>I appreciate this point George. I see this also where I am when people often are not ( or will not be ) trained on the usage of the software or properly test the software for problems and as a way to learn the system they will be using in production.
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>E.g. They asked me to develop an extensive and complicated form in Outlook to be a tracking system. I tell them it's on line to be tested by them to make sure it does what they want and there are no problems. Fine. They create 1, 2 or maybe three items, fill in a few or maybe several of the 60 something fields in this thing, route it to 1 or maybe 2 people and say "Ok, it's fine." Then later, when we're half an inch away from production I get "Oh, BTW, we really need this, and this, and this thing isn't the way we like it ...". Very frustrating.

I think we've all been down this road, Bill. Unfortunately, I think it's part of the nature of the business.

In my case, it's a very complex application that use to be done manually. Doing ti that way took about an hour. When I wrote the application, the first users understood what the system could and couldn't do and knew that the intent of the application was never to be able to cover all possible contigencies. Since thy knew what had to happen in order for the system to work, when a message came up saying that the necessary information to make the desired calculations couldn't be located, they knew that the data wasn't either beyond the scope of the printed guidelines and that data would have to be added. Since that time, however, the original users are no longer the current ones, and have to idea how to process the information manually. I've pointed out on several ocassions that, as a backup, worst case scenario, the users should be able to process the information manually, but this has fallen on deaf ears.

BTW, the application can process 200+ requests per day where before the maximum was 8.


To Mark:

Sorry, I didn't mean to use you as a sounding board. Remember also, that there's nothing from preventing the users from adjusting the speaker volume on the speakers and, for that, there is no API or anything else to override it.< s >