Came here to say essentially the same thing - GET REQUIREMENTS. No matter which road you end up choosing, the requirements will make choices much clearer, and their objective nature will give you a buffer against the business folks who agreed to them, but want the flaming logo on Wednesdays.

I did this a few years ago for a decent-sized telecom, that wanted to get rid of dozens of home-built systems in favor of telecom-specific ERP type software (usually called OSS for this industry). The RFP was a bust (no vendor selected), but those requirements guided the next 18 months of systems development, COTS adoption, integration and legacy retirement. In the end, even the business folks acknowledged that without the written requirements, they would not have been able to make any of the advances we made.

This is also known as "Bugs Bunny-ing" someone.

I see what you did there.

Hey, feels just like Reddit!

I was brought into my current job about eight years ago, ostensibly to bring PM and SDLC process to the wild west of application development in my department. The mainframers wanted nothing to do with process improvement, saying they had everything under control. The client/server and web folks gave me the "we're different, old rules don't apply" argument. I asked around, looked through old documentation, anything to get a feel for where this group was at and what they'd done. After about six weeks, I decided it was basically a green field and brought in your run-of-the-mill PMI-style project mgmt and basic SDLC. Nothing fancy, and pretty stripped down since most projects were in the $50K-$150K range.

Fast forward to this year. Management makes a sweet offer for early retirees, and they take the bait. In droves. One of the retirees drops a folder off on my desk as she's headed out the door. It says, "Blast from the past...thought you might enjoy this." It was a fairly complete PM and SDLC definition, from two years before I'd arrived. No one (including the manager who had hired me and given me the task) had offered this to me before, even though that manager's name was on the approvers list.

Now I'm not sure this was strictly age-ism, but might this problem be more properly defined as a "green-field" syndrome? That is, that people would rather bump into the same problem than have to listen to someone else who's already been there?