The problem here is that you usually do not have ~1k users with all the same requirements. You have 200 groups of average 5 users each, all with their own department-specific, country-specific or workflow-specific requirements. Of course a central solution will be better and cheaper. But it will never be quicker, because you will take ages to just gather requirements from all 200 distinct user groups. As soon as you have those requirements, they will have changed already, so you are working on yesteryear's problems.
And of course, given a working system, the users can drop you a quick email, explain their problem (yes, in an ideal world they could do that, and you would understand them right away...) and you implement a 5min change. In reality however, their problem will first have to be specified in a user story, with a ton of clarification requests until the story is really understood by the dev team, then you need goodwill, time and money for the implementation. And maybe their problem can only be solved by an ugly hack, a weird special case for the ternary currency and ages-old lunar-calendar-based tax-system of lampukistan. Would that really be quicker than just the lampukistan team throwing together a few formulas and be done faster than the initial email? Even when multiplied by the special requirements of the other 100 country sales teams?
Also, I've had similar change requests where is was explicitly asked to provide a spreadsheet prototype of what the statistics should look like. Well, thanks, why again do we need a dev team?
I know that spreadsheets suck. They are ugly, undebuggable hacks, always and without exception. You need tons of time to implement in hours what would be a quick one-liner SQL query. With terrible error behaviour, weird edge cases and hell knows how many hidden bugs when the locale uses the lampukistan-currency-separator instead of a decimal dot...
...Except that they provide those office drones with velocity, which, as the usual wisdom around here goes, is everything.
And of course, given a working system, the users can drop you a quick email, explain their problem (yes, in an ideal world they could do that, and you would understand them right away...) and you implement a 5min change. In reality however, their problem will first have to be specified in a user story, with a ton of clarification requests until the story is really understood by the dev team, then you need goodwill, time and money for the implementation. And maybe their problem can only be solved by an ugly hack, a weird special case for the ternary currency and ages-old lunar-calendar-based tax-system of lampukistan. Would that really be quicker than just the lampukistan team throwing together a few formulas and be done faster than the initial email? Even when multiplied by the special requirements of the other 100 country sales teams?
Also, I've had similar change requests where is was explicitly asked to provide a spreadsheet prototype of what the statistics should look like. Well, thanks, why again do we need a dev team?
I know that spreadsheets suck. They are ugly, undebuggable hacks, always and without exception. You need tons of time to implement in hours what would be a quick one-liner SQL query. With terrible error behaviour, weird edge cases and hell knows how many hidden bugs when the locale uses the lampukistan-currency-separator instead of a decimal dot...
...Except that they provide those office drones with velocity, which, as the usual wisdom around here goes, is everything.