Things Are Heating Up All Over

One of the first projects that I ran as a PM was for a large insurance company. They had just purchased a smaller vision insurance company and we were to rewrite their vision claims system.
It was strange, because no matter what we did, nobody was happy with the project. We spent, gosh, two or three months just prototyping screens. It seemed like we couldn't do anything right.
We would show our screen designs to our manager, and he liked them. Then we would show them to the director. He always hated them. So we would change them around, and then the manager said they sucked. When we finally got those two guys agreeing, the users didn't like them.
After investigating a bit, I found out why: it turns out that the vision company that was acquired did not want a new computer system. They were very happy with their current one, thank you very much, and didn't take kindly to the new "main office" delivering goods from on high. The manager and director? Both of them were color blind! If you looked at some of the other screens in that shop, they looked like bizarre neo-modern art -- reds, pinks, huge buttons. It was like Picasso became a GUI designer. The term "butt-ugly" only began to describe the looks of these applications.
What did we do to fix it? We had to have a "come to Jesus moment" inside the team, and realize who our primary customer was. Not who was going to use the program, or who was our boss. Who wrote the checks. And in this case, it was the director. From that point onwards, we did everything we could to keep him happy. And he kept the other people happy as well.
How did it all work out? Wish I knew. The project ran for two years (for a simple VB application!) I found other contracts. Last I heard the code was sitting in a box in a server room somewhere. But we all got paid, learned some good lessons, and gave the people what they were asking for. Sometimes you can't win, but in those cases, maybe you have defined victory poorly.