A quick warning to user experience professionals.  Do not allow yourselves to become the rope in an organizational tug of war.  As organizational awareness to the practice of user experience design grows, the first questions to be asked are, "Who does what?"  Project teams and customers are familiar with traditional requirements gathering processes and business analysis teams may feel threatened by a new way of engaging customers and gathering information.

Approaches vary but people still do the work. Waterfall, XP, Agile, SCRUM, RUP are project structures and never replace project teams.  Clearly defined roles and responsibilities ensure accountability.

Avoid undo project team stress by remembering the following:

• Eliminate all redundant meetings
  
• Avoid single document ownership and version all document changes.
  
• Write customer facing docs in plain english.
  
• involve your entire team in project planning/ release planning
  
• Avoid an esoteric approach/ theoretical dev team management
  
• Understand the project theme: ask yourself what kind of project it is? a legacy replacement; a green field; internal app, external app;
  
• Understand how the customer defines success