The proposal is signed off, the deposit is paid, the team has started. And the project is stuck. Not because something cannot be programmed, but because four things are missing that only the customer can supply - and they usually do not know about them until somebody who has been through it asks.
This is not a reproach. The point is that these four items can be prepared in advance, before the clock starts running, which turns them into preparation instead of downtime.
1. Access, and in a clearly defined scope
The most common snag is not a refusal of access. It is uncertainty about how large that access is. The customer hears "we need access to your storage" and pictures everything the company owns.
That worry is legitimate, and one of our clients put it exactly, on 24 June 2026:
"Full access to [the storage] - we would have to work that out, not even all of us have it (...) and we cannot give that. Shall we make a folder where we give you a few selected documents?"
That is the right answer and it should be the rule, not the exception. A supplier should not get more than the task they are doing requires.
What must not happen is that the subject then stops being discussed. On the same project the question of access scope came back on 29 July and again on 30 July 2026, three times in five weeks, and as of 30 July there was still no unambiguous answer. Meanwhile the work went on whatever could be done without it.
The practical fix that unties this knot is simple: do not grant access "to the system", grant it to a specific folder or to an account with specific permissions. Registering an application with restricted rights is a couple of minutes of work - on the project mentioned we sent the client the procedure on 30 July 2026 and the estimate for their administrator was about a quarter of an hour. The decision about scope takes weeks; carrying it out takes minutes.
2. Samples of real data and documents
The second item is the one customers most often underrate, because it sounds like a formality.
A system that is meant to prepare documents, sort enquiries or match line items cannot be built from a description. It can be built from samples. On the project mentioned we summarised on 27 July 2026 what was needed to close that phase, and the first item was samples of eight types of document the office routinely produces.
Samples have three properties that matter:
- they are real, not filled in for show;
- they cover the ugly cases too, not just the nice one;
- there is more than one of each type, because on a single sample you can succeed by accident.
If they cannot leave the building, they can be anonymised - but they have to stay realistic. A sample with everything interesting stripped out describes a different process from yours.
3. Third-party accounts, including the ones somebody else holds
The third item tends to take longest, because often neither the customer nor the supplier has the keys to it.
On one e-commerce project the carrier credentials took two attempts between 3 and 5 November 2025: the first set did not work, and before the right combination was found, two rounds of questions went through three parties. On the same project the verification codes for the search engines only arrived on 26 March 2026, with a note from the customer's IT that they were not in charge of those codes themselves and the site developer looked after them.
This is the most ordinary cause of delay in the entire field and it cannot be solved by being clever. It can only be solved by a list you draw up beforehand: for every connected service - carrier, payment gateway, accounting, analytics and search engines - write down who owns the account and who knows the password. Wherever the name next to it is a former supplier, start at once - that is always the longest item.
4. One person on your side who decides
The fourth thing is not a document, it is a role. You need one person who has the right to say "yes, this is how it will be" and who has time for it during the week.
It does not have to be the owner and it does not have to be a technical person. It has to be someone who knows the operation and whom the others trust enough that their decision is not reversed a week later.
On the e-commerce project mentioned, this role was split with the customer's IT after a phone call on 23 March 2026, and part of the work moved to their side. The effect was visible immediately: decisions stopped waiting on one overloaded person. The other half of this role comes from the same project - the client prepared the material herself, in detail, colour-coding what was existing and what was new, and wrote on 27 March 2026 that she had tried to describe it and illustrate it graphically as well. That is what material you can work from without follow-up questions looks like.
And one thing that is forgotten every single time: the people who will be working in it should know about it in advance. On the same project the client tried showing the new interface to the staff on 4 December 2025 and wrote straight away that the staff were unhappy about it and that she was already budgeting for a short training session. That is the right move - the worse variant is finding out the same thing on launch day.
Checklist before signing
Go through it with the supplier before the deadline starts running. It takes one meeting.
- Access: to which systems, in what scope, who grants it and how much work it is for your administrator.
- Samples: how many types, how many of each, by when and in what form.
- Accounts: a list of connected services, the owner and the password holder for each; mark separately the ones held by someone outside the company.
- Decisions: the person's name, their deputy, and the deadline they answer within.
- Staff: who will be working in it, when they first see it and who trains them.
The deadline a supplier promises applies from the moment this list exists filled in. Until then it is an estimate.
Want to prepare this before you start asking for quotes
Tell us what you want to connect. We will come back with a specific list of access and samples for your case, even if you end up giving the work to somebody else - the list will serve you with any proposal.
Integrations between systems are what we do as part of business process automation.
Write to info@lamapixel.com or call +420 775 599 009.
