An insider asks a trusted vendor to deprioritize work for a rival faction's initiative, and the vendor delivers late under cover of capacity or quality problems.
An example
Holiday travel was the deadline for an airline's new mobile boarding and rebooking app, built by an outside development firm that also ran the airline's crew scheduling system. The firm's relationship had been managed for a decade by the vice president of airport operations, who had argued for spending the money on kiosks. In September the firm's delivery dates for the app started to slip, two weeks at a time, with explanations about developer capacity and a quality issue in the test environment. The firm's work on crew scheduling and two other airline projects stayed on schedule. The head of digital products compared delivery records by internal customer and found that every late item was on the app. The launch missed the holidays. In January the head of digital products signed a second development firm for the next release.
Why it works
Slipping deliveries drain the rival initiative's momentum and freshness, and a project that finishes months late can miss its window and pick up a reputation for mismanagement, which makes it look worse. The rival absorbs overruns from replanning, standby labor, and a sponsor explaining repeated slippage, so it costs more. Behind it sits real relational capital between the insider and the vendor, a rival initiative that depends on that vendor with no easy substitute, plausible cover stories, and a rival without the vendor-management depth to see the pattern.
The thinking behind it
Oliver E. Williamson Oliver Williamson's The Economic Institutions of Capitalism (1985) explains that relationship-specific investments make parties dependent on each other and exposed to being taken advantage of. An app built by one development firm that also runs other systems for the company is such a relationship, and whoever manages it holds influence over its priorities. A qualified second firm reduces the specificity and with it the exposure.
Jeffrey Pfeffer The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective (1978), by Pfeffer and Salancik, holds that whoever controls a critical, scarce resource gains power over those who depend on it. A vendor's developer capacity is that resource for a launch, and an insider with a long relationship to the vendor can influence where it goes. Tracking delivery by internal customer, and routing prioritization requests through procurement, puts the allocation of that resource in view.
Warning signs
Slippage from one vendor clusters on a single internal customer while its other accounts run on time. The explanations are capacity constraints, quality issues, or other customers' escalations. Deadlines slip in small increments, so each one seems minor. The vendor relationship is managed by someone who opposed the initiative. No substitute supplier is in place.
How to defend yourself
Treat your critical path the way a security team treats a network perimeter. Keep redundant suppliers for critical components and services, or at least a qualified second source you could switch to. Track vendor delivery by internal customer, so you can see whether your slippage is bad luck. Ask who else in the company has a long relationship with your suppliers. When the pattern shows, take the delivery records to the vendor's senior account executive and to your own procurement head, and ask for an explanation and a recovery date in writing.
How a leader shuts it down
Audit vendor relationships where one supplier holds a critical dependency and a delay story would be easy to tell. Track supplier delivery performance by internal customer. Make clear to critical vendors that prioritization requests come only through procurement, never from individual executives.