Re: The customer is always right!
True, but the Client vs Customer issue actually happened in French, which is already longer than English. Changing that label was literally 3 minutes work - replace, in the French metadata, the content of that field's default label. Presto, all done. But, as you point out, you really need to check that there is space for the new label everywhere the field is shown to users. And adjust if necessary. I could have easily told the customer which pages had this field, even the ones using the default label. Could even have trawled through the security configuration to limit this review to only the pages which were actually used by any of their users, if the final security access rights had been configured (unlikely early in an implementation). But I wouldn't have been able to compute spacing to flag placement issues.
It was so obviously stupid that even a techy like me could carry the day pointing that out. But what made our software configurable almost invariably dragged customer implementations into quicksand. The customers had the same tools and compilers as the our own (vendor-side) developers, so they could go to town modding. Part of the problem was also the sales cycle: our salesmen sold that flexibility. An undisciplined government IT Dept - or even more often, one too subordinate to the Accounting or HR Dept in corporate seniority - would never have balls to stand up to endless cycles of nitpicking, or sometimes just stupid data re-modelling effort. "Well, we've re-implemented your Department Tree" was something another years-late customer told me when I did converted some stuff for them and panicked when said Department Tree - an uber-critical component - seemed to be broken afterwards. Throwing more staff at these projects just makes things worse - it literally feeds the fires.
You really need to start out with a Project Director who has the direct support the C-suite and the authority to tell the user stakeholders to buzz off when appropriate. Then that person needs to have rally good functional SMEs who understand the product, the general business domain and that particular client company's business processes well enough to know exactly how to configure what's likely actually not very special at all, using out-of-the-box functionality. Even have them change their business processes a bit, if really warranted. Customize and create new code artifacts only in the need-to-have areas, like data integration feeds: very little busywork for the techies. Train, interview - and cajole - the heck of the actual line workers, those projects typically only ask their supervisors' input. Strangely enough: having too little resources and too little time can actually be a wonderful stimuli - in the right hands - to get to a successful go-live quickly.
But it is all down to good project and expectations management and some of the worst performers in that league are the big consultancies whose incentives are billing more hours..
