🛑 Legacy Systems Are Holding You Back
🎥 Episode 1 of 10 — From Legacy to Engineering Excellence with Azure DevOps
Your legacy systems aren’t just old—they’re a bottleneck to innovation.
Every outdated process, fragile deployment, and unscalable architecture adds friction to your engineering teams.
And here’s the truth: the more friction you add, the more your teams give up on doing things the right way.
🔒 It’s like locking a door—not to stop the expert, but to dissuade everyone else from even trying.
That’s what legacy systems do:
🧱 Long lead times
🧱 Fragile, manual releases
🧱 Architectures that can’t scale
🧱 Engineers spending more time fighting systems than building value
At NKD Agility, we help you identify and eliminate the friction that’s holding your teams—and your innovation—back. Visit
https://nkdagility.com
Because engineering excellence starts when you stop working around your systems and start working through them—with intent, clarity, and flow.
👇 Watch now. Follow the full 10-part series to learn how Azure DevOps and NKD Agility can help you modernize the right way.
#LegacySystems #AzureDevOps #EngineeringExcellence #DevOpsTransformation #TechLeadership #NKDAgility #MartinHinshelwood #SoftwareArchitecture #InnovationStrategy #ModernEngineering
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For most organizations, they have a ton of legacy systems. And legacy systems are holding back their ability to innovate. They’re holding back their ability to move towards the new features and capabilities that they’re looking for.
Mostly because it gets in the way. It adds friction. Anytime you’ve got a bunch of engineers working on something and you put something in their way, it creates a little bit of friction, right? And if you have enough friction, then most people give up. Most people are not, you know, the sort of person that’s going to try and fiddle with it until they get it working. They just want it to work.
And if you put enough things in the way, it’s the same reason that you put a lock on your house or an alarm on your car. It’s not going to stop a professional thief, somebody who’s really trying to get around those things, but it dissuades the vast majority of people. And that’s about friction. You’re adding friction in that case for a positive outcome, not having your car stolen.
But in engineering work, in organizational systems, every piece of friction you add in the way makes it less likely that people will bother doing the thing that you want them to do. So part of working towards these ideas around engineering excellence is that we want to remove the friction, right? We want to remove that friction because what that friction leads to—and legacy systems are a huge part of that friction—is long lead times, fragile deployments, and your architectures just don’t scale because the effort to change the system to get it to the point where it can scale is just insurmountable.
And that friction can be seen at the engineering level with the engineering teams having difficulty. It can be seen at management level with approvals, right? Why is this going to take so long? What is this big investment in this thing that’s not going to provide any value to our direct value to our customers? Well, it’s going to provide long-term value to our customers. In six months, we’ll be able to increase the number of users that we have. And it just often doesn’t fly because there’s not a clear understanding of what it is. There’s not a clear understanding of what the problem is and there’s not a clear understanding of how do we reduce the friction in order to make things successful.
And once you have that friction in these legacy systems—and there’s nothing wrong with systems that have been around for a long time, that’s not a legacy system. I mean, it is, right? It’s a system that’s been around for a long time. But for example, Windows has been around for a really long time. 1985, something like that. That’s a really long time, right? That’s nearly 40 years. Forty or fifty years of Microsoft. They just celebrated their 50th anniversary and 40 years of Windows at least.
So why don’t we think of Windows as a legacy system? Because it’s continually updated and maintained and people collaborate on how do we get rid of these little frictions that come along. It starts with a bit of sandpaper, right, getting in our way, but it turns into a bunch of boulders and the engine seizes up and we can’t move forward.
So, your legacy systems are what’s holding back your ability to innovate, to shorten your lead times, to improve quality in your products, and to scale your architectures. You need to fix them.
