to reflect on your experience as I had a similar one, where the project I was working on depended on another sector to hand us some chip that will allow us to obtain a signal for us to analyze. Research was definitely a key to avoid this delay, but as you mentioned it is not always the only way to avoid such problems. However, there should be sufficient balance between analyzing and investigating all the details of a project before implementing it and actually taking this analysis to initial testings and prototyping.