Yeah I agree with all of this. I'm fortunate in that we have built into our rollout process a "dev-supervised-ops" period. This time which can last a couple of month but is usually shorter involves me or one of my colleagues _doing_ production on our systems. In my experience this has always lead to tweaking and minor (froma dev point of view) usability improvements.

The other option that I like is to spend a few days doing production tasks with a member of the production team. Working through a set of queries using the tools gives you lots of opportunities to spot possible improvements and enhancements. (You mean you use it like that!?)

:-)