Let’s imagine for a moment...you just made the strategic decision to transition to a new technology across your enterprise. For this example, let’s say you are migrating from a traditional legacy data warehouse to AWS’ Cloud, or piloting a new PaaS model. In a perfect world, you not only want the implementation to go smoothly, but you also want to do it in a manner that mitigates your risk and reduces your costs.
How do you do this? We suggest a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that is reusable versus just a proof of concept, for a few simple reasons.
It saves you money.
In a traditional testing model, you build out the technology with a proof of concept (POC) test sample. This costs money for development and a substantial amount of your team’s time. If it works as planned, you scrap the POC and redevelop from the ground up in a development, QA, and production environment. While the POC allows you to test your strategy and the technology, it leaves you with nothing at the end that is reusable, except whatever knowledge your team gained during the test. With a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), you build a real model that can be deployed into production using a small sample of data or business scope. If it works as planned, you don’t start over from scratch instead, you can scale it out across the enterprise. Your investment in time and money is then reused going forward, and not just tossed aside.
It scales.
Once you have a working MVP that has been tested in one business area, you’re able to scale it across the enterprise to other business units or data sectors. This further mitigates your risk by using a working technology you already have live in production.
It tests your skill sets.
Piloting a new technology by creating a MVP also lets you test and validate your internal team’s skill set. Do you have the knowledge and skills necessary to implement and scale the new technology? Building a MVP allows you to gain visibility into your team’s expertise and validate if additional skills and training are needed.
We believe in making smart technology decisions that benefit both the IT and business side of your organization. A MVP lets you test the technology, test the scalability, test the governance rules and test your internal skill sets. Why throw away your efforts and money with the traditional testing models, when you can build something real that works going forward?
