during my past 12 years of experience: no matter how early we encounter the users to the projects, they would still fail if we didn't have highly skilled and experienced developers. The "skilled" here I am talking about is the skill to design the software flexible enough to be modified in a very short period; and "experienced" is the experiences to work with those clients who ALWAYS hand out useless ideas and material and create the mess during the development. In Taiwan, most of the clients tend to consider themselves highly intelligent but in fact knows nothing but creating bigger confusion on the business model. If we don't have the experienced developers who are capable to shut them up, no project can be delivered successfully.