[Sigia-l] rapid prototyping by business managers

[HK Dunston]

hello,

I'm helping a client at a large company think through the way intranet
projects get built. He is convinced that the (non-technical) company
business managers need to build some sort of prototype before any vendors
have been hired to build the application. He has the idea that this
prototyping effort will help to scope the project more accurately -- that
the business manager would put together something simple, get approval from
various stakeholders and *then* hire a firm to build the full application.

Setting aside the (rather large) problem of whether business managers
understand enough about IA or technology constraints to design a prototype,
has anyone done something like this before? What did the prototype look
like? How successful was it in clarifying scoping, getting early feedback,
etc? What was its relationship to the final product?

As you might imagine, I'd like to steer the process in a different
direction -- I was hoping that some horror-stories would help build my case.
Of course this may just be professional bias -- who says business managers
can't build prototypes? :-P Any reactions or anecdotes would be welcome.

In this vein, has anyone used instamatic prototype creation tools like
i-rise (http://www.irise.com) or M7 (http://www.m7.com/prototype.html)? What
was the result?

Thanks!

--hk