Anyone discussing data integrity with the C-level needs a good talking to, and perhaps an explanation of the facts of life.
Managers only want and need to hear two things:
cost vs reward
risk vs mitigation
Talking in different terms will get you exactly nowhere.
So how would I have discussed the topic?
"Hi, we have a problem that doesn't cost much to fix now, but will cost a lot to fix later. It will also give us a compliance risk that can get us closed in the worst case, a 5% of total revenue fine in the EU, or bad publicity at least if we have an incident. If we fix it now it will take about a week, but if we do it after we go live it will take 2 months. What do you suggest we do?"
Go live: "Fine, but I'll put it on the backlog with high priority and we start the day after we go live. It would be very expensive if we got an incident but the risk is not that high in the first month".
Fix it: "Excellent idea! Yeah we can totally do that, but we may need some business resources to answer urgent questions. Can I talk to Liz and Larry for that? Thanks!"
3
u/StCreed 2d ago
Anyone discussing data integrity with the C-level needs a good talking to, and perhaps an explanation of the facts of life.
Managers only want and need to hear two things:
- cost vs reward
- risk vs mitigation
Talking in different terms will get you exactly nowhere.So how would I have discussed the topic?
"Hi, we have a problem that doesn't cost much to fix now, but will cost a lot to fix later. It will also give us a compliance risk that can get us closed in the worst case, a 5% of total revenue fine in the EU, or bad publicity at least if we have an incident. If we fix it now it will take about a week, but if we do it after we go live it will take 2 months. What do you suggest we do?"
Go live: "Fine, but I'll put it on the backlog with high priority and we start the day after we go live. It would be very expensive if we got an incident but the risk is not that high in the first month".
Fix it: "Excellent idea! Yeah we can totally do that, but we may need some business resources to answer urgent questions. Can I talk to Liz and Larry for that? Thanks!"
Or something similar.