Before You Move the Wall

Author: Javier de la Sierra, Director of Software Development, DecisivEdge

Those who know me, know I’m a big metaphor guy. But for the rest of you – fair warning – you gotta bear with me.

A couple of years ago, I reconstructed my house. And I found out the hard way that before you move a wall, you should probably understand why it’s there in the first place.

Maybe it’s load-bearing. Maybe somebody put it there 30 years ago for good reason but is no longer necessary. Regardless – whatever the reason – tearing it down before you understand its purpose is a pretty good way to create a much bigger problem.

The longer I work in technology, the more I realize businesses aren’t all that different.

One of the biggest mistakes I see during modernization projects is assuming the technology is the hard part. It isn’t – flat out.

In my experience, the hardest part is understanding the client’s business.

Here’s what I’ve learned over the course of my 24 years of work:

1. Don’t mistake complexity for confusion. 

Whenever I hear someone say, “Why on earth would they do it this way?” my first instinct is usually to ask a different question: “What problem were they trying to solve?”

Sometimes the answer is that the process is outdated and should absolutely be changed. But more often than not, there’s a story behind it that needs to be heard because it is very telling.

Look, you don’t have to keep every process. But you should understand it before you tear it apart.

2. Business knowledge compounds.

Technology gets your foot in the door. Business knowledge gets you invited back.

Understanding how an organization operates takes months – sometimes years – of conversations, observations, and experience. Eventually you’re not just solving technical problems; you’re helping solve business problems.

That’s where the real value starts to show up.

3. Governance matters more than people think.

The word itself gets a bad rep, but I’ve seen good governance rescue more projects than good technology ever has.

Governance creates consistency. It gives teams a shared way of planning, communicating, making decisions, and managing change.

When it’s done well, projects become less dependent on individuals and more resilient as organizations evolve.

4. Cross-training isn’t just for the gym. 

I’ve never liked building teams around a single expert. It creates a bottleneck, and eventually it creates risk. Knowledge works best when it’s shared. Cross-training increases flexibility, and helps organizations keep moving when even the best plans (inevitably) change.

5. Context is king: the best solution has to fit reality. 

I’ve seen technically elegant solutions fail because they didn’t fit the realities of how an organization worked. I’ve also seen simpler solutions succeed because they addressed the real business need.

The longer I do this, the more convinced I become that context is king. Technology matters, but understanding the environment where that technology will live matters even more.

6. Keep your eyes open. 

When you spend enough time understanding a client’s business, you start noticing things. A new leadership hire. A job posting. A shift in priorities. A recurring challenge that keeps surfacing in different conversations.

Individually, those signals may not mean much. But together, they tell a story.

Tying this back to context – the more of it you have, the easier it becomes to connect the dots. And sometimes that means identifying an opportunity that the client hadn’t considered before.

Technology expertise matters; it always will. But technology expertise without business understanding is like having ALL the tools to move the wall without knowing whether the roof is resting on it.

So, whether I’m reconstructing a house or helping a client modernize a system, I try to follow the same rule:

Before you move the wall, understand why it was put there to begin with.