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Third-Party Dependency Delay Impacting Critical Launch

Project Management · advanced

Your team is launching a new checkout experience for an e-commerce platform, dependent on a critical third-party fraud detection API. Two weeks before the planned launch, the third-party vendor informs you their API will be delayed by three weeks. This delay pushes your launch past the critical holiday shopping season. How do you manage this project?

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Community approaches

Pavlo’s approach

  1. First thing first - get to know the root cause of the delay. Are there any potential complications which can push the API roll out even more later?
  2. Check if there are any options to get partial implementation of the API which could be a compromise solution.
  3. Communicate the situation with all stakeholders ASAP.
  4. Evaluate how critical the API is for our launch. Maybe we can proceed without it for a time being.
  5. Check alternatives - there might be some other fraud detection solutions which might be not perfect for us, but still viable an available for quick integration.
  6. Considering steps 4 and 5 - make a decision with appropriate stakeholders. If the loses of potential fraud (including reputation) are much less than the gains of the holiday season then we can proceed without the API, with partial implementation, or with alternative solution. If not, then postpone the launch.
  7. Communicate the decision with all stakeholders.
  8. Document all the actions and takeaways.
  9. Reflect on the issue and consider it for future planning.