Case Study
Managing sideways on a legacy system
Legacy enterprise claims platform — MFA rollout · Project Manager III · 2024-2025
At a glance
Role
Project Manager (Level III)
Duration
2-4 months
Team
2-3
Driver
Compliance mandate
System
One of the company's oldest platforms
The situation
A new compliance directive required two-factor authentication on one of our oldest systems. Small team, clear scope, hard external deadline.
The challenge
The challenge wasn't technical. It was a senior engineer with a decade of experience who preferred to work autonomously and pushed back on process and oversight early on. I had no formal authority over her, she was substantially more experienced than me, and the project genuinely depended on her. The internal timeline slipped as a result.
What I did
Worked it through directly instead of escalating.
The escalation path was available and I didn't use it. Escalating would have solved the immediate friction and permanently damaged a working relationship on a small team I'd be working with again. Overriding her would have done the same thing faster. I worked through it with her, and as the project progressed she adapted.
Protected the real deadline, absorbed the fake one.
The internal target date slipped. The client's actual deadline did not. Knowing which of the two was negotiable let me give ground on the relationship problem without giving ground on the commitment that mattered.
Closed out properly.
Handled a set of minor post-implementation feedback items rather than declaring done at deployment.
The outcome
- Compliance-mandated MFA delivered on a legacy system within the client's actual deadline.
- Only the team's internal target date was missed.
- Minor post-implementation feedback only.
- The working relationship survived — and improved — through the project.
What I took from it
Authority you have to invoke is authority you've mostly already lost. On a small team, the cost of winning an argument by escalation is usually higher than the cost of the delay you're escalating about.