Who Needs Documentation When You Can Just Reverse Engineer It?

Here's what happens when you skip the workshops and go straight to the source.

Here's a question: what do you actually do when a client has 15 business processes running in a workflow tool they're leaving - and zero documentation to show for it?

You could run a workshop. You could bring in the subject matter experts. You could spend weeks mapping out what everyone thinks the workflow does, versus what it actually does. Or you could just go straight to the source.

That's what we did for a recent project in financial services. Our client was moving from Nintex to Flowingly. Fifteen workflows to rebuild. Some compliance-heavy processes. The kind of workflows where a missed step isn't just inefficient, it's a problem.

No formal documentation existed. And their team of subject matter experts had more important things to do than sit in workshops explaining what was already running perfectly well in production.

So instead of starting with interviews and trying to work forward to a design, we went directly into Nintex and worked backwards. Every step, every condition, every approval path - all right there in the existing workflow. No translation needed. No "I think it works like this." Just the actual logic, as built.

This turned out to be faster and simpler than we initially expected. 

Faster as the source of truth was right in front of us. Fifteen workflows, reverse engineered, captured, and rebuilt in Flowingly.

Average time per workflow: 12-15 hours.

Once each workflow was built, we flipped the process - running through every branch and output against what the original Nintex workflow produced. Think of it like re-reading a recipe to make sure you haven't skipped an ingredient. We ran around 30 SME sessions across the project. Not to gather requirements - to sign off on what we'd already built. That's a subtle but important difference. SMEs aren't great at describing abstract processes from scratch.

They're very good at looking at something and saying "yes, that's right" or "no, that bit's wrong." We leaned into that. It was faster for everyone.

The total project: 15 workflows, approximately 226 hours, for a major financial services firm - across a set of compliance-sensitive processes where getting it wrong genuinely matters.

The speed came from the methodology, not from cutting corners. Reverse engineering the requirements directly from Nintex meant we didn't waste time on documentation that ends up being wrong anyway. Testing backwards meant our SME sessions were decisive rather than exploratory.

That's the kind of migration we like doing.

If your organisation is sitting on a pile of undocumented workflows in a platform you're leaving, we should probably have a chat. Get in touch.