From Barriers to Bridges: Dependency Management as a Path to Enhanced Collaboration
Introduction
In companies with multiple departments and teams, dependencies are an inherent part of product development, creating a need for coordinated effort and interdependence across diverse functions. They typically surface when several teams need to align their work, or when the outcome of one team’s tasks affects the progress of another. This may involve anything from resource access managed by another team or specialised technical assessments to integration tasks that bridge different systems or platforms.
Dependencies play an integral role across various stages of the development lifecycle, ensuring that the initiatives led by one team can rely on the necessary actions and support from others, driving cross-team collaboration and strengthening alignment with broader organisational goals. As a result, dependency management becomes a critical element of any company’s journey toward product success.
At AUTODOC Product Academy, we recognize that failure to take due account of required dependencies or ineffective dependency management can create a wide range of risks that disrupt workflows and may jeopardise product delivery. This realisation sparked our commitment to redefining dependency management as a structured process fortified by practical tools and complementary artefacts targeted at enhancing cooperation across teams.
Challenges in Dependency Management
Dependencies — whether technical or operational — are the threads that tie product development efforts together. While dependencies are not problematic in nature, the way they are approached can have a substantial impact on estimated timelines, resource allocation, and overall product quality. When overlooked, dependencies result in confusion, misalignment, delays, and missed opportunities. Additional issues include the complexity of tracking dependencies across numerous teams, handling unforeseen blockers from last-minute coordination, and managing shifts in priority driven by market changes. Left unchecked, these factors can turn dependencies into significant bottlenecks, stalling progress and derailing strategic objectives.
Identifying dependencies at an early stage is a crucial enabler of effective operations and product success. While acknowledging that dependencies are an unavoidable aspect of work is a necessary first step that requires a shift in mindset, dependencies are in fact manageable when approached with the right strategies and tools. The question we asked ourselves was simple and straightforward: How can we orchestrate dependencies rather than let them become roadblocks?
Successful Solutions in Dependency Management
These insights led us to embark on developing a comprehensive, streamlined approach to managing dependencies, incorporating proactive planning, standardised procedures for addressing dependencies, and a set of flexible tools to keep essential processes in sync. While we continue to establish and scale these practices across our teams, we have already observed positive outcomes, indicating that we are on the right track. For example, one team’s implementation of new dependency identification practices resulted in 10.36 hours of time savings per person each month.
In the following sections, we will explore the introduced practices in depth, highlighting success cases, the benefits achieved, and the structured flow of the dependency management process, with a breakdown of how each tool contributes to its respective stage.
Strategic Roadmaps for Dependency Planning
Proactive dependency planning is a cornerstone of our evolving product-oriented culture. As we strive to optimise workflows and boost product outcomes, it is crucial to recognize the importance of planning in anticipating dependencies. Roadmapping is the most efficient way to identify and represent the dependencies as well as minimise the risks that dependencies pose. Although dependencies cannot be entirely avoided, associated risks can be mitigated with strategic planning.
We adopted roadmapping practices that properly account for interdependencies between issues, ensuring they are visualised and planned for in advance. By leveraging Jira Advanced Roadmaps, teams can outline cross-functional work and clearly reflect relationships between issues, determine where dependencies exist, track their status, and better predict potential workflow bottlenecks. Employees can utilise dependency-related features such as numbered badges for tracking dependencies on the roadmap timeline, the Dependencies report tab for relationship visualisation, or the Dependency management view for displaying incoming and outgoing dependencies. This solution addresses the prior challenge of fragmented roadmaps across platforms like Google Sheets and Miro, allowing all team members and stakeholders to access up-to-date and automated dependencies displayed in one place.
Team Responsibilities Internal Knowledge Base
To ensure team members have an instant-access source of essential information about the scopes and products of other teams when necessitating external dependencies, we designed the Team Responsibilities Internal Knowledge Base. This tool enables team members to quickly locate other teams’ areas of responsibility, contact information to engage on dependency tasks with the team, their requirements and cadence rules for working with incoming dependencies.
The initial implementation in one of the pilot teams has shown cumulative time savings of 3.45 hours per person per month when working on the identifying the responsible team (0.9h), dependency DoR preparation (1h), passing dependency to the responsible team according to their rules (1.5h) steps, demonstrating the tool’s potential in streamlining the search for the right team and essential collaboration details.
Dependency Register for Consistent Tracking
For large-scale initiatives, managing dependencies across teams can become chaotic without a standardised approach. To address this, we encourage each team to maintain a record of their incoming and outgoing dependencies in one place. Our suggested solution is a Dependency Register tool, represented as a Jira structure dashboard, to log all external dependencies of each team, providing a centralised view of dependency tasks, their statuses, and responsible parties. We recommend requesting dependencies for at least the upcoming quarter, ensuring they are planned, agreed on, and documented in advance.
Beyond showing the reduction of time required for dependency monitoring — time savings of 1.6 hours per person monthly in the targeted team — and recorded 83% of employees’ satisfaction with the dependency management processes, the application of the register improves visibility, supports risk management, and establishes transparent alignment of timelines and clarity in responsibility assignment.
