooks online, launching our new job board product, building a new event management system, and then finally rebuilding all of our custom dashboard/reports that we have.
The current system has this structure:
The final system should look something like this:
We are building a list of projects in Google docs (image intentionally downsized to obfuscate details).
Each column outlines at a high level what we need to do within that project, what that project fixes, what that project breaks, and finally a list of things that remain broken after the project is complete.
The first two projects basically break a ton of stuff, then it’s six projects to try to put it back together. The end result will be that the company is in much better shape for the expected growth when the economy kicks back in.
I’ll report back in after we complete each project of Chaos 2010 with observations what went well and what went poorly. Wish us luck!
