Having worked in a number of cross institutional projects in the past has lead me to always be weary about how to interact with people. Often it’s the lack of co-ordination and communication that seems to be the killer. Parts of the team would seem to not know what other parts of the team are doing and thus either deviate from the master plan or duplicate work.
Gathering requirements for a project is always fun, translating the requirements for a developer to create the end product is even more fun, it often can lead to ‘chinese whispers’ where things just get miscommunicated and misunderstood.
Agreeing on collaborating in a sense that everyone should talk and making sure everyone is on the same page always seems to be a touchy subject, everyone is an expert. So many things can be resolved by just bridging the communication gap. I will be finding this out very soon in how I manage expectations for the latest project that I am working on.
Perhaps I should change my approach vector in getting everyone to communicate their concerns and specifications to deliver the product that we want to create. The worst thing we can do is spend half our time developing something based on an early spec only to find out that the goal posts have changed.