The Real Villain in Your Tech Stack: How to Tame Legacy Systems
Because 'Outdated and Overcomplicated' Isn’t a Feature
This is
- your weekly guide and shortcut to mastering emotional intelligence through the power of empathy. I talked recently about how EQ can make or break your ambitions.
Villains. They can arrive in your favorite shows (mine being Doctor Who) or in your tech stack.
It does matter where the villain is - it must be tamed and neutralized. Not doing so will stall your ability to innovate.
Villains slow you down and interrupt your progress. The villain of legacy tech has the potential to do the same.
In the most recent Doctor Who Christmas Special, the villain is the tech. There are no spoilers here, but like any villain, The Doctor and his temporary companion Joy (played by Nicola Coughlan from Bridgerton and Derry Girls) must learn to tame it creatively and change perspective.
Can you tame your villain legacy tech stack the same way? Yes!
Legacy Systems: The Silent Saboteur in Your Tech Stack
I got an invite for a recurring meeting with a new department head that I would be supporting with his day-to-day reporting needs and more strategic ones. We met, hit it off, and decided to create 5 Dashboards to slice and dice the data from a few perspectives.
This worked great in the first few weeks. In the coming months, however, it began to sabotage our scalability.
You see, each Dashboard had about 10 visuals that had to be adjusted, ONE AT A TIME, anytime we had a change. We started our build mostly in a legacy system. The legacy system was easy to use and did not require special access, but there was a real cost in the long term.
I demonstrated to leadership the time it took to maintain and offer options to upgrade the visual displays to a newer system. I collaborated with other folks in our data team to tackle how we could best consolidate. Some of the Dashboards were decommissioned to start. The consolidation and upgrade got moving.
How did I make this work? I garnered the empathy of my stakeholders to show how inefficient this was. This gave me the time I needed to start tackling the challenge of the legacy program instead of spinning my wheels and continuing to use it as business as usual.
Change Is Painful, But Ignoring It Is Worse
On average, 31% of an organization's tech is made up of Legacy systems. Yuck. Even worse, it drains opportunity cost, meaning time could be spent elsewhere on more productive measures rather than maintaining the status quo.
I was on a project team consolidating record data in our CRM. You can use the more modern version or the classic one within this CRM (without naming it).
Our customer service team always used our classic version. This was legacy and not ideal for keeping our data clean. It was missing some capabilities of the more modern version.
This was only discovered upon a deep dive into our systems, which revealed that we were continuously creating duplicates of certain Contact records. We were able to trace this to the Customer Service team. The reason was revealed after some Q&A sessions—they could not find the source of the truth record, so they just created a new one. This was an overcomplication of something that should have been simple - finding the existing record.
We tackled it by doing a few things:
As part of the implementation project, we trained only on the modern system
We showed them the benefits of the new system - the user.
We trained their leadership team to lead the way and update their directory views to align better with the modern interface
We empathized with the Customer Service users' issue and resolved it for them by training and motivating them to use the interface. Creativity and innovation went a long way.
Winning the Long Game: Communicating Benefits with Empathy
I sat next to a colleague leading a major Six Sigma project in a department in the far corner of the building that was perceived to have outdated processes and a bloated staff.
She was one of the kindest people I knew, and she still is, as we are friends many years later.
At first, she tackled the project with enthusiasm. As the weeks and months went on, she got increasingly frustrated as the department, particularly one of its leaders, was not forthcoming with answers to her questions. It felt like pulling teeth. What went wrong here?
We all want to exist. We want to have our place, our mark and presence in the world we are in. This theme comes to light in the Doctor Who Christmas Special. It is also illustrated here in the department leader who climbed to hold their secrets close - revealing them could cease the existence of part of their identity, being their job.
My colleague was assigned to lead an initiative. She did not allocate resources to her team to help initiate the difficult conversations of change management. Her role was to reconstruct the process. To my knowledge, the executive sponsor gave no preface on the purpose of the project to the department stakeholders, and the department stakeholders probably assumed the worst.
With moving away from legacy systems and processes, tough conversations sometimes must be had. Tackle them with empathy, compassion, and open ears. It is better to have these conversations up front vs. avoid them. Avoid them, and there might be avoidance to tame the villain: the legacy system.
Conquering Legacy Systems: Innovate and Influence
If you work a job, whether in tech or not, you have most likely encountered a legacy system. There is just no way around it unless you work for an incredibly wealthy corporation that only has the best and newest tech. This is rare. There are always priorities of where spending is allocated, whether for implementing a new system or the salary of those who will run the change initiative.
If you want change, you must influence decision-makers and detractors. Empathy is a component of strong emotional intelligence, and it will be your strongest tool for making progress.
Listen for pain points. Negotiate so you both win.
Legacy systems can be tamed; it just takes a little innovation and change in perspective.
✅ What I’ve been Analyzing this week (reading, watching, listening, etc.)
📖 I’m reading Empathy (HBR Emotional Intelligence Series) by the Harvard Business Review, Daniel Goleman, Annie McKee, and Adam Waytz. I’m learning about why compassion is a better managerial tactic than toughness.
📺If you want to watch the Doctor Who Christmas special, watch it on Disney+ in North America and Europe. If you are in the UK, you are special, and you can view it on BBC iPlayer.
✍️ I commented on a post by
about “The Great In-Between” about vulnerability.Want more on Empathy and Emotional Intelligence to Elevate your career? 📈
I empower💪tech people to elevate their empathy, to accelerate their careers
What seems obvious to us in tech isn't always clear to business leaders. Upgrading legacy systems requires more than technical skills - it needs influence and empathy. We must translate technical challenges into business language, showing value and potential savings. The key is helping stakeholders see the problem from our perspective, not just expecting them to understand automatically.