I've been in exactly your situation. At this stage, what the team needs is
not your expertise on how things could have been done, but your help making
a success out of the tool they've currently chosen. If you can use what you
know to help create a successful outcome, you will gain credibility points
which will get you a lot farther in the long run.

Also, never underestimate how much people can be impressed with small wins,
such as you can get by performing a few well-placed "interface surgeries"
(to use R Hoeckman Jr's term) to the worst UI widget offenders.

I recently worked on an intranet project with many challenges: lousy
Lotus/Domino back-end technology and a really insecure marketing team who
was anxiously spraying feelgood text all over anything that couldn't get out
of the way. Within these constraints I went to work and applied best
practices as much as I could.

To me, the finished product looked like JoJo the Dog-Faced Boy. But the
project sponsors were ecstatic. You can't account for taste, but you*
can *decide
whether or not you're going to be a difficult person to work with. Ask
yourself: is your objective to make sure that everyone knows what you know,
or is your goal to quietly use what you know to be the guiding hand in a
storm?
________________________________________________________________
*Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah*
February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA
Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/

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