Disjointed ranting follows.
We have a team of utterly braindamaged business analysts (the team used to be good, but their manager took the well liked people who did their jobs better than her to be threats and drove them out, meanwhile hiring... frankly, idiots) who are responsible for being the interface between my developers and the rest of the world. In order for us to not be made to look like braindamaged morons, we have to smear as many of the fuckups (which are constant. More things are wrong than are right) as possible back on the BA team.
Naturally the BA team tries to smear as much of it back on development as possible.
The situation has escalated to very nearly a shooting war.
That team basically takes anything that could possibly be construed as 'Development made a misstep' or 'Development took 45 seconds longer than estimated' or 'Development did not have required ESP and asked for clarification on a sentence largely made up of gibberish' and escalates it to our management. This usually takes the form of cc:Director.
We are more tactful and usually only cc:Manager and just let our (highly annoyed) director shout at theirs out of band.
Except this week. This week, their manager is out. Her OOO reply says to email her boss (actually a junior VP now, rather than a director) about any issues. Excellent. cc:JVP on whatever idiocy was transpiring at the moment.
That team FREAKED THE FUCK OUT. They had considered it completely unthinkable that cc:Boss+1 could be applied to them, rather than just to developers. Best part: The email where one supervisor in particular was freaking the fuck out cc'd our Boss+1.
I spend entirely too much of my time on organizational politics - mainly building elaborate illustrations of where other people fucked up and how we were working on faulty information when we wrote Thing That Doesn't Quite Do What The Customer Thought It Should Do.
We recently had an app go live where the specification was still changing in fundamental ways FOURTEEN DAYS after initial deployment, and all those changes were related to reconciling what the BA's wrote with what the customer actually expected. All implemented as emergency production changes, of course.