an iPlant use case
As working groups are formed, they get a wiki space and work with an administrator on requirements for their specific activities and create a roadmap through interaction with engagement team members. Functional needs are prioritized, and when the functionality is clearly understood the administrator works with team leads to define a product, then works to define development projects accordingly. There are a number of distributed datasets that are not easily available, and thus social networking is a paradigm being explored to enable easy access to these resources. This led to the development of "MyPlant."
Another team receives requirements and provisions resources to be shared across all WGs and the technical team. For centralized services such as AuthN and shared resources, they also provision SW to support this.
GoogleDocs and WebEx were early examples that the user community desired in the discovery environment, and iPlant didn't want to reinvent the wheel for obvious reasons. Thus they have been working to further refine the requirements.