You are the Engineering Manager for a customer-facing initiative that is already 4 weeks into a 12-week plan and is now projected to miss its launch date by 3 weeks. The work touches a shared services team, a vendor integration, and a compliance review, so delays in one area are blocking the others. The product leader wants to preserve the original scope, the sales team has already committed to a launch window, and one senior engineer has raised concerns that the current plan is underestimating testing and integration work. You need to decide how to get the project back on track without creating avoidable rework or damaging trust.
| Detail | Value |
|---|---|
| Planned timeline | 12 weeks total |
| Time elapsed | 4 weeks |
| Forecast slip | 3 weeks |
| Core team | 1 EM, 4 engineers, 1 QA, 1 product manager |
| External dependency | 1 vendor integration with weekly release windows |
| Compliance review | Required before launch |
| Stakeholder commitment | Sales has promised a launch window to 2 enterprise customers |
How would you handle this project so you can recover the schedule, align stakeholders, and decide what trade-offs to make?
