How to Handle a High-Priority Migration with Minimal Information and a Non-Cooperative Manager?

Question

I need advice on how to handle a challenging situation at my job. 6 months ago, my team underwent a consolidation, and a new manager joined, bringing along three engineers and 100 pipelines from his previous department. The first task he was assigned was to migrate those pipelines to our team’s tech stack.

The problem is that the migration has been significantly delayed. My skip-manager got involved and asked my manager about the value of these pipelines and why all of them need to be migrated. However, my manager insists that all pipelines must be migrated but hasn’t provided clear reasons for their business value.

To address this, an architect was brought in as a neutral party to gather requirements. They discovered that the pipelines lack documentation, which further complicates the migration process. Now my skip-manager has asked me to step in and lead the migration as a high-priority project.

This puts me in a tough position:

I may need to read the code and start migrating pipelines without understanding their business impact.
I’ve suggested to my skip-manager that we first evaluate the business impact of the pipelines, but my manager remains uncooperative and refuses to share useful information.
There’s potential for conflict with my manager, who seems resistant to transparency, while my skip-manager is relying on me to resolve the issue.

I’m unsure how to proceed under these circumstances, especially with the lack of cooperation and documentation. Should I push back and insist on understanding the business value before proceeding? Or should I move forward with the migration despite the risks of misprioritizing pipelines?

Any suggestions or strategies for navigating this situation would be greatly appreciated.

Rahul Pandey · Accepted Answer

It'll be hard for your skip-level manager (or even your manager) to support a decision unless there is some data presented and various options. The key information missing here seems to be "How long will the migration process take?"

Could you take a week to scope this out? Then there are various options you could present:

If you estimate the time of the migration to be short (< 2 weeks), you could just grit your teeth and do it. View it as a trust-building exercise with your manager, and you can deepen your understanding of various pipelines.
- Another option here, if the process is fairly mechanical, is to automate the migration with a script/codemod.
If the scope of work is large but you can easily divide it so other engineers can work in parallel, you could propose this as a team effort. Assign everyone on the team to do a handful of pipeline migrations, and have everyone review each other's changes.
If the scope of work is large and can't be easily partitioned, then you need to have a difficult conversation about whether the migration is worthwhile. Taalk

How to Handle a High-Priority Migration with Minimal Information and a Non-Cooperative Manager?

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