John,

One of the things that OOP causes to happen is a big shift in where we spent our time developing. The shift is from coding to designing. In oop we need to spend alot of time designing the interfaces that our objects will expose and use. We need to really seriuoously work to insure that these interfaces cover all of the issues our objects need to address.

Once these interfaces are desgned we need to begin coding to the int3erfaces even if the objects we are calling on do not yet exist. One of the reasons you are feeling the pressure right now is that you have a development team that wants to start coding and they don't know what the interfaces will be. These people and you need to spend a good deal of time figuring out what the interfaces will be and designing the system before the coding actually starts.