In this story, there are three “groups”. The vendor, who is the development team, the end users, and IT for the users. IT is the sponsor – i.e. they have the money for the project.
The vendor does a pretty good job of documenting their requests for information. The end users don’t always do such a good job of responding in a timely manner. This isn’t really that shocking, because supporting the software development effort is not their primary job. The vendor has been very good about allowing schedule slippages to accommodate the users. (How they do this without charging more money is beyond me. Presumably they make their profit via selling their software licenses.)
Unfortunately, there is this one request for information that has been out there for weeks and the vendor is still waiting for a response. (All the others have been completed. The end users really are pretty much on top of things.)
Finally, getting nervous, the vendor calls a meeting to discuss the status of the request. During the meeting it becomes clear that the end users still don’t know what they want. The vendor pointed out that if we can’t resolve this soon the result will be that they will have to break these requirements out into a separate release and therefore ask for some additional money – but probably not that much.
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