In today's fast-paced digital landscape, keeping your business applications agile, efficient, and user-friendly is paramount. Many organizations are grappling with how to evolve their existing Pega applications to leverage the latest advancements. A recent webinar, "Mastering Constellation Modernization Assistant Tool," offered invaluable insights into this journey, focusing on transforming applications to Pega's cutting-edge Constellation UI. If you missed it, don't worry – we've got the key takeaways to get you started, and we highly recommend listening to the full playback for a deep dive!
Why Modernize to Constellation UI?
The core of this modernization initiative is moving to Constellation UI, Pega's latest and most advanced UI technology. But what does it offer? Constellation UI is designed to dramatically improve:
- Workflow Efficiency: Streamline processes, data models, and case user experiences (UX).
- Channel Experiences: Enhance portals, dashboards, and reporting capabilities, enabling better data insights and actionability for end-users.
- Architectural Consistency: It reinforces Pega’s Center-Out business architecture, ensuring business logic remains central and decoupled from the UI, preventing silos.
This shift is not just about aesthetics; it's about setting your applications up for future trends like autonomous enterprises and AI-enabled processes, while also addressing common pain points like difficult upgrades and performance issues associated with UI-centric development.
The Three Pillars of Modernization Success
According to the experts, a successful modernization journey hinges on a comprehensive understanding of three key areas:
- Traditional UI Capabilities: Know your existing application's foundation – how you built outcomes using canvas-based UI, team templates like Theme Cosmos or UI-Kit, and action sets. Understanding these patterns is crucial.
- Center-Out Business Architecture: Internalize this core Pega philosophy. It advocates for building application logic centrally, leveraging live data, and using case management to put business outcomes first. Constellation UI is purpose-built to help you achieve this architecture more consistently.
- Constellation UI Capabilities: Familiarize yourself with its architecture, stateless DX APIs, and authoring paradigm that emphasizes configuration over UI element building. Understanding its design system, which is optimized for workflow automation, is also vital.
Strategic Approaches to Modernization
Pega offers flexible strategies to help you transition:
- New Applications: For entirely new builds, Constellation UI is the recommended default.
- Incremental Modernization (Modular Approach): This involves blending traditional UI and Constellation UI architectures within a single application. You can run new workflows and portals in Constellation while existing traditional UI cases continue to function. Infinity 25 introduces a one-click mechanism to easily blend architectures, allowing you to innovate quickly with Constellation portals while gradually modernizing older cases.
- Full Application Uplift: For comprehensive transformation of existing cases, a planned approach using the modernization tool is recommended.
The Constellation Modernization Assistant Tool: Your Co-Pilot
The webinar highlighted the "Constellation Modernization Assistant Tool," available on the Pega Marketplace, as a game-changer. This tool drastically reduces the manual effort and complexity of modernization.
It operates in two key modes:
- Analysis Mode (8.7+ versions): This mode performs over 50 tests on your existing application rules (data types, data models, sections, flow actions, etc.). It identifies issues, categorizes them by severity, complexity, and count, and helps you prioritize which issues to tackle first. It can even export findings to Excel for detailed planning. For instance, it can flag misconfigured pick lists (e.g., a text property that should be a table type for Constellation's dropdowns), guiding you to make the necessary changes.
- Migration Mode (23.1+ versions): Once issues are identified and addressed, this mode automates the process of moving assets into a new Constellation application, accelerating your migration.
The tool provides a clear visualization of your modernization project, helping you understand the scope, plan your work, and track progress. For a moderately complex application (e.g., 4-8 assignments, 20 sections, 40 properties), the modernization effort could take approximately two weeks with an enabled developer, according to Pega's heuristics.
The Future of Modernization
Pega is continuously enhancing this tool, with monthly updates planned. Upcoming features include improved grid-to-list view conversions, more granular field type analysis, and exciting new capabilities like a "case-by-case" analysis lens and a "modernization inspector" leveraging AI. These innovations promise to make the modernization journey even smoother.
Don't Miss Out – Listen to the Playback!
This blog post only scratches the surface of the valuable information shared in the webinar. For a detailed demonstration of the tool in action, deeper explanations of the modernization strategies, and answers to pressing questions (including nuances for Customer Service applications leveraging Process Fabric), we encourage you to listen to the full webinar playback.
- Webinar: https://community.pega.com/event/transform-your-applications-master-constellation-modernization-assistant-tool
- Event Q&A: https://community.pega.com/conversations/user-experience/q%26amp%3Ba-from-mastering-modernisation-webinar
Stay tuned to the UX Expert Circle for more insights and future events!
Related Resources
- Modernization Assistant tool experience v. 1.0.8 (part of our Constellation 101 series)
- Pega Marketplace component
- Pega Academy: Constellation Modernization Assistant Component
