It is interesting that most of ther responses seem to assume a very large project. But a small company like ours deals with very small applications with very specific uses. Maybe what is needed is a guage of "small" versus "large".

How would you rank a project such as Infopop's "Ultimate Bulletin Board" which appears to be very successful and continually growing.

Or John Cokos "Hyperseek" search engine which has grown over the lsat few years.

If you are not familiar with either one:

http://www.infopop.com

http://www.interactive-web.net

Both of these appear to be small applications. But would require some heavy duty planning and documentation to maintain.