Requiem Aeternam

It seems that for some reason people get the impression that all I do at work is write e-mails and surf the internet, but I want to make perfectly clear that this is a totally false presupposition–I drink coffee and eat donuts too! But here’s a brief description of what our job requires.

Introduction to Project Management

As project managers, we attempt to manipulate the project management triangle and direct team members in order to effectively produce a product (textbooks, in our case).

The triangle demonstrates the relationship between a project’s scope (its size or amount of work required, for instance how many pages will be in a textbook), the time needed to complete the project, and the cost necessary to complete it. For instance, if you want to decrease the amount of time needed to finish a project (demonstrated by shortening the corresponding side of the triangle), you would also have to change the other two sides to maintain the triangle shape. You could decrease scope (the amount of work you plan on doing), or increase the amount of money you want to put into the project, or decrease both scope and cost in order to make the project’s duration shorter. You could also accomplish a project in a shorter duration by changing the angle where the cost and scope sides meet without reducing scope and without increasing cost, but that would negatively effect the quality of the product. It’s not a perfect illustration, but it gives a general idea of what we’re trying to do, namely manipulate the three sides of the triangle to be the optimal size and shape.

Meetings

Pretty much everything we do to accomplish this job ends up in some sort of meeting, so the best way to describe more precisely what goes on would be to discuss the different types of meetings that we have. Most meetings fit into the categories of project planning, implementation, and tracking.

Planning meetings include product line meetings, charter meetings, and project planning meetings. Product lines include all textbooks of a certain subject. For instance, the product line I work on the most is secondary Bible, which includes Bible Truths A, Bible Truths B, and so on up to Bible Truths F (7th grade-12th grade). Our goal is to maintain a copyright age of 5 years or less for all textbooks. Since there are six products on my product line, this means we need to come out with a new textbook revision every year (the first year a book comes out it has a copyright age of zero, so it works out). In product line meetings all the different department supervisors (authors, art/page design, page layout, photo/text acquisition and permissions and editorial), as well as marketing representatives and a few others try to balance the consumers’ needs, our resources, and our time requirements to develop a general plan for the next twenty years or so. My job is to organize the meetings, direct them, make sure all relevant information is examined, and finally to produce a written version of the plan (normally an excel file complete with charts and graphs) to hand to sponsors (the really high up people in charge) for them to approve.

Charter meetings are more specific in nature; rather than looking at all the products in a product line, a project charter defines the attributes of all the items in a single product. My team just finished a charter for our next Bible Truths project and the charter goes into the particulars about what items will be included (student text, teacher’s edition, a CD to go with the teacher’s edition, tests, and test answer keys), what level of revision we will do (generally light, medium, heavy, or full), how much money we can spend on the revision, and when the items need to be finished. In other words, a charter defines what the triangle will look like for each individual project. Pretty much the same people come to charter meetings as to product line meetings, although supervisors might send a worker who will be working on the project instead of coming themselves. My responsibilities are similar as well, but the final draft of the charter is prepared by a marketing representative and then given to me to route around to the sponsors.

Project Planning meetings are even more specific. Project planning meetings include the workers from each department who will actually do the work on the project rather than their supervisors. These meetings produce the specific schedules that we use to execute and track the production of a text book. Normally I will create a preliminary schedule for the different items of a project in Gantt chart form using Microsoft project and go over that schedule with the team who will suggest changes to make the schedule more realistic by dropping tasks or adding them or changing their durations. We break each schedule up into work packages so everyone is working on a maneagable amount of work (like a single chapter or section) at a given time rather than just trying to complete the whole book. Each work package will consist of 5 to 20 tasks depending on the project and what stage of development it’s in. A team member will complete their task and pass the work package on to the next person. For instance, an author will write the revisions for a chapter and then pass the work package on to an editor who will edit it for conceptual or structural problems (proofreading type editing occurs later) and then hand it back to the author to incorporate the editor’s suggestions. I have to schedule and coordinate all the tasks for all the departments and make sure the durations are reasonable and everything is in the right order (trickier than it may seem sometimes–on our current project we’re scheduled to finish the testpack before the teacher’s edition, but a certain amount of the teacher’s edition needs to be finished first because the test answer key references page numbers in the teachers edition).

Moving on to project implementation meetings–these are meetings that take place weekly or biweekly after work has already been started on a project. The team members meet to review what has been accomplished, communicate and resolve issues, prepare for upcoming tasks, and reexamine whether or not the team can meet the scheduled completion dates.

Project reporting meetings consist of a weekly meeting between all the project managers, all the department supervisors, and a few other people. The main purpose of this meeting is to make sure that supervisors are aware of potential problems in their departments and that the head of the product development division of the press has an accurate idea of what projects are running late or early or on time. To relay this information we use an excel chart such as the one below.

Each vertical column represents a work package. A column that is green all the way to the top means that work package is ready to be sent to the printing press. Red indicates where a task or series of tasks is late, light blue means a schedule has been made, and so on.

We also have meetings within our department to discuss better methods of management, strategic planning, and tactical approaches.

Summary

A good analogy for a project manager is a coach on a sports team. Like sports players, our team members do the real leg work, but we are the ones planning and directing the team members to do what they do more effectively and meet a common goal. One of the most important aspects in project management is communication, and that means a lot of meetings, and standardized graphs, and charts, and forms, and templates that we create and use as tools to help the teams as they work.

Now, if you actually read all that, congratulations! You get a big fat juicy cookie!