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Project Triage
Retail Platform Migration
Verdict
This project is running on borrowed time and the people doing the work know it. The Black Friday deadline was set before the technical scope was understood, the agency and the internal team are working from different versions of the brief, and the board is receiving a sanitised picture that doesn't reflect what's actually happening. Without an honest reset this week, the choice becomes: miss the date, or go live broken.
Project Summary
A mid-market retailer is migrating a 12-year-old e-commerce platform to Shopify Plus ahead of Black Friday — a date fixed by the board before the full technical scope was understood. The project is three weeks behind the internal plan. The board doesn't know.
Stakeholders & Team
The COO owns the outcome and has publicly committed the launch date to the board. The delivery team is split between two internal developers and an external Shopify agency in a dispute over scope creep. No one has the authority to formally change the scope or push the date.
Key Risks & Issues
- Data migration complexity was significantly underestimated — a spike three weeks ago revealed product variant structures that weren't in the original brief and haven't been rescoped.
- The agency and the internal team are working from different versions of the requirements document with no change control in place.
- The COO's weekly board update is written by the project coordinator, not the technical lead — the board is receiving an optimistic picture.
- There is no rollback plan if the migration fails during the Black Friday trading window.
What Good Looks Like
The new platform handles Black Friday traffic without incident, with the legacy system available as a verified fallback for 30 days post-launch. The COO and the technical lead have agreed in writing on what 'done' means before any go-live approval is given.
Next Steps
- 1Brief the COO on the true project state this week — the gap between the status reports and reality needs to close before it becomes a crisis.
- 2Run a scope lock session with the COO, technical lead, and agency PM to agree a single requirements document and freeze it.
- 3Define the go/no-go criteria for the Black Friday launch: name the criteria, name the person who makes the call, and agree a fallback if those criteria aren't met.
One Honest Assessment
The conditions for a bad outcome are all present: a deadline set under commercial pressure, a team without authority to escalate, and a communications chain filtering out bad news. The date may still be recoverable if scope is frozen and the board is briefed honestly this week — but that conversation is being avoided, and avoiding it is what turns a difficult project into a failed one.
10 May 2026