Prototyping - occasionally when starting out on a big in-house development project, we'd task one or two guys to build a prototype in access to understand the c

Prototyping - occasionally when starting out on a big in-house development project, we'd task one or two guys to build a prototype in access to understand the challenges, functionality, data issues and get user feedback on what worked and what didn't. Invest 3-4 weeks of effort that saved us months of effort from the project overall and de-risked the project substantially. One time it back-fired a bit when the users liked the access proto-type more than the final system (pushed the envelope a bit too much and the performance was very poor), but typically got plenty of value out of it.