I'm back in town after a two-week business trip. I have a client who viewed the demo of the software we developed and suddenly revealed that what we developed didn't exactly match what she wanted. I was afraid of this and was reminded of this February 2002 article from Joel on Software.
Have you ever noticed that on these custom projects, the single most common cause of overruns, failures, and general miserableness always boils down to, basically, "the (insert expletive here) customer didn't know what they wanted?"
I visited the customer last month to demo the conceptual mock-up demo. Before I could get through the demo, the customer said this wasn't what she wanted, even though I had numerous conversations with her on the specifics that I put in. It's primarily my fault for several reasons. This system was developed from the back-end rather than getting the customer to agree on all of the interface components. My customer is a very visual person and she really needed to see a complete mockup of the final product. I'm a conceptual person and I see conceptual material and easily extrapolate the full picture from the pieces. I have to remember that not everyone can do that, nor should I expect that.
Note to self: Always do the interface first and leave the rest for later.
So after this last trip, things are much better because I had the interface nearly done and she could visualize the workflow. It goes to show that it's easy to forget the basics when you are trying to make a project work and you're rushed. I think more time and money is used to make up for mistakes than actually doing things right to begin with.
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