The eleven projects demonstrated many effective ways to put the foregoing principles into practice. Through surveys, interviews, and project documents we identified nineteen best practices that should go into the design, development, and operation of any state-local information system. The individual projects provided many illustrations of how good managers adapted these practices to the needs of their specific projects.

• Define purpose and scope
• Choose a well-skilled and respected project leader
• Recruit the right project team
• Sell the project to decision makers
• Communicate often and clearly with stakeholders
• Finance creatively
• Adopt tools and techniques that can manage complexity
• Look for existing models
• Understand and improve processes before you apply technology
• Match the technology to the job
• Use industry standard technology
• Adopt and abide by data standards
• Integrate with related processes and practices
• Use prototypes to ensure understanding and agreement about design
• Choose a capable pilot site
• Make the best use of vendors
• Train thoroughly Support users
• Review and evaluate performance