After reading tilly's response to my post, I realized that I sounded a bit more dogmatic about the situation than I had intended. I see that I have a habit of doing that when I post too quickly :( Basically, there are two ways that I prefer to develop a project.

  1. Well defined specifications are handed to me.

    The benefits of this should be obvious.

  2. The customer doesn't have well-defined specifications.

    This is all-too-familiar, unfortunately. When this happens, I prefer to develop while working hand-in-hand with my customer. I tell them that I'll accept loose specifications so long as they can provide me with a single point of contact within their organization whose word is law.

On the second point, I go to that person when I have questions and when that person answers in writing (phone calls for discussion, but I'll still send a confirmation email), I know that I can implement their response. They may have to run to other people to get the response, but those other people had better not be calling me! What invariably happens, otherwise, is that I have to take direction from multiple people and when things go wrong, I take the blame.

With the single point of contact, you wind up with one person who really know what's going on and is less likely to come up with the boneheaded "design everything in Flash5" type decisions. Further, when someone says I didn't do my job, I point to the email or, better yet, the discussion board and say "see, this is exactly what you asked for".

Frankly, even with well-defined specs, I prefer to work closely with a single point of contact who knows their business and isn't too far removed from actually using the product requested. Otherwise, I have discovered in the software world that one of three things happen:

  1. The developer produces a product that suits the customers needs.
  2. The developer produces a product that is not what the customer asked for.
  3. The developer produces exactly what the customer asked for, but its virtually useless for the customer.

It's that last scenario that gives me nightmares. The pointy-haired boss (PHB) at Acme Corp. gives me well-defined specifications, but he never bothered to ask his data-entry people what they needed. Know what happens if the product is useless? The PHB blames it on me anyway. Sigh.

Cheers,
Ovid

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In reply to (Ovid) Re: They don't specify because they don't know what they want by Ovid
in thread They don't specify because they don't know what they want by C-Keen

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