I'm surprised about the emphasis too. In terms of ideas, I used to work in a large corporate on the technology side - now work for a software company, so YMMV w

I'm surprised about the emphasis too. In terms of ideas, I used to work in a large corporate on the technology side - now work for a software company, so YMMV with these: One of the first projects I worked on involved re-writing an entire admin system, both the technology and the underlying processes. One technique that worked well for the team, was to work-shadow; we would each spend time watching how a couple of people worked; compared notes and would go back and ask questions if we didn't understand it. Work shadowing doesn't have to be project related either; I visited nearly every department in our division of the over the years (1 every couple of months). I even managed to swing going out with the sales guys and visit clients; the clients were happy to spend an hour talking about their business and problems. Anyway, my experience with large corporates if that if you ask - people are generally happy to help you out - but I think many people just censure themselves from asking in the first place. One other technique that I think works quite well is to get the strong end users seconded to beef up the QA team. Again, this doesn't work in all environments. But in the context of developing an internal system, it worked really well. For an external facing system, we did get a sales guy seconded onto the team too - which again really helped build up the knowledge of the whole team. A variant on reading is podcasts and forums - I've used both of those to get to grips with whats going on in an industry. For the software company, most of the above doesn't work, we're adapating Steve Blank's mantra of "get out of the building" and just trying to talk to as many people (especially customers) as we can. If they agree to talk to you, they're generally going to be helpful.