I know *exactly* what you mean. The requirements document is always below 1.0, nobody reads the documents except before the milestones where the document is “required”, etc.

I’ve even participated a project where me (the consultant) drafted the requirements for the software and, since nobody wanted to give any feedback, that particular document ended up being the final requirements specification. Verbatim. Of course, we constantly heard things like “we are very serious about this project”, “this is a top priority of the global organization”, and so on…

It’s not any greener this side of the globe

Amen. This has been true on so many projects I have been involved on. It is incredibly frustrating when you write a functional spec and no one reads it

Now I aim to produce zero documentation and focus my effort on developing the domain knowledge of the team
and coach the business how to best interact with the project (e.g. Write requirements in the form of uat expected results.

I agree with the points made above. In my opinion it is because of non-technical BAs. In the beginning, when the world was dark and BA less, ‘requirements’ were written by nerds. Project Managers and clients found these documents to be completely unintelligible…because they were. The docs were written because when studying ‘Information Systems 101′ at Uni, we all learn how essential a requirements document is. But the nerds hated these documents at uni, and nothing changed for them once they entered the real world. They saw them then, as now, as speed bumps on the road to development Utopia. Then GOD said ‘let there be BAs’…and there were BAs. Now, these BAs were specialists at understanding people’s businesses. That is to say, they knew how to spend inordinate amounts of time with clients, finding out exactly how little the client understood about the problems they were buying an IT system to solve. The problem was, the technical ability of the BA usually wasn’t much stronger than developing databases in Access 97 (credit where credit is due though…most can competently convert an Access 97 db to Access 2000). So, nerds have too much technical skill to write good requirements…BAs too little. What’s the answer? The technical BA. The problem is, it takes a special breed of person who wants to maintain a high level of technical acumen for the sole purpose of writing requirments documents. I could go on to say why I think this will go a long way to enhancing any development process that is used…but I will wait to see what you all think…