When critical dependencies go critical 🔥

Alysha Khan • public
• 2 min read

So remember that migration go-live I wrote about last week?

It got pushed to Monday because there was a huge backlog in the MKTO <> SFDC sync that prevented us from turning on the new instance on Friday as planned.

So classic it almost hurts.

Two important lessons come to mind from this delightful week.

The first lesson is for me personally as a consultant: managing the MKTO <> SFDC integration and sync was not part of my scoped work for this project so I honestly did not pay much attention to what was going in that corner.

But good consulting is about understanding all the potential impacts of the work you are undertaking, even the parts that you do not directly own. I definitely could have done a better job of thinking through all the adjacent work taking place and how it impacted the core work my team was undertaking.

The second lesson is that almost all important marketing operations projects have critical dependencies. These are milestones in the project plan that must go as planned in order for the rest of the project plan to proceed as expected.

We did not fully plan for our critical dependency so here's how I would have ideally handled it.

Step 0 is acknowledging that all project plans have critical dependencies and making sure you can identify them. If you can't identify it, then you need to take a much closer at the work you are completing and how all the pieces work together.

After that, you need to understand:

  • Why the critical dependency exists i.e. does this problem actually need to exist or have we accidentally created an unnecessary problem for ourselves?
  • Why it is critical i.e. why is this dependency a big problem vs. a small or medium problem?
  • And what exactly the impact of the critical dependency will be upstream and downstream if things don't go to plan

From here, you need to create:

  • A backup plan (or multiple depending on the scenario) so when things hit the fan or fall apart, there is less panicking and more doing and pivoting.
  • A communication plan to make sure this critical dependency and the backup plans are appropriately communicated in advance to all relevant parties so again, when things hit the fan, there is less calming down stakeholders and more kicking butt.

In an ideal world, no one is surprised or confused if things go sideways.

And now, I'm going to find some time this week to go back through all my active projects and make sure we are a little bit more prepared for all eventualities.

See you next week,

🫶🏽 Alysha

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