Our developer worked feverishly for 6 weeks and got us a barebones, functional system. It was at this point that we tested the heck out of it. We reported bugs directly to him and within hours they were fixed. After two weeks of this the system was solid enough to show others.

It was at this point that management sat down with the developer and tech support. They looked at what we had been working with. They made their suggestions and a couple of weeks later we met again. This time management was really impressed. We had a system that met tech support, management, and customer needs. For nothing more than giving one person the time to work on it.

The branding part of the project did not come until well after an established code base existed. This was as I feel it should be. In the above example it gave the developer and his manager leverage to get more resources to fully flesh out the project and gain wider support for it a little bit at a time.