Describe your approach when you inherit a mess.

I've inherited several. The worst was the state of the agency's technology before I arrived. Three separate enterprise tools that didn't talk to each other. $5,100 a month in combined fees. Staff working around broken features instead of reporting them because they'd given up believing anything would change.

My approach: don't clean up. Replace.

I don't mean that recklessly. I mean that when a system is fundamentally misaligned with the people who use it, no amount of patching fixes the misalignment. WorkEasy was buggy. But the real problem wasn't bugs. It was that a generic enterprise tool was trying to solve a specific problem. Fixing the bugs would still leave a generic tool.

So I replaced it with something purpose-built. Same for ProviderSoft. Same for Rethink BA. In each case, the replacement was simpler, cheaper, and more aligned with how people actually worked.

When I can't replace, my approach is archaeological: trace the current behavior back to the original intent. Every mess was once someone's best attempt. The code that looks insane usually made sense when it was written, under constraints that no longer exist. Understanding why it's messy is the first step to making it clean. Skipping that step just creates a different mess.