If you are like most IT and business professionals who rely on integrations to achieve your goals, you’ve likely experienced the frustration of waiting for integrations to be delivered. Over time, you may have even become resigned to these delays. Having personally built dozens of integrations and witnessed hundreds more over my 16-year career, I share this frustration with the inefficiency and wasted effort poured into this problem. This is why I’ve made it my professional mission to drastically improve the technologies and approaches used to implement integrations.
Many assume the lengthy timelines are due to development itself, but the actual “hands-on-keyboard” time spent coding is often proportionate. Improving developer efficiency alone won’t move the needle significantly. The real delays stem from prolonged waiting—waiting for approvals, resources, or a critical person to complete a task. Often, that key person is stretched thin across multiple responsibilities, leaving integrations deprioritized.
The Reality of Integration Timelines
A typical integration project can take 6 to 18 months or more to complete. This timeline includes a range of phases: defining business objectives, assembling teams, obtaining approvals, gaining access to environments, and troubleshooting scaling issues. Each phase introduces its own set of delays and bottlenecks, compounding the overall timeline.
Where Does the Time Go?
To understand how we can address these challenges, it’s critical to examine where time is lost in a typical integration project:
- Clearly Define Business Objectives(1-3 weeks)
- Stakeholders disagree on pilot versus full rollout objectives.
- Business priorities shift mid-project, requiring redefinition.
- Assemble the Right Project Team(1-3 weeks)
- Difficulty aligning pilot and scaling teams with contractors and vendors.
- Lack of clarity on team ownership for different rollout phases.
- Gain Access to Development Environments(2-5 weeks)
- Separate sandboxes needed for pilot and scaled rollouts, delaying access.
- Vendor environments for scaling are underprepared for multi-tenancy.
- Understand System Integration Capabilities(2-5 weeks)
- Scalability concerns for APIs and systems are overlooked during the pilot phase.
- Systems behave differently under multi-location setups.
- Identify Events and Endpoints(1-3 weeks)
- Events and endpoints required for scaling differ from the pilot setup.
- Vendors must provide additional documentation for multi-schema support.
- Configure Systems to Fire Events and Expose Endpoints(2-5 weeks)
- Configuration changes for pilot locations don’t translate directly to scaled environments.
- Vendor systems require custom configurations for multi-tenancy.
- Vendor systems don’t have a way to fire test events, requiring manual workflows to be performed to receive the event.
- Validate Access and Endpoint Behavior(1-3 weeks)
- Testing environments fail to replicate scaled conditions (e.g., multiple tenants).
- Access issues multiply as the number of tenants or locations increases.
- Write a Comprehensive Integration Specification(2-5 weeks)
- Specification must account for scaling complexities, such as custom schemas per customer.
- Contractors or vendors miss key scaling requirements, causing rework.
- Review and Approve the Integration Specification(1-3 weeks)
- Stakeholders are hesitant to approve without clarity on scaling plans.
- Scaling-related changes introduce additional review cycles.
- Plan for Capacity and Costs(2-5 weeks)
- Infrastructure costs for scaling are underestimated during the pilot phase.
- Multi-tenancy requirements demand unplanned capacity planning.
- Obtain Cost Approvals(2-6 weeks)
- Approval for scaling budgets delayed by competing priorities.
- Vendors submit higher-than-expected quotes for multi-tenancy support.
- Develop the Integration Code(2-6 weeks)
- Code must handle additional complexity for multi-tenancy and custom schemas.
- Vendor APIs require adjustments to support scaled deployments.
- Conduct Unit Testing(1-3 weeks)
- Tests for multi-tenancy behavior reveal issues not encountered in the pilot phase.
- Testing environments are insufficiently isolated for multi-tenant setups.
- Perform Realistic Test Cases(2-5 weeks)
- Scaled test cases require more data, environments, and coordination.
- Edge cases in multi-location setups create unexpected issues.
- Handle Edge Cases and Fix Bugs(2-6 weeks)
- Edge cases related to multi-schema data handling or tenant-specific behaviors.
- Fixes for scaling bugs require vendor system updates, delaying progress.
- Share Outcomes with the Wider Team(1-2 weeks)
- Teams are unclear on scaling impacts based on pilot results.
- Communication gaps between pilot and scaling teams create confusion.
- Address Additional Review Requirements(2-5 weeks)
- Scaling reviews introduce new security and compliance requirements.
- Governance boards require additional assurances for multi-location rollouts.
- Coordinate Between Teams(2-6 weeks)
- Vendors and contractors need additional coordination for scaling timelines.
- Pilot teams may lack insight into scaling challenges, delaying decisions.
- Prepare Deployment Procedures(2-5 weeks)
- Scaled deployment scripts differ significantly from pilot procedures.
- Rollback plans for multi-location deployments are complex and incomplete.
- Pilot Rollout(4-8 weeks)
- Pilot locations encounter unforeseen issues, delaying the rollout.
