Legacy pension system modernization enables incremental transformation without service disruption

The client administers pension benefits for active and retired municipal employees across one of the United States' largest city governments. Its Pension Administration System, written in COBOL and running on an IBM mainframe, represented decades of accumulated business logic critical to day-to-day operations. A full cutover replacement carried unacceptable risk; the system needed to keep running without interruption while the organization rebuilt around it.

Leadership required a strategic partner capable of operating on two tracks simultaneously: sustaining legacy system operations while designing and delivering the next-generation platform, and doing so under the governance and accountability standards appropriate for a public pension fund.

InfoPeople was selected through a competitive process as one of the agency's strategic partners for the Legacy Replacement Project: a five-phase initiative to build and implement a new pension administration system designed to automate functions currently performed manually and deliver expanded self-service capabilities to members through a modernized member portal.

We assembled a 30+ person team spanning the full transformation lifecycle: mainframe developers providing legacy operational support, and a modernization team comprising project managers, business analysts, QA specialists, UI/UX designers, Java developers, BI analysts, and content management specialists.

Working with the agency's internal project leadership, our program manager helped define an incremental deployment strategy, carving the overall system into discrete modules that could be designed, developed, tested, and deployed without disrupting active operations. One of the first major releases migrated document management off the legacy content management platform, delivering immediate cost savings on licensing and maintenance while reducing the complexity footprint of the legacy environment.

InfoPeople also led the Organizational Change Management workstream, developing communications protocols and stakeholder engagement strategies to keep internal and external audiences informed throughout the program. A contract manager was embedded to coordinate vendors, purchase orders, and compliance documentation across the initiative.

To prepare the agency for the post-transformation operating environment, we delivered a comprehensive workforce analysis report, defining role standards, assessing current competencies, and identifying gaps across the future-state organization in alignment with Civil Service System requirements.