Tool for Fixing Agreements in Dependency Management
One of the primary pain points in dependency management is ambiguity in decision-making. Verbal agreements that were not properly documented often lead to misunderstandings or delays. To eliminate this issue, we implemented a custom Jira field that formalises and records dependency agreements between teams, turning Jira into a platform that solidifies commitments. Whenever a dependency request is discussed, the involved parties can mark whether the task has been “Agreed” on or “Rejected”. By treating the agreement tool as a checklist, Product Managers can identify dependencies that have been agreed on and those still requiring confirmation. Explicitly tracking decisions, rather than relying on informal contract or verbal communication, not only allows to track dependencies with a high degree of transparency and improves accountability but also reduces the need for persisting follow-ups, ensuring all stakeholders are aware of the commitments in play.
The Agreement fixation tool has received positive feedback from employees who have integrated it into their workflows, showing 4.1 out of 5 CSS rate. The introduction of the tool has also encouraged closer collaboration between Product and Engineering teams when working on dependency identification, estimation, and prioritisation, resulting in a holistic view of the project’s dependency landscape.
Escalation Matrix for Critical Issue Resolution
Dependencies have been identified, agreements have been fixed — but what should be done in case issues arise? Managing dependencies often involves dealing with emerging complications, which requires an efficient escalation process. Key escalation principles that we have established in AUTODOC Product Academy are clearly defining cases when the issue should be escalated, prioritising collaborative solutions over hierarchical escalation and ensuring relevant facts and details are considered before involving management.
To streamline this process, we developed an Escalation Matrix and accompanying communication template to ensure any unresolved dependency that creates bottlenecks is promptly addressed. The matrix offers guidance on how and when to escalate, outlining the escalation paths based on the nature and urgency of the issue. Such a systematised method allows teams to direct problems to the right stakeholders for quick, informed decision-making. The template standardises the communication procedure, ensuring that escalations are concise, actionable, and properly recorded for future reference.
Monthly and Quarterly Reporting Templates
Regular reporting plays a pivotal role in ensuring accountability and transparency, especially when managing dependencies. To reflect critical milestones and deliverables, product and business metrics dynamics, and upcoming steps, we have established Monthly Reports (MRs) and Quarterly Reports (QRs) that offer snapshots of product development progress. MRs provide monthly advancement details outlining current task progress statuses, while QRs deliver an in-depth analysis of product development over the past quarter, highlighting opportunities and risks, as well as verifying alignment with organisation’s strategic goals.
One of the key functions of reporting is coordination of goals and schedules across teams and awareness of the parties’ roles and responsibilities in the project. This facilitates the identification and tracking of dependencies, promoting smooth inter-team coordination and helping stakeholders make informed decisions. Monthly and quarterly reports also ensure resources are allocated efficiently and adjusted as necessary to prevent critical path delays and detrimental impact on the overall outcomes. This way, regular updates through reports act as early warning systems, underscoring any delays or risks in one task that may affect others, prompting timely interventions and allowing for developing the essential mitigation strategies in advance.
Interactive Workshop for Dependency Management
Training and hands-on experience are crucial for embedding new dependency management processes. To support the effective adoption of these methods, AUTODOC Product Academy has developed and conducted a modular, scalable workshop on Dependency management that combines 30% theory with 70% practical application in the actual Product environment and focuses on three core areas:
– Communication: Effective strategies for communicating dependencies within and between teams
– Problem-Solving: Real-world problem-solving sessions where Product Managers bring in their current product issues and work on practical solutions
– Tools and Techniques: Use of various dependency management tools, such as Jira Roadmap for structured planning, Jira Dashboard for project visibility, Dependency Register for tracking, and Reporting Practices for dependency communication
Having achieved an NPS of 90%, the workshop has been particularly noted for interactive activities and best practices in dependency management. Building on this success, the Academy is developing further workshops tailored to the needs of specific teams. The upcoming sessions will focus on the teams’ active work, assisting in organising roadmaps, dashboards and other essential means to enhance performance of introduced practices in the context of particular teams, their unique products and workflows, while reinforcing new dependency processes.
Conclusion
At AUTODOC Product Academy, we embrace the mindset that dependencies are not obstacles but opportunities. Our proactive approach to managing them is contributing to fostering a culture of transparency and ownership that drives better product and project outcomes. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution for managing dependencies, the introduced framework is customised to our organisation’s structure and operational processes, creating a seamless fit with our ecosystem. Every dependency resolved brings us a step closer to our shared goals, and by incentivizing the efficient unblocking of dependencies, we celebrate each team’s contribution toward our collective achievements.
Our journey is ongoing, but by investing in the right tools, cultivating open communication, and promoting collaborative problem-solving, we are significantly improving how we handle dependencies in AUTODOC. As we move forward with refining our processes and scaling their implementation to more teams, we are confident that we will continue to transform how we manage dependencies, further propelling our teams and products toward success.
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