Discover Your Project’s Identity

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Discover Your Project’s Identity
David Schmaltz (June 15, 2006)

It takes a community to bring a project to coherent conclusion, but no project achieves community without first discovering an identity that everyone involved can recognize. Sleep-inducing PowerPoint presentations packed with milestones and deliverables can’t do the trick. What can? Well, withered turnips, kimonos and other visual metaphors have worked for others. Can you discover your project's identity and, most important, share it?

Part I of this series, “The Good, Er, Old Days,” recounted how projects were mustered before the practice of “project community” began taking root. Part II, “Someone Else’s Goals,” considered the importance of enlightened self-interest. Part III, “Five Little Minutes,” described how helping others find their project within the overall project creates community. In this, the fourth installment, I introduce how to describe your project so everyone involved recognizes they are related.

It takes someone who understands every little detail about a project to explain it in a way that no one else could ever understand.

Even when the death-by-PowerPoint presentation succeeds in inscribing the Gutenberg Bible onto the head of a pin, it doesn’t further anyone’s understanding of scripture.

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