Culture Clash: It isn't Just About Geography

Each side concentrated on doing what it did best. We did code drops every Friday with new features and deliverables, although there were some major questions about just what the project was supposed to be accomplishing (hey -- that's called Extreme Programming, right?)
The other side had some vague ideas of what they wanted, and pressed constantly for promises of when it would be ready. Could we cut staff? Could we deliver more quickly? When pressed with requirements questions, two things happend: everyone in the room (we had a super-user group of between 10 and 15 people from all over the world) felt a need to pontificate on the history of the problem and life in general. They also were extremely adept at referring us to some other group, deep within the bowels of the corporation, which we had never met.
So the development process I walked into was chaos: developers, architects, and pms sat around in a big conference room day after day, listening to endless meetings that confused more than resolved matters. I was mentoring our lead on site, and he was very angry most of the time, "This project is directly approved and being watched by the CIO," he used to say, "these people are way down the food chain. We need to push to get the answers we need."
But when push came to shove, he was more interested in his image as a PM and keeping the boat from rocking. I think on a couple occasions he tried to go back to the CIO for more "juice", but each time the superusers had cut him off at the pass. He was playing checkers. these people were lifetime employees: they were playing grandmaster chess. The users would keep us in meetings for hours on end, without even a bathroom break, in a gritty determination to show who was "really" determined to make the project work.
One week I went to work with a list of ten questions from the developers. On Monday, I went into ten straight hours of meetings, working through lunch. By the end of the day, I had two answers -- one of which they weren't so certain about. It was enough to make a grown man cry.
I learned a lot of great lessons from that contract. You can't have a productive, decision-making meeting with 20 or more people in the room. 5-10 is pushing it. And failure to understand culture and deal with it is the same thing as failure to deliver.