[zdragnar]

The problem you describe is one of a lack of ownership. I'm at a company that has a quite small engineering team, but other departments have their own services (dashboards that read from our database, marketing CRM, etc) which means any change at all to any database table requires bringing together multiple departments to make sure nobody gets upset by the change.

It's easier to have a single owner at a smaller scale (something we should do) but even at a company with a large engineering team, there needs to be someone whose responsibility is to manage dependencies. Otherwise, it falls back to design by committee, and that's how you end up in your situation: nobody actually knows how anything works, and there is literally no way to find out.

[pc86]

Exactly this - they needs months to respond to "small" changes because nobody knows who at the day is responsible for a given service. They probably need to time to filter the request through the product office, find out which service(s) are affected, find the dev team(s) responsible for those service(s), and beg/harass/bribe the EM(s) for those teams to get the work scheduled.

If they had documented service contracts with ownership information attached they could probably have the GP's team communicate directly with the service devs and it would likely go a lot smoother.