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Have you ever driven through downtown Boston? If so, you might scratch your head as to why some streets wind and twist seemingly at random, driving you around in circles, sometimes literally, while raising your blood pressure like Clark W. Griswold trying to exit from London’s Lambeth Bridge roundabout.

As legend has it, the streets in the downtown quarter were the old livestock and dirt roads used by the first colonists, and have stayed relatively the same for hundreds of years.

When you embark on a new BPM, ECM or SharePoint project, it is important to not jam a superhighway of sharing and productivity on top of the cow path. Enshrining an illogical, unrefined and often unplanned path is not the ideal method of project execution or user adoption. The best question you should ask before working on any new project is, “Why?”

• Why are things being done a certain way?
• Why should they stay the same?
• Why should they be changed?

You have a wide variety of options here, ranging from hiring a dedicated PM, diagramming things in Visio, or even drawing a process on a whiteboard. I think the critical component is actually seeing what a workflow or system currently looks like before you embark on changing or refining it. If you can understand the process first, and the people involved, then adding technology to improve things is easy.

So have you ever paved a cow path on a project? Narrowly averted disaster? Leave a comment below and let me know.