[coleca]

Reminds me of a story I heard during a project management class many years ago. The PM was working on a govt contract for the US Army in the late 90s to build a mobile mapping system for use in the field on the Humvees. He got all the specs from the generals to build this marvel of a technology system with screens and scrolling maps (90s remember) and decided to talk to the soldiers in the field to ask them what they wanted out of the project.

The soldiers told him what they really wanted was a piece of plywood that they could fold out and lay their paper maps on. They didn't want screens or electronics, because those don't work with bullet holes in them, but the paper maps work fine even if they get shot.

[8_hours_ago]

This kind of stuff still happens all the time today. A few years ago I worked for a small government contractor which did a lot of phase 1 and 2 projects for the DoD. Most of the contracts we got were for developing experimental technologies to make soldiers more effective, which involved a lot of guessing what the soldiers actually wanted. After making a shiny demo (usually held together with duct tape, ugly perl scripts, and prayers) which the government PM would fall in love with, we would do field testing which would inevitably end with the soldiers reporting that it was a cool piece of technology, but almost completely useless to them. Anyway, it was lots of fun to work on those projects :)