Feels like things like this are super common in the consulting / non-tech company world. A lot of small factions all wanting their little requirement slotted in, and the whole product end up either being completely incoherent or there are large parts that are wasteful.
For me it was a project a while ago with a telecom company. They wanted a place to manage their customers' communications. One group was adamant that we needed to surface customer's emails in this portal, instead of providing say just a link to whatever their email provider is. Essentially they wanted us to build a clone of gmail / hotmail / yahoo mail but only with SMTP / POP / IMAP access to the data. We tried to tell them how expensive and not useful this would be, but no had to build it.
Obviously we couldn't build a gmail clone in the time we had that was better than gmail, and there was pretty much no incentive for users to use our version instead of gmail proper. So after spending more than half of the total project time (and budget) on this email functionality, six months after launch we had a very small handful of users linking their email and most of them didn't do anything with it. Even after being presented with the usage data, we couldn't just get rid of this feature, because that would be admitting failure.
For me it was a project a while ago with a telecom company. They wanted a place to manage their customers' communications. One group was adamant that we needed to surface customer's emails in this portal, instead of providing say just a link to whatever their email provider is. Essentially they wanted us to build a clone of gmail / hotmail / yahoo mail but only with SMTP / POP / IMAP access to the data. We tried to tell them how expensive and not useful this would be, but no had to build it.
Obviously we couldn't build a gmail clone in the time we had that was better than gmail, and there was pretty much no incentive for users to use our version instead of gmail proper. So after spending more than half of the total project time (and budget) on this email functionality, six months after launch we had a very small handful of users linking their email and most of them didn't do anything with it. Even after being presented with the usage data, we couldn't just get rid of this feature, because that would be admitting failure.