Hear, hear. Thanks for a great post. Very useful synopsis of my jumbled up reasoning – timely too – managing UCD budgets and activities to ensure real ROI is critical for so many IA teams right now.

Matching appropriate methods to the objectives, scale and budget is, I agree, very important. There is a tendency to see UX design and usability as a kind of consultancy activity – not integrated into the development process and definitely not iterative. Breaking down the perception of large scale user research projects as the be-all-and-end-all of the field will help UX workers to integrate, and there be more effective, in tech teams.