A calmer way through a stressful problem
When something business-critical is going wrong, the last thing you need is a sales pitch. Here’s how I approach it.
1. I understand the problem properly. I sit with you and the people who use the system, and I map out how your business actually runs and where it’s hurting. This is the step most rushed projects skip — and the reason they go wrong.
2. I steady things. Often the first job is simply to stop the bleeding — to make the fragile thing reliable and buy us breathing room — before any bigger decisions.
3. We look forward, together. Once the pressure’s off, we can talk about where you actually want the business to go, and how the technology can take you there. This is usually the moment people realise the thing they dreaded has become an opportunity.
On rebuilding from scratch
If you’ve inherited a system you dislike, your instinct is probably to throw it away and start fresh. I’ll often advise against it — and I’m arguing against my own short-term interest when I do. The trouble is that an old, unloved system usually contains years of business rules and hard edge-cases that everyone has forgotten are there. Rebuilding from zero means rediscovering all of them the hard way, at great cost, while the business waits.
More often, the right path is to stabilise what you’ve got, then evolve it deliberately — modernising piece by piece, adding the new things you need, and retiring the old safely. Less drama, less risk, far less cost. Sometimes a full rebuild is right — and if so, I’ll tell you that too.