The preparatory phase of ProDES -- which involved design, development, testing, and training -- required about 2 years of work. Working with the State's core delinquency programs, Temple University's Crime and Justice Research Center identified outcomes and change measures that were relevant to program performance, found and tested standardized instruments that would measure those variables, and trained program staff in conducting data collection. The tracking system that emerged from this process, which began operating in January 1994, called for information-collection at four points in time: disposition, program intake, program discharge, and 6-month follow-up. Such information-collection has been done for about a decade, and currently more than 90 programs participate in ProDES. All programs that contract with the Department of Human Services are now required to provide staff assessment and self-report data to the system. In return they receive several kinds of useful feedback. Case-specific summary sheets regarding individual juveniles are provided to participating programs at intake and discharge, enabling programs to see and understand the results of their assessments. Follow-up summaries instruct programs in how their clients have adjusted 6 months after leaving the program. Every year or so, each ProDES program receives a detailed program summary that analyzes its performance in the aggregate. It is up to each program to decide what it does with the information ProDES provides. Currently ProDES is working to develop the Program Design Inventory (PDI), which is a database of detailed information on delinquency programs available for Philadelphia's youth. The PDI is intended to help probation officers and judges make better delinquent-program matching decisions in individual cases.