NBV Web is alive!

This week we hit a massive milestone – our multi-million dollar refresh of our flagship product went live at our first client. Part ‘woo hoo’ and part ‘phew’!

NBV is our current flagship product. It’s done amazingly well – but it is 17 years old this year. And that’s 17 real years in internet years so in technical terms it is positively ancient. A few years ago we committed to refreshing the front end, adding beautiful design and user experience to what is a large and complex application.

And we didn’t do this lightly. It’s a big change, requiring new skills and new patterns of thinking. It’s also a big change for our clients and end users – some of whom have been working on the old tool for 10 years. And whilst the old front end might have some quirks – our power users know every one of those quirks and are totally comfortable with them.

We’ve had a super interesting journey to get to this point. Enabled by cloud, spoilt by choice, constrained by free developers ( too much industry related work – hi Power of Choice! ). Perhaps a post for another day; the project was at times our own mini version of Dr Seuss’ classic ‘Oh the Places You’ll Go’.

But we got there.

We did a lot more than ‘just’ make it. I have a quality aspiration sitting on my wall, with some scientific measurements of quality such as ‘me unhappy’, ‘what most company’s delivery’ and my favourite ‘PRIDE’. You can tell I’m highly technical.

PRIDE – well that’s the goal when we deliver. I want to go home feeling like we’re doing something great. I want our team to go home with a warm fuzzy feeling that we can go the extra mile, that we over deliver, that we’re doing a lot more than the bare minimum.

Verifying that we’re on the right track is difficult; because most of the time we hear the negative feedback ( “The new screen is not as fast as the old.” ) or no feedback at all. But we’ve worked through our backlog, we’ve updated screen after screen based on our real world user’s experience. Getting through those first UATs and production rollouts is certainly one way to think we’re getting there.

But then this is next level – one of our key users raised a support ticket. Super experienced, super knowledgeable senior leader at one of our clients. What had we done wrong? What did we need to resolve…. but it turns out we didn’t really need an ITIL process for this ticket….

How often do you get a support ticket with ‘your software is awesome’?

Getting the new product completed has been a major labour of love for many of our team here – getting a compliment like this has absolutely made our week!

So NBV Web is live at our first client. Phew! We’re looking forward to rolling out to all clients over the next few months – and then the next 17 years of NBV ( now on web! ).