I would like to start my blog with a famous quote: “Necessity is the mother of invention.”
The overall concept revolves around Product Engineering. Research of a new tool, its analysis on functionalities which fulfils the requirements, design of roadmap, development in it, unit testing to nil issues, signoff from stakeholders, rollout in production to use by users and maintenance of applications for sustainable utilization.
The Need for Change
The plan was to shut down Siganvio, a SAP Business Process Management (BPM) product due to expensive license cost, maintenance & support fees and advancing to better technology. We need to do colossal activities before the expiry of the license, which included Workflow Migration, migration of data, consistent belief of users on IT tools and their accessibility to data.
Lookout of an alternative
Initially, there was no plan but only a specific date on which SAP would revoke the licenses of administrators and users of Signavio, because renewing it for five long years was never an option. There was an effort made to extend the license for a year to allow sometime for preparation of a roadmap, but received denial from SAP. Meanwhile, we were exploring a better sustainable tool within the organization or outside. Finally, we found Opentext Appworks Platform, an in-house bought tool which suffices almost all our requirements. It came up with a perpetual license, less maintenance fee, an environment to make business processes and better integration with other tools like SAP, Postgre-SQL, etc., with ease.
Transition Process
Now, with only four months in hand, we pledged ourselves to migrate all serviceable workflows to Opentext. The goal and the timeline were crystal clear, but the major challenge was no skilled professionals within the organization who could develop workflows in Opentext, no team and no leader, but only the willful courage to complete the task. Quickly, technology SMEs joined to understand the problem and within a few days, a roadmap was laid. Contractors skilled in the BPM domain specific to Opentext got hired, internal resources got onboarded for the project to learn quickly, team leaders of different domains were brought up to enlighten the right path, business analysts were made ready to bridge developers and stakeholders and most importantly, a leader was nominated to execute the project. Within less than a week, all people involved in the project came under a single roof, leaving their base locations to accomplish the mammoth task. Office mornings start with presentations, whiteboards and reference workflows by analysts to make developers understand the processes with no room for ambiguity to build up replicas optimizing the old workflows. Now dedicately they sat hours to forge thoughts into actions, which ultimately evolved into applications which would be used by hundreds of users. It was never easy to efficiently work with new faces within such a short timeline, but nevertheless, the only motivation was accomplishing the goal. Gradually developed Workflow Migration were put in unit testing, where a tussle between testers, aka analysts and developers started. But ultimately, a reliable process got readied for demonstration with process owners and users. Training feedback and issues came up, which were taken care of, expecting a sign-off from stakeholders. Slowly, one by one each workflow was signed off, taking us closer to our target with a fast-ticking clock.
GO LIVE
Therefore the final day came when incessant toil and hard work for some couple of months was about to GO Live. Fingers crossed with the initiation workflows parsing and boom “Not readable data”. Yes, an error that no one expected to come up. No idea, no clue of what was happening. But here come tech leads, with their years of experience, who put up all the efforts, introspected multiple app codes and continuously operated for half a day to finally resolve the issue. Now, started production movement and bang, the workflow migrated successfully with no problem. The room filled up with giggles, happy faces, and tears rejoicing like a war has been triumphant. Eventually, we got all the workflows live in a couple of days to be used by users.
Conclusion
Hence, a story with just targets having no plans but grit, resilience and the will of a team got a tremendous task accomplished. Later on, observations and issues from users were collated and rectified soon. Moving from development to support and maintenance work has given us relief since our brain used to work numerous hours continuously thinking of solutions, ideas and designs. The successful Workflow Migration from Signavio to Opentext marks a significant milestone in our continuous efforts to provide pioneering product engineering solutions to our users. We at STL Digital are committed to helping organizations deal with complex solutions and achieve goals within tight deadlines with a devoted team working together.
