One of the biggest frustrations I experienced when I was performing development was that I was often too far away from the customer. Every layer of communications seems to add 10% at a minimum to the development time. Even worse was when non-technical people were doing the installation. The customer’s actual needs always seemed to become transformed into some mixture of pseudo-techie sounding language, business school euphemism, and buzzwordian nonsense, to be transformed into a working product. All too often, “I have a spreadsheet of 30 sales reps who need to receive a report with these calculations weekly