i think the take-home lesson from this is, where possible, use set based rather than point based communication... when setting up meetings don't ask "can you come on the 19th, sally can only make it then, and if you can't then we might have to reschedule this and that..."

likewise, in engineering, don't let the design dept deliver a finished design to the manufacturing dept and say "can you make this." because they'll say "no. make these changes" then design make the changes and come back and ask "can you make this?" and manufacturing will say "no" again... and when they finally do say "yes" and go ahead amd manufacture it, then they go to marketing and say "can you sell this" marketing will say "no, make these changes" so manufacturing says "oh... nuts. ah, design dept? yeah, we have a problem."

design, manufacturing, marketing and quality etc etc etc MUST all sit down and work on the entire process as a single unit, and they must communicate like the above diagram: design dept says "this is the range of design ideas we can develop" manufacturing says "We can make all these things - some of which you have designs for - bewty - and some of which may trigger new ideas" and marketing says "we can sell this, this and this." and I bet that, hey presto, this style of communication would cut the whole project by half and there'd be fewer mistakes and fewer dead ends and less wasted and repeated work.