- Users at pilot sites provide feedback that necessitates changes.
- Scaling readiness is underestimated during the pilot.
- Finalize User Acceptance Testing (UAT)(2-6 weeks)
- UAT for pilot sites does not replicate conditions for scaled rollouts.
- Scaling UAT requires coordination across multiple locations and tenants.
- Secure Go-Live Approvals(1-3 weeks)
- Approvals for scaled rollouts are delayed by unresolved pilot issues.
- Vendor-specific requirements add additional cycles for final approvals.
- Execute Multi-Team Go-Live Coordination(1-3 weeks)
- Scaling rollouts require multi-location synchronization, increasing complexity.
- Vendor systems experience bottlenecks under scaled production loads.
- Monitor Integration Post-Go-Live(2-6 weeks)
- Multi-location setups reveal performance bottlenecks missed during pilot monitoring.
- Monitoring tools struggle to handle tenant-specific metrics.
- Scale Rollout to Additional Locations(4-12 weeks)
- Each additional location or tenant requires custom configuration and setup.
- Multi-location scaling uncovers issues with system performance and reliability.
- Delays due to dependencies on internal teams, contractors, and vendors for new setups.
- Iterate and Optimize for Scaling(Ongoing)
- Optimization for multi-tenancy requires significant architectural adjustments.
- Vendors introduce changes that disrupt existing scaled rollouts.
- Feedback loops for multiple tenants or locations slow down improvement cycles.
The Broader Impact of These Delays
These challenges are sadly the norm in most organizations. The natural reflex of leadership is to treat integrations as high-stakes investments, which means only a limited number of projects are pursued. This added scrutiny increases costs even further and slows progress.
The ripple effects are significant. Innovation stalls, partnerships go unexplored, and companies shy away from entering new markets or working with smaller customers because integration timelines seem insurmountable. Employees adopt a mindset of “Forget about it—it will never happen,” and potentially transformative opportunities are left unrealized.
This inertia only reinforces the cycle: without addressing the root causes of these delays, companies struggle to make meaningful investments in improving integration processes. I’ve seen these effects firsthand, and it’s why I’m so passionate about solving this problem. The world is full of untapped innovation, sales, and partnerships waiting to be unleashed once integration bottlenecks are removed.
How We’re Solving These Challenges
Understanding these realities has driven us to rethink the integration process from the ground up. Here are some of the innovations we’ve implemented to drastically reduce integration timelines:
1. Detailed Design and Seamless Handoffs
We craft precise design diagrams collaboratively with domain experts, customers, and vendors. This thorough approach mitigates risks and ensures all decisions are finalized before implementation, enabling immediate project commencement upon contract signing. Our fixed-bid model offers cost predictability and necessitates a deep understanding of the problem space.
2. Comprehensive System Knowledge Base
Our extensive catalog encompasses over a thousand operations, providing immediate access to system information during design and development. When new endpoints are encountered, we document them, continually expanding our knowledge base. This empowers solution engineers to design confidently and allows developers to be productive without being system experts.
3. Reusable Integration Functions
We develop reusable functions for common integration patterns, reducing redundant coding efforts. As a result, each project requires less labor, enhancing efficiency and allowing us to focus on delivering value rather than billable hours.
4. Implicitly Scalable and Secure Platform
Our platform automatically scales functions based on usage, eliminating concerns about load calculations and capacity planning. We implement secure vault patterns for credential management, simplifying credential handling and enhancing security.
5. Integrated Development Team
Our developers work on both the platform and customer projects, ensuring deep proficiency and optimization. This model keeps our engineers consistently engaged, ready to implement projects without delays, and eliminates the need for strict resource allocation typical in traditional system integrators.
6. AI-Enhanced Engineering
We leverage AI tools to assist our engineers beyond code generation, aiding in domain-specific concepts, testing, and code reviews, thereby enhancing productivity and accuracy.
7. Proactive Project Management
Our project managers excel at de-risking projects, promoting parallel workstreams, and monitoring critical paths. They ensure team members understand the implications of delays, maintaining project momentum and efficiency.
8. Optimized Development Platform with Telemetry
Our platform is continually refined based on real-world implementation experiences. We prioritize reducing friction points, developing new features, and delegating tasks to AI agents, ensuring it remains at the forefront of integration technology.
9. High-Trust Customer Partnerships
We cultivate strong relationships with our customers, often initiating work before formal paperwork is completed. This approach accelerates delivery and results in higher-quality proposals and timelines, demonstrating our commitment to going the extra mile.
These innovations have already enabled us to cut project implementation times by 50–66%. We’re not stopping there. Our goal is to reduce timelines to one-fifth or even one-tenth of their historical averages, unlocking countless opportunities for partnerships, sales, and innovation.
Work With Us
If you’d like to explore how we can help with your integration projects, email us at hello@polyapi.io. Since we don’t have a large sales or marketing team, reaching out directly is the best way to connect.