Near the beginning of my career, I worked for a company in Iowa City, Iowa that had another location in Austin, Texas. The management in Iowa City said that the Austin office needed a call tracking application. They also said that I should talk to the Iowa City project managers for specifications because "the folks down there in Austin won't really know how to specify what they need." For real - that's what they said. I was still green enough that I figured "they must know what they're talking about." :os

Anyway, being young and foolish (I'm at least older now), I did what they said. I spent several months developing a very-cool-for-the-time call tracking application for them so that they could take incoming calls, route them to each other, perform common workflow on the calls, integrate with email, etc. We started talking with the people in Austin, and they allocated one person to test the product, and she liked what she saw.

Next step: I was flown down to Austin to install the software (couldn't be done remotely back then) and give training. Two events stick in my mind from the training sessions: the site administrator asking "where did THIS come from?" and a rank-and-file worker stating that "this is a great start, but I don't see how anybody could use it if it didn't do X." I can't remember what X was, but it was something that was an integral part of their call processing that the Iowa folks had decided wasn't important enough to implement at first. Final outcome: after months of development, nobody used the product.

It was not a total loss, though. Two good things came out of it. First, I learned something that is obvious to everyone AFTER you learn it: make sure the REAL users are involved in creating or approving specs. Secondly, the company had an annual internal "open house" where each of the departments would show off their best work. My team (which was one of the most visible) chose to demo my product (!). We gave a 40-minute presentation to all comers. People were duly impressed (of course, none of them knew what "feature X" was, so they couldn't complain that it was missing). However, one person at the end asked a really troublesome question: "how many people are using this system now?" Our answer: "we still have some work to do before we get it widely deployed in Austin."

As far as I know, that work is still waiting to be done. ;^)

Cheers,

Chris