Week 916

Matt Kirkland

It's week 916, and this week we handed off one of our longest-running projects to an internal client team.

This is exciting.

This project has been running under the BNB aegis for a decade! That's a really long time in software. Most web software projects don't live that long, and in this decade we've built a great tool (and better relationships!) that serves the client doing a REALLY big job.

And it's grown too. We started out with a super simple brief: 'Make a website with a couple of graphs. We'll give you the data.' And it's grown from there. Now it's a suite of tools for web and mobile, that serves a huge organization and manage billions of dollars. And it's still going strong: it should be used for a long time still.

But the client has always had the instruction to take this in-house for themselves - so after months of preparation and onboarding, the client officially has the keys now.

After ten years, that's a weird feeling.

It's not unusual for one of our projects to transition from our control to the client's. In fact, that's good! We want to build a useful tool for every client, and then put the keys to the new tool into their hands.

The metaphorical 'keys' here mean at minimum control over admin functions: they can add and update, configure and manage the tool, all without asking BNB for anything. Our ideal state is that the client can use and manage the new platform all by themselves, forever.

At maximum the metaphorical 'keys' here can means we hand over the development process also: so the client's team can actually update and manage the software itself, from code to deployment.

Of course, in practice this doesn't happen very often. Most of our clients either don't have the internal capacity or appetite for the kind of work we do. They don't want to be a digital product studio! So then, even as the client uses and manages their tool, we're still around to help with design and tech changes.

But on this one, the internal team really does want to do this! So this week, we handed over control of our ten-year-old child. It's a pretty exciting landmark.

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PS: This process has made me wonder: what's the median end-of-life for a BNB project? It would be interesting to do a retrospective or survey on how and why a BNB-powered tool ends its service. A task for another weeknote, I think.