Replace the old system without stopping the business.
The system everyone complains about is also the system everything depends on. That is why it survives: the risk of replacing it in one weekend is worse than the pain of keeping it.
Who this is for
An owner or operations lead running something critical on a version nobody supports, whose last replacement quote was one enormous number and a cutover weekend.
What this usually looks like.
- It runs on a version nobody will support, and the person who understood it left.
- Every quote to replace it is a single enormous number and a cutover weekend.
- The data model has thirty years of exceptions encoded in it.
- It cannot integrate with anything bought in the last decade.
Do not hire us if
The old system's job is now a commodity, and a current product covers it.
Migrate to the product. A replacement is only worth building when the exceptions encoded in thirty years of use are decisions the business still makes on purpose.
How we approach it.
Slices, not a big bang
The build ships in milestones, each one useful on its own. The old system keeps running until a slice is genuinely ready to take over. There is no weekend where everything moves and nothing works.
The exceptions are the specification
Thirty years of odd cases are not noise to be cleaned up. They are decisions the business made, mostly for reasons. The sprint's job is to find out which ones still matter before anything is rebuilt without them.
The riskiest piece gets prototyped first
Whatever most likely sinks the project gets built during the sprint, not discovered in month five. If it cannot be done the way you hoped, you learn that while it is still cheap.
Someone is accountable afterward
A replacement with nobody running it becomes the next legacy system. The production retainer is bundled for that reason, not as an upsell.
Where we stand
Every NovraScale engagement replaces something that already exists and is load-bearing. Nothing here starts on a blank page.