Putting the PR in Project

Kill it with Fire is ostensibly a book about legacy systems but is packed with good advice about managing any significant project. In one chapter Marianne Bellotti talks about gathering consensus, showing progress, and maintaining momentum.

It's probably coincidental but she happened to use several words that start with "pr" when describing some of the key aspects of her approach. I liked the description a lot, but I also liked the pun, so I recast the broad ideas with a Public Relations head on:

Provoke a need. You'll have observed that people tend to care more about urgent than important. What urgent hook can you hang your important project on? Is there a security issue, a performance issue, a cross-team ambiguity, or anything else that can be used to motivate others?

Promote the value of the project to whoever matters and will listen. Be prepared to cast the value in their terms rather than yours. The head of marketing doesn't give a crap about your tech debt but does care about cadence and reliability of feature delivery.

Protect the project from interference. Avoid dependencies and "big" decisions. If you can tie your work to an existing initiative, you might be able to leap nimbly over the needs-widespread-approval quicksand.

Prove the value of the project quickly. Organise your project to have some early and visible win that will give you goodwill and cover if and when things get tricky later.

Predetermine the project endpoint. Be clear what that aim of the project is and how you'll judge that you've got there. Push back on mission creep and focus on activities that contribute to the mission.

Read my summary of the book here.

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