Platform Forward GroupRetire something this quarter
The habit that keeps an estate honest, in two hundred words.
Every quarter, retire something. One system, one integration, one server, one scheduled job. Small counts.
Not as a project. As a habit, with a name on it, the way finance closes the books. The team that retires something every quarter keeps three muscles that atrophy everywhere else: they know what they run, they know how to turn things off safely, and they remember that turning things off is allowed.
The estates that scare us are never the big ones. They are the ones where nobody can recall the last decommission. That fact alone prices the whole engagement, because it means every removal will be a first, and firsts are where the surprises live. Decommissioning is a project when you have not done it in years. It is a checklist when you did it in June.
Pick the candidate at the quarterly review. Smallest, dustiest, least defended. Archive its data, document its absence, take the monitoring down last. Then put the win where the budget people can see it.
Four retirements a year is not a modernization program. It is the proof you could run one.