Do you guys ever feel like you're pushed on all sides, with people coming at you all around and making you relay unwanted messages back and forth? For example, I have to take very high level software change requests that our external clients submit, get more details and write them up as requirements documents. That's the cool part of the job that I signed up for.

But right now I have an external client who asked us to develop some features that will be greyed out/disabled until some unknown future date when they might actually use them. My dev team pushed back and my manager said "no, we're not going to spend development resources on things that are not functional". I'm 100% on board with that, so I went back to the client and politely explained. Client said "do it anyway". Now I have to be firmer with the client, and best customer service face on, "I'm sorry, we won't be doing that" and hope they don't pitch a fit.

The external client requests are why we are here, our entire job is a contract to support this software for them. We have strict rules that we don't develop anything that's not approved by the client. Last week one of my dev teams submitted a change request to optimize a stored procedure. As a former software engineer I'm all in favor of optimizing code and making things work better. However, as the BA on this contract, I have to document specific, measurable and testable requirements in detail, explained so that the client can understand it and approve the work. The dev team says it will take them a year just to analyze all the issues with this stored procedure and try various things to see if they work or not. So that's not flying because I can't write it up that way and they don't want to make (they're saying) 54 change requests as they discover what the issues are. My manager assigned their CR to me to do, but the organizational side of the management team says the requirements have to be documented correctly or it can't be done. I want so much to pull the management team and the dev team into a meeting so that I don't have to be the unwanted messenger running back and forth on this.

Do any of you have jobs like this? How do you deal with it?