Health 2 Employment — Legacy System Continuity & Redesign
Maintained a legacy system handling multiple business-critical workflows while designing a modern alternative to replace it — ensuring operational continuity throughout the transition planning.
The Challenge
Health 2 Employment operates in occupational health — a regulated, business-critical sector where system downtime is not an option. Their existing platform handled multiple essential workflows but was built on legacy PHP platform that had accumulated technical debt over years of incremental development. It was difficult to maintain, slow to adapt, and increasingly fragile.
The business faced a classic legacy dilemma: the system was too important to switch off, but too costly to keep patching indefinitely. They needed both immediate stability and a credible path forward.
The Approach
We took a dual-track approach: maintaining the existing system while simultaneously designing the alternative. Key work included:
- Stabilising the legacy PHP platform to ensure business continuity — addressing the most critical fragilities first
- Mapping all business-critical workflows currently handled by the legacy system to inform the replacement design
- Designing a modern software architecture that would handle all current workflows while enabling future flexibility
- Producing a detailed technical specification for the replacement system, structured so it could be built in phases without disrupting operations
- Working closely with the business team to ensure the proposed solution mapped accurately to operational requirements
The maintenance and design work ran in parallel — the business couldn’t wait for a clean transition, and the replacement design had to be grounded in the reality of the existing system.
The Outcome
- Legacy system stabilised with critical vulnerabilities addressed
- Full workflow mapping completed across all business-critical processes
- Modern replacement architecture designed and documented
- Phased implementation roadmap produced to minimise operational risk during transition
- Business team equipped with a clear, actionable path away from legacy dependency
Technologies & Methods
PHP (legacy system maintenance), JavaScript, software architecture design, business continuity planning, requirements analysis, system migration planning.
About this engagement
This was a Transform engagement: operating on a live system that couldn’t be taken offline while simultaneously designing its successor. The combination of immediate stabilisation and forward-looking architecture is characteristic of the hardest kind of technical work.