External components: Sending one's own proposed schedule

This is something that happens in larger software development organizations. Typically, there would be multiple teams within the organization, responsible for specialized stuff. For example, a number of organizations have separate teams installer and build process since that is a function reasonable similar across multiple teams / software applications; there are many common components dealing with technical requirements that are common across applications - such as parsers, decoders, encoders, imaging libraries, document readers, and so on (the list of common technical stuff can be pretty large).
When an organization has multiple software development teams, there will be different schedules for the teams, with many of these schedules being widely different form the other teams. There will also be different priorities for these teams, with some products having a higher priority while other products may not be so important for the component team - this is also dependent on the money making capabilities and strategic importance of the various products within the organization. In addition, with different schedules for different teams, and the component team having a different schedule from our own team, reconciling the schedules in order to ensure that the product quality is good enough to take the component at the time of incorporating the schedule.

Consider an example:
Team XYZ - the team in which we are working
Schedule for team XYZ - Start in Feb, take component of high quality by July and release product by October

Component team - Need to take a component from this team
Schedule for component team: Previous component will release by January; next release will be in December

With these schedules being out of sync, taking a component where features have been incorporated and a good quality level being achieved looks difficult. There is no option to change the schedule of the component team, since they are in sync with another product, and that product has a higher priority. So what can be done ?
Well, this sort of schedule mismatches can happen fairly often, and there are solutions possible. Essentially, there is a need for having an ongoing communication between both the teams. The component team should be fully aware of our schedules, including the timeline by which an initial version of the component would be required, more versions to be taken with defect fixes, and a final version of the component.
In the end, there will be compromises needed to be made, with some features that could be taken, others that could not be taken for the current release, and if necessary, a fork made in the development of the component where a minimal set of features would be taken up and provided to our team.

Using the latest version of external components - Needs attention

Most software applications do use components that are not created by the software team; these could be components created by other teams within the organization, or by using components created by other organizations. For so many different functions, it is not required that the team try to do everything on their own; for example, you could consider many different types of parsers, or system access components, or image manipulation components, or video codecs / decoders, etc. In all of these, these are specialized components created by people far more competent in these areas; it would always make sense to use these components rather than try to replicate such software within our own application.
When your software is larger, there would be more such components that are in use which are created by other parties. Over a period of time, it gets to be a task to track all such components. I have experience where we used such components the first time many years back, pay for using the component at every new version of the application, and the number of such components that are in use is well over 50 within the application (some of those are free, others are paid with minimal charges, and some can be pretty expensive - some of the specialised video codecs can be pretty expensive, although one cannot do business in the video area without using these codecs in order to look professional).
Just like our software is updated with every version with new features and defects, even the components that we use also get new versions. In many cases, we could still continue using the older components since the newer version does not promise any new features that we need, and we can avoid the overhead of trying to incorporate a new version. However, it is still required to monitor these external components to ensure that we know the reasons why the new component has been released.
In many cases, there may have been some critical defects found in the component which required a new version to be released. In such a case, we should need to evaluate the defects that were found to determine whether it is required for us to take the new version. In some cases, the defects could be in a section of the component that we do not use, and hence we could still continue to use the old component. But in many cases, the defects are serious enough that it could pose a risk to the software application unless the new version of the component has been taken. However, taking the component will have an overhead, since other changes that have been implemented in the component would need to be evaluated and testing done to ensure that no other impact is caused due to these changes.
This whole process of ensuring a watch on these components is troublesome and takes time and effort, but it is essential. One would not want to release a software that integrates an older version of the component which has some serious risk. This can have further impact, and in some cases, the external component provider mandates that the newer version of the component has to be used.