Add an alternate path

Create a genuinely independent route around a single point of failure.

Everything ships through Dana. She is the only person who can approve releases, the only one who knows the deploy process, the only holder of half the passwords. When she took one sick week in March, your team's output went to zero, and the backlog from that week took a month to clear.

Add an alternate path creates a genuinely independent route around a single point of failure. The cue: one node, a person, tool, or channel, that everything must pass through, so its outage becomes everyone's outage. Steps: identify the choke point and what flows through it; build a second route that does not share the same failure modes, meaning a trained backup person, documented process, and separate credentials, not just a second login only Dana knows; then prove independence by running the alternate route for real while the primary sits idle. Success is measurable: the next absence produces a slowdown, not a stoppage. The trap is fake redundancy, two paths that fail together because they share a hidden dependency. Skip this move when the redundancy costs more than the outages it prevents, or when the route itself is harmful, which calls for redirecting rather than duplicating.