Diving Into The Unknown: Challenge Accepted
Counter was awarded a client engagement that consisted of supporting and maintaining a legacy data lake, deploying a team of Associates Consultants alongside an experienced Tech Lead to guide and support them throughout. However – due to the nature of the organisation we were working with – security policies, access to estate documentation, tech stack overviews and details of team member responsibilities were not disclosed until the first day on site. This meant that in terms of preparation, the team was in a position of needing accelerated learning on day one due to lack of opportunity to prepare in advance. This brought an importance to leveraging their base technical knowledge, an unrivalled hunger to learn and the enthusiasm for making a stamp as they take their first steps into a brand new career.
The Old Legacy:
The estate turned out to be quite the beast. As the Tech Lead on this engagement, the scale of data usage, data throughput, and operational reliance was beyond anything even I’d seen previously – never mind some bright eyed fresh engineers in their first role. Plans for an eventual decommission and migration of data and services had already begun, albeit with timeframe estimates yet to be established. But the estate had already been tarred with the ‘legacy’ brush.
The ‘legacy’ label implies old. Outdated. Uncool.
As the maintenance responsibility had been passed from team to team, the upkeep of documentation had slipped meaning that key information and understanding of the estate’s ‘quirks’ had disappeared along with the individuals who were off to a better place; Working in a shiny, new environment using cutting edge and importantly, cool technologies.
Our environment was not perceived as particularly desirable or prosperous. The dedicated team members remaining were just ‘doing what needs to be done’ – keeping the system comfortable and nursing it through its last period of use. But the scale of users still reliant on the estate was huge and the ‘life expectancy’ was estimated in years rather than weeks or months and it was our job to keep it ticking along, but any flames of aspiration for upgrades, updates or expansions have well been quelled. After all, why put effort into a system that’s already been marked for death?
The Current Legacy:
Remember our bright-eyed engineers that have just begun their journey? They have just started a new role, in a new industry. Regardless of your average engineer’s perception of this task, the Counter Consultants were ready and raring to put their skills and problem solving mindsets to work and get stuck in on something that was new to them.
Their enthusiasm was evident from the offset. Within weeks, documentation had been expanded upon with both personal findings and cross references across multiple documents in multiple places. What had previously been scattered or incomplete notes were now structured, organised, and easily accessible, ensuring that critical information was no longer lost or overlooked. This was a key step in the legacy system transformation, bringing about clarity and efficiency.
Their positivity was infectious. ‘Remedial’ tasks that the team are responsible for were automated, giving time back to all team members to further explore the estate themselves and update other areas of documentation – something which previously they had no chance of fitting in.
A task management system was implemented to allow the team to see the wood for the trees and gain control over the management of their working days. Like ripples in a pond, their attitude had spread and increased the efficiency of the entire team. Feedback from external teams was superb. The turnaround times of requests for access to the estate, code deployments and incident resolution had decreased across the board. Why? Because when a new ticket entered the stack, they were genuinely excited to get to work on it!
Users were being questioned as to the nature and scale of data being placed into what was previously perceived as a bit of a ‘dumping ground’. The estate was trending. They had injected life into something that, although living, had no soul.
The New Legacy:
Although the Counter Consultants had very solid technical foundations, everything outside that was new. We’d hear the horror stories of those unfortunate individuals who made critical mistakes in production or acted ever so slightly outside the guidelines of interaction with estate. But these tales didn’t scare them. Their attitudes have absolutely been their most valuable asset in navigating this new territory. A lot of the problems they have solved, although technical at the core, have involved establishing the correct communication channels or traversing the ‘political landscape’ with care. Importantly, they earned the respect of their peers not by seeking it explicitly, but through their approach and results. Their ability to balance technical skill with adaptability was essential in driving this legacy system transformation forward.
A lot of their efforts will go completely unnoticed by downstream users interacting with the estate, but that’s an additional victory rather than a negative. Those users expect the legacy system to just keep working… and it does.
The estate has seen an increase in performance and a decrease in operational costs as a result of their efforts. This tangible impact solidified the success of the legacy system transformation, demonstrating that even aging infrastructure can be revitalised with the right approach. No matter the industry, no matter the product, people are providing the contributions.
If everyone applies the same mentality as our heroes in this story, ensuring positivity and enthusiasm are the only emissions from every interaction, the product will benefit, the users will benefit, the industry will benefit.
If you’d like to learn more about how a Counter team can drive positive change and results in your organisation, please get in touch today.
