[Sigia-l] rapid prototyping by business managers

[Dunston, HK]

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