Legal approved the project, with caveats

With little fanfare the first major hurdle has been surpassed. The caveats were as expected: no discussion of product technology, no vendor or client names, and no vendor bias - what we call vendor-neutral. The last point has been the real 'chestnut' for the marketing folks with past projects. They want to control the product message and spin things in their direction. I've always been of the mind that the only real solution was to stay vendor and technology neutral. I've been doing it this way for years.

As I've been sticking to "vendor-neutral" as the dominant theme for the APM practice, over the last (4) years and it has clearly been the "path least traveled". If there is nothing to leverage, the marketing arm has generally been indifferent to the program but sometimes it would be a little more pointed. The name of the program, for instance, went through a number of iterations, each about (9) months apart, and ending with a pronouncement and re-branding of all the materials - and then silence. And when we did get some marketing support for a brochure or web link, you really had to hunt it down.

I had last year an MBO to develop sales training materials, get it recorded and up on our internal training site. Everything was under "severe urgency" and when it was finished, no notice of the update was allowed and no edit to make it part of the presales learning plan - which is really the only way folks will spend a couple hours doing training. Sure, it was a month late but I had some family problems. So here it is a full year later and folks are still surprised that they can find it.

So just three days later, after the blessing by legal, I'm now finding that the Project PM is questioning the very premise of re-purposing the root documents for the practice, into book form, and that call will not happen until December 4th. This will suck!

Call me paranoid but I think the old product-centric nemesis is back again! - preserve the status quo, it's not our business anyway, it will only help the competition survive another year...

I did a best practice paper a couple years back focusing on memory management and going way more than the product doc to really show folks how to use it correctly and, more importantly, how to back out of problems when it was used incorrectly. A year as a proposal and a cherry of a project (from a technical perspective), I pick up the project (original lead back off the project) and finished in 3 months. Multiple reviewers and probably my best work at the time. Then it went to marketing for approval to publish and sat there for (9) months. Then it was released, with no edits at all or commentary. My inside sources said the issue was that marketing could not accept that someone could misconfigure the product. Sounds plausible - but folks blown stuff up all the time, for any software system. It seems cruel that you would not show them how to back out gracefully - but that's just my opinion. Anyway, I never sent any more material up to marketing. And now that decision is back to bite me - and with 4 years of constant writing, without any marketing oversight, will they actually review it? Shoot the project? Or throw up their hands and yield to the marketplace?

My original response to management, back in August when the book was 'commissioned', was that marketing would wake up and block a book so why not look at just dropping the fame and glory and go with the Google Knol? We publish what we want (with blessing by legal), the world is made a better place - and I can go on with the next big thing. I still think that is the best route, especially as my optimism wanes.

Maybe it will be better after some turkey?