The MVR Modernization Modeling Tool: Discover the where your of modernization risk, work, and time!
Watch the video to understand the key drivers of your risk, work, and time!
What drives the majority of your risk and work, the majority of your customers or a tiny sliver?
The 1%!
In almost every modernization, 1% or less of your customers drive the majority of the risk, work, and timelines!
The question is why, which ones are they, what can you do about it
So after much pondering, I came up with a simple equation and tool to help identify the drivers, assess the impact, and take action to reduce your risks, work, and timelines.
👇 Read on or watch the video above ☝️ to learn more.
The drivers of risk, work, and timelines
Complexity: This is the obvious one. Some customers and scenarios are more complex than others. The more complex, the more work.
Uniqueness: How custom is the solution we've developed for each customer/ use case? Is each deployment completely unique, a snowflake, or can the same codebase completely reusable, so no additional work is required regardless of the number of customers.
Even if you have a relatively low complexity solution, if each deployment is unique, the amount of work grows exponentially!
And of course what you see is that uniqueness tends to grow in parallel with customer size.
Uncertainty: How well do you understand the required work? If you have 100% clarity then you don't need to spend time upfront in discovery, and don't have to worry that you are building the wrong thing.
However, the older and larger the client, the greater the uncertainty, as no one in the company really understands how all the pieces fit together, or even what they are.
Instead, they are more like an archeological expedition, trying to piece seemingly random things together, that rarely make sense to our modern eyes.
The end result is that not only will it take much more time up front, you will inevitably be surprised when your solution doesn't work as expected, and you need to spend additional unplanned effort trying to fix things, or just delivering less value.
Customer Adoption Effort: How much effort will be required for your customers to adopt the solution?
It may take you a day to implement something, but it may take your customers years to adopt.
The more work/change required on their part, the longer the potential adoption risk and timelines.
Too many organizations plan their timelines based on work they need to do internally, missing the fact that the external adoption may take 2-5X longer!
The equation
Complexity x Uniqueness x Uncertainty x Customer Adoption Effort = Risk, Work & Time
This model is an over simplification, and the numbers aren't designed to be exact or represent days of work or timelines, but it highlights the interplay between these four drivers, and how they are not additive, but multiplicative!
You can now begin to plug in some numbers and see how increasing or decreasing each can explode or shrink the risk, work, and time on a per customer basis.
Or you can multiply by the total number of customers
(Complexity x Uniqueness x Uncertainty x Customer Adoption Effort) x Number of Customers = Overall Risk, Work, and Time
The real value though is when you apply this at the segment level, and what you will quickly see is that a tiny sliver of your customers drive the overwhelming percentage of your risk, work and time!
So what?
Forewarned is forearmed! You can now make better decisions and plans so you avoid being surprised by the one percent of your customers.
Once you understand the drivers you can design your work and systems to minimize things like uniqueness, uncertainty, and customer adoption effort, or if you can't at least you won't be surprised.
You can do things like:
Minimize the amount of custom coding/work per customers, building things to be configurable without coding, or maybe pushing back a little more on supporting custom development.
Conduct more upfront discovery work and run smaller scale experiments to reduce uncertainty, as opposed to leaving that to the end, which might result in a bunch of rework!
Develop your solution to minimize the amount of adoption work required by your customers. It may even result in you leaving certain components in place so that you can change out the majority of the systems that deliver the majority of the value, and not wasting your time on something that your customer may not adopt for years.
Again, the equation isn't a silver bullet, but it should help you cut through the cloud of confusion before you hit the icebergs!
The Tool!
Instead of plugging the equation into Excel, you can use The Minimum Viable Replacement Migration Modeling Tool I developed with the help of Claude. (100% Vibe coded!)
It's free to use, so take it for a spin.
Get Help!
While the tool and concepts are helpful, if you've never led a modernization before, it can be very overwhelming, so reach out, I can help!
Whether it's training on the larger Minimum Viable Replacement Framework, a workshop with your team or executives, I can help you identify the icebergs early so you can avoid sinking your project, company, or career!