I find it’s always helpful to think in terms of user, business and tech. For example, whenever I see a product design or requirements, I walk through the user perspective, the business perspective and the technical perspective. A lot of times, the business or technical perspective ends up winning because the customer didn’t have a voice. Mistakes like that give software a bad rap. After all, the software is for the user, isn’t it. If your software doesn’t make the user more effective and more efficient, or worse, makes them feel dumb, they aren’t going to like it.
I have a similar approach, the only diff is that I see IT folks as an end users too. These guys are responsible for supporting the app/solution in prod environment, they are the first one who’s flamed by end users, they are those who under fire when shit happens and hits the fan. That is why I think DFO (design for operations) or as I like to call it ODL (operations development lifecycle) must be practiced just like SDL and PDL.
The operations perspective is definitely key. It’s a living, breathing system. As one of my mentors would say — “it’s got lungs.”