The gap between Customer's explanation and his real needs

Have you ever heard about the gap between the Customer's requirements and the point of view of the project team's members?

All the people involved in a software project have heard about the gap between: 

• Customer explanation
• Project leader's understanding
• Analyst's design
• Developed code
• Business description

And the unfortunately very common poor software results:

 Project documentation

• Operation installation
• Support

In my opinion, one of the most astonishing and even striking differences is between Customer's explanation and his real needs.

My work as Functional Analyst has shown me that very often, the customer doesn't know what he wants or, more precisely, he does not know how to explain it. It gives the opportunity to any unscrupulous marketing agent to sell him any kind of solution.

One of the tasks that I really like is the work with the customer and final users in order to help them representing (or even better, modelling) their needs. All this, in the form of graphical models, requirement specifications, user stories, storyboards, use cases, mock-ups, sketches, etc. This is a a very valuable work since it allows the customer to finely adapt his budget to target:

• All of the "Must-have" requirements
• Some "nice-to-have" requirements

We have also heard about these stories where a marketing guy sells something that cannot be developed. Moreover, with a ridiculous delay and price. Then, the dev-team shall deal with all those restrictions and try to do it in the assigned time, quality and budget. A have written a post on Answering to Impossible Requirements.

The following video illustrates some of these problems:

• Customer doesn't know exactly what he wants
• Customer requirements are
• contradictory
• fuzzy
• impossible to implement
•  Marketing agent pushes the expert guy to accept any requirement

        At the end of the sketch, everybody agrees on a "seven perpendicular red lines drown with green ink" project!

I really laugh at the "perpendicularity" question:

        - ....
        - Seven lines, all strictly perpendicular
        - To..... what?
        - eeuuhhh...... to........ everything!
           ....... among ........ themselves !
           I assume you know what perpendicular lines are like !
        - Of course he does! He is an expert!
        -  ...
        - Why are they blue?
        - Indeed, over it was that myself
        - I have a blue pen with me
        - This was just a demonst.....
        - That's the problem, the lines are blue, draw them with red ink
        - That wont solve the problem
        - How do you know before you've tried?
           Lets draw them in red ink then lets see...