Increasing Project Resilience at Scale

Your "perfect" system is about to break. Not because it's badly built. But because it's missing the one thing nobody told you about. After watching countless systems fail (including $100k+ implementations), I discovered something surprising: The most "basic" systems often outperform the most expensive ones. After helping 50+ businesses transform their operations, I've distilled what makes systems truly resilient into this essential framework – "The ABCs of an Unbreakable System." Here's what separates systems that survive from those that thrive: A is for Adaptability: Systems that evolve with your business B is for Boundaries: Clear guardrails that prevent overload C is for Consistency: The backbone of scalable results ...all the way to... Z is for Zero Friction: Where efficiency meets sustainability When you build with these principles, you create: * Operations that prevent fires, not just fight them * Teams that scale smoothly, not frantically * Results that compound, not collapse * Systems that strengthen under pressure, not break The most expensive system isn't the most reliable. The most complex system isn't the most effective. The best system is the one your team actually uses. Here's your 3-step action plan to start today: 1️⃣ Audit Your Current Systems → Pick your most painful process → Check which principles it's missing (Adaptability? Boundaries? Zero Friction?) → Map where it breaks under pressure 2️⃣ Start Small, Start Strong → Pick ONE system to upgrade (start with the most painful) → Focus on implementing just TWO principles → Document the before/after impact 3️⃣ Scale What Works → Share wins with your team → Replicate successful changes across other systems → Build a monthly system review using this framework 💬 Which principle resonates most with your current challenges? Drop a letter below, and I'll share specific strategies to strengthen that area. ♻️ Share this with your team as a reminder: strong systems scale. ➕ Follow Will for frameworks that create resilience, not chaos.

When systems scale the problems you face are rarely about raw throughput. They’re about resilience. Take a common scenario like the one below! A downstream service starts slowing down. Not failing, just getting sluggish.  At first glance, this doesn’t look catastrophic but if left unchecked, it can snowball into a cascading failure across your ecosystem. Well, why do I say that entire system might go down ? 1️⃣ Calls start queuing up, threads get blocked 2️⃣ Retry logic(if misconfigured) adds more pressure instead of relief 3️⃣ Circuit breakers miss the rising latency 4️⃣ Long timeouts keep resources tied up far too long 5️⃣ Shared thread pools let one bad dependency impact unrelated features The system doesn’t crash all at once. It grinds.  And for users, that’s even worse as they don't know what's happening! Okay then how we tackle this? ▪️Retries with exponential backoff → Retrying is fine, but only if it backs off intelligently → Blind retries amplify failures ▪️Circuit breakers tuned for latency and error rate  → Don’t just look at failures. Watch for slowness → A slow service is often as bad as a down one ▪️Isolated thread pools  → One failing dependency shouldn’t starve everything else → Bulkhead isolation matters ▪️Fail-fast timeouts  → Waiting forever for a response isn’t resilience → Define strict SLAs and cut off early ▪️Chaos and latency testing  → Don’t assume. Simulate slowness, inject failures → Validate if your “safety nets” really work Resilience patterns are not “set and forget” They need to be tuned, tested and revisited under real-world conditions. Because at scale, it’s rarely the big outages that bite first. It’s the silent, creeping slowness that nobody accounted for. --- Follow Rohit Doshi for more ! 🙌🏻 Image Credits - Patrick Roos #systemdesign #interviews #softwareengineering #softwaredevelopment #interviewprep #growth #learning

My thoughts on why we need change resilience more than #changemanagement to drive successful digital transformations. 1) Digital transformations are now never ending and always on. Gone are the days of a one-time tech upgrade and then years of "business as usual" 2) Employees and customers are inundated with transformative change across multiple applications, tools, processes, ways of working, etc. and change fatigue is real 3) New transformation projects are being constantly trigged due to compliance, legal, regulatory, M&A, marketing, new tech (Gen AI and agentic), ERP upgrades, digitization, standardizations, digital analytics etc. 4) Each employee and customer is currently being "managed" across multiple change efforts and is experiencing change fatigue 5) With change fatigue, enthusiasm for new tech will wane and will turn into resistance ("there is too much to do") which lowers the value and ROI of investments The answer according to me is building change resilience at an organization level. What do we need: - System to run small experiments, validate results, and only then scale up to maximize value and minimize disruption; discard unsuccessful and unscalable ideas i.e., fail fast instead of continuing to fund never ending transformations - be very strict on value/ROI before kicking off large projects - Prioritization of what is critical, what is must have, and what is only good to have that everyone agrees with; include costs of backfilling key business SMEs, and maintain extra budget (buffer) to augment during overlap of milestones across key projects and workload spikes - Company wide digital reskilling and redeployment program that scales with increasing digital maturity, encourages building of modern digital skills (e.g., AI, low code no code tools) and enables Human+AI collaboration - Measure engagement and experience in real time and deploy interventions to keep them high; make them feel as part of the journey - even if the outcome for some are negative, ensure they build competence and experience and come out as future ready professionals on the other side

✨ The Wizard of Oz motif at Riskonnect, Inc.’s Konnect 2025 in Miami could have stayed a cute gimmick. It didn’t. What emerged was a clear-eyed exploration of how modern organizations build resilience at scale—by translating opportunity into objectives, confronting the risk those objectives create, and institutionalizing resilience not as a project, but as a living capability. Moderated by Darrin Smith of Riskonnect, Inc., the panel brought together voices from across industries: ✅ Julianne Martinez – FedEx ✅ Hector Mastrapa – Marriott International ✅ Britt Roarx – Texas Roadhouse ✅ Barry Wilson – Bridge Investment Group They didn’t pitch tools. They described operating disciplines: where technology accelerates and aggregates, and where people remain irreplaceable—interpreting, deterring, deciding, and ultimately leading. In my analyst write-up (linked below), I dive into: 🔹 FedEx uncovering $50M in fraud when human intuition spotted what models normalized. 🔹 Marriott reminding us that efficiency becomes risk when it erodes human deterrence. 🔹 Texas Roadhouse turning its kitchens into learning systems with digital prompts and real-time feedback. 🔹 Bridge Investment Group keeping risk “at the table” by framing decisions in ranges, not single-point forecasts. 💡 My key takeaway: resilience is not a tool—it’s a capability. It emerges when: Analytics flow downward, frontline truth flows upward. Human-in-the-loop steps are designed in, not bolted on. Policies live in the flow of work, not as static documents. 👉 Read my full synthesis in the article linked below . . .