pivotalinnovations LTD
Practical resources · Discovery worksheet
Legacy system discovery checklist
Recover the knowledge you need before changing a system nobody fully understands.
Free to use. No sign-up. Work through this with the colleagues closest to the problem.
Purpose and people
- What business outcomes depend on this system? Who uses it and who supports it?
- Find business owners, long-serving users, suppliers and people who handle exceptions.
- Separate observed facts, assumptions and unknowns. Record evidence and the person who can confirm it.
Rules, data and dependencies
- Inventory interfaces, databases, scheduled jobs, reports, file exchanges and manual steps.
- Trace a representative record from creation through change, use and deletion.
- Capture validation rules, calculations, status changes and undocumented workarounds.
- Record where credentials and configuration are managed without copying secrets into the worksheet.
Operations and risk
- Identify critical dates, peak periods, recovery arrangements and support constraints.
- Confirm access through authorised owners. Use approved read-only discovery where possible.
- List upstream and downstream teams, failure impacts, data quality concerns and single points of knowledge.
Turn discovery into a plan
- Draw a current-state map and review it with business and technical colleagues.
- Prioritise unknowns by consequence and test the most important assumptions first.
- Deliver a dependency register, business-rule catalogue and options for retain, improve, integrate or replace.
A practical starting point to adapt to your organisation, rather than a substitute for project-specific decisions.