This curriculum spans the technical, organisational, and operational dimensions of a multi-phase systems review, comparable in scope to an internal capability program that supports enterprise-wide modernisation planning across interconnected application portfolios.
Module 1: Defining Scope and Stakeholder Alignment
- Selecting which legacy systems to include in the review based on business impact, technical debt, and upcoming project dependencies.
- Negotiating access to system documentation and logs when owners are in different departments or external vendors.
- Mapping integration touchpoints across departments to identify hidden interdependencies before scoping the review.
- Deciding whether to include shadow IT applications based on usage volume and risk exposure.
- Establishing thresholds for system criticality using uptime requirements and user count data.
- Documenting conflicting stakeholder priorities and creating a weighted scoring model for inclusion in the review.
Module 2: Data Inventory and Dependency Mapping
- Using network packet analysis to discover undocumented API calls between systems when metadata is incomplete.
- Choosing between manual data flow interviews and automated discovery tools based on system age and access permissions.
- Resolving discrepancies between documented data schemas and actual database structures in production environments.
- Classifying data sensitivity levels to determine which systems require additional compliance scrutiny.
- Identifying redundant data stores that violate single-source-of-truth principles but remain in use due to performance needs.
- Deciding whether to map batch job dependencies that run outside business hours but affect daily operations.
Module 3: Technical Debt Assessment and Codebase Evaluation
- Running static analysis tools on legacy codebases with outdated syntax and incompatible build environments.
- Interpreting cyclomatic complexity metrics in context when third-party libraries dominate the codebase.
- Assessing risk of undocumented custom patches applied directly to production binaries.
- Determining whether to include configuration files and scripts in technical debt scoring.
- Documenting absence of version control for critical components and its implications for change tracking.
- Deciding how to weight obsolete frameworks versus poor coding practices in the final assessment score.
Module 4: Integration Architecture and Interface Review
- Evaluating whether point-to-point integrations should be refactored into an ESB based on current transaction volume.
- Identifying integrations using deprecated protocols like FTP or SOAP without encryption in regulated environments.
- Assessing retry logic and error handling in asynchronous messaging systems during network outages.
- Documenting lack of idempotency in APIs that cause data duplication during retries.
- Measuring latency across integration chains to isolate performance bottlenecks.
- Deciding whether to retain middleware adapters that compensate for incompatible data formats.
Module 5: Security and Compliance Posture Analysis
- Verifying certificate expiration dates on internal APIs that use self-signed SSL certificates.
- Reviewing authentication mechanisms for systems that rely on hardcoded credentials in configuration files.
- Assessing audit trail completeness for systems that overwrite logs after 30 days, violating retention policies.
- Identifying systems storing personally identifiable information without data masking or encryption at rest.
- Mapping access controls to job roles and detecting privilege creep in long-standing user accounts.
- Documenting exceptions granted for compliance requirements and their renewal timelines.
Module 6: Performance and Scalability Benchmarking
- Designing load tests for batch systems that only run weekly and cannot be interrupted.
- Isolating database contention issues from application-level memory leaks during peak usage.
- Measuring response time degradation as data volume increases in monolithic applications.
- Deciding whether to include third-party service SLAs in end-to-end performance evaluations.
- Documenting caching strategies that improve performance but risk serving stale data.
- Assessing auto-scaling configurations in cloud-hosted applications during traffic spikes.
Module 7: Change Management and Operational Readiness
- Reviewing deployment scripts for hardcoded environment variables that cause promotion failures.
- Assessing rollback procedures for systems lacking versioned backups or schema migration scripts.
- Identifying single points of knowledge by mapping support responsibilities across shifts and locations.
- Evaluating monitoring coverage for critical transactions and defining missing alert thresholds.
- Documenting use of manual runbooks that have not been updated after system upgrades.
- Verifying backup restoration intervals and testing recovery point objectives for key applications.
Module 8: Roadmap Development and Prioritization
- Ranking modernization initiatives using a matrix of business value versus implementation complexity.
- Deciding whether to decommission systems with low usage but high maintenance costs.
- Allocating budget across security patches, performance fixes, and feature enhancements.
- Sequencing integration refactoring to avoid breaking dependent downstream processes.
- Defining interim controls for high-risk systems when full remediation is delayed.
- Establishing KPIs for measuring success of review outcomes over a 12-month horizon.
