romoted to manager before finally coming on board your team. Joe is intimately familiar with what the users need, what management needs from the application and how the system can deliver it. He can design it and then code it to specifications with no help from anyone.
Next Best Thing:
Well, if you can’t hire Joe away from the user group and teach him to develop, what about getting your designers and developers to shadow users while they work? I clearly remember using new applications and immediately realizing that the developer never sat with the users. Users cannot possibly articulate each step and function, option and result of their jobs while sitting in a conference room, yet that is the level of detail you need for your project to be a true success.
Reality:
For most of the projects I manage, our user groups are one or two time zones away from the developers, and we must expect users to relay their processes and requirements over the phone and via e-mail. If your reality is like mine, we can stop dreaming but still hope to improve the quality of our requirements documentation.
Set Expectations, Give Explanations
It is critical to set customer expectations in the project-request phase by explaining, “Yes, we can create a site or application that will meet your needs, but it will be a team effort. We will need an estimated two hours per week from your team members for requirements meetings, and you will all have homework.”
When creating our communications plan, I encourage good user representation by saying, “The users might not see the application until user acceptance testing, and when they do, they frequently have very valuable input for improvements, but by then the application is already built, and changes would delay delivery sometimes by several weeks. So

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