The admonition "look before you leap" is grounded in practicality and applies to many situations in the realm of system development and project management. Most of the projects we studied have integrated this concept into their practices. When developing a large, integrated system that involves stakeholders with a wide variety of perspectives, it is a good idea to find out how others have approached the same issues. Often other states, localities, or private businesses have experiences to offer as models. Before you choose a single approach and decide to implement it, look closely at similar experiences and devise a set of reasonable alternatives for your system. Look carefully at each possible approach to identify all of its strengths, weaknesses, and implications. Build a paper model or system prototype to show these ideas in more concrete form to users, customers, and other stakeholders. Invite feedback and act on it. In doing this you may uncover problems that you did not see at first, or you will refine your approach, or you may adopt a new approach that is better than the original.

One of the best ways to accomplish this is to use a process improvement method to either understand and improve upon existing processes or create new processes to satisfy business needs. There are many methods to choose from such as business process improvement, business process innovation, information engineering, and prototyping. Each of these techniques, when used correctly, engages designers and users in a focused dialog that yields a great deal of information that helps everyone make better choices. They produce maps, diagrams, small prototypes, and other illustrations that engage groups in a common understanding of the problem, process, or system. In the projects we studied, we saw how effectively these demonstrations could:

• replace many individual mental pictures of the new system with one tangible representation that all can understand in the same way,
• remove some of the fear and resistance to change that comes from simply not knowing what to expect,
• give designers and users a common vocabulary for asking and answering questions and recommending changes and additions,
• encourage people to think not just about the system itself, but about how it will fit into existing operations.