Scott Free Thinking

Skip to Project Management - Part 2 - Building and Using a Team.

Throughout any project you will start, managing a team is important. And what is interesting, when I think about it, is how many projects revolve around the same fundamental concepts. The very process of making a movie in the film making industry is actual the exact same basic process that you would use during the oversight, maintenance, and creation of any project in general. When you set out to make a film, you set out to make it in five basic stages:

1. Development
2. Pre-Production
3. Production
4. Post-Production
5. Release & Marketing

For development you essentially create the project from the ground up. For a movie, this consists of coming up with the idea for the film itself, writing the screenplay, doing the conceptual artwork for the film, and other aspects of its overall creation in the form of the movie being an idea.

With Pre-Production, you find locations for filming, make a shooting schedule, you essentially finalize the decisions that you were throwing around in development. In Production itself, this is quite simply shooting the movie with cameras. It is the actual making of the various pieces of the film’s footage that will eventually be edited down.

In Post-Production, in fact, the movie is then broken down to a reduced version more and more from hours and hours of footage until it is finally ready for the final stage.

The final stage is release, in which you get to see either the fruits of your efforts, or the disaster of your efforts. Whether you’re talking about a multi million dollar movie or how to organize your office supplies, each project remains the same, and each outcome of a project is either going to be success or bust.

The best movie directors, just like the best project managers and team leaders, are the ones who know what it is going to take to make a successful project. So more simply, let us change this five step process that is applied to the film making industry and instead turn it into the overall work process for any project in general. We will use a list to describe the components in short, and then I will describe the inner workings of each of the five phases in the process.

1. Development
2. Pre-Action Build (PAB)
3. Take Action and Keep Acting (TAKA)
4. Polishing, Optimizing, Securing, and Adapting (POSA)
5. Completion and Release (CAR)

Development

The first step, when you’re talking about both contexts, is development. Development is perhaps one of my favorite stages of any project. Let me use this website, DirtyMechanism.com, as an example. This website originally started as nothing more than its online retail store. In April 2006, I had set out to do something with this as a project, but I did not quite know what I was going to do. So I began brainstorming. What kind of products am I going to offer? How am I going to meet customer’s interests and supply the demand? How am I going to manage running the store or automate the process? I began asking myself these very important questions about the mere thought of running a retail store in general, let alone the idea of running Dirty Mechanism itself, which is meant to have a unique identity all its own.

Perhaps the funnest part of development is the fact that this phase of the project creation process is that it is unlimited. You get to think big, and dream even bigger. For a creative project like this website, I first imagined where I would take the idea in the future if I had no limits on where it could go, and if I had unlimited resources with which to pursue it. With just about any project you’re talking about, it will have unlimited potential over a certain timeline with the right conditions, and I think planning its beginnings out, or at least thinking its beginnings out with these possibilities in mind is a great idea. Ideally, I imagined this website being a multi-million dollar retail store back in May of ‘06 during the time I was designing the products for it. As the months went on, I began to get a growing interest in what it would be like if I could compete with huge market brands like Abercrombie, or all the stores owned by Limited Brands corporation.

Development, especially on diverse projects like this one, was important. It made me realize certain aspects of my personality I had not yet realized before. For instance, you never would have heard a word from my mouth about fashion, style, or anything related to visually apparent individuality characteristics like clothing or jewelry prior to the point of me creating my own store. When I began doing the Dirty Mechanism store, it became about more than just a money-making idea, it was a store that was developing its own unique identity. Then I thought about my old website before this one that was devoted to personal development topics. I decided, why not have Dirty Mechanism just be a full blown display of my brand, in all its different forms, through all different mediums? The ideas can quickly explode when you take a look at how they can be interrelated, and when you truly take the time to consider it - the relationships can be more unorthodox than you would think.

But let’s think about the manpower involved for any project during its development. Are you going to need more than one person? How many people? 10? 20? 50? 100? 500? What is it going to take to make this project an accomplished reality? For my own businesses, it has always been important to me to minimize the expenses and needs. It may be true that during the first initial “dreaming up” parts of the development phase you’ll get to thinking about something like a chain of retail stores that is run by hundreds of your own employees, but is that how you’re going to start?

For DirtyMechanism.com, I have designed this website so that if it maintains its current structure, it can be run by, at most, five people. You might have a webmaster who keeps everything in order on the technical side, a few writers, a forum moderator, and perhaps that is all it will ever need. But who knows? Only time will tell. One thing is for certain, though. Until the project reaches a point of critical mass to require that maximum that I might have contemplated for the design phase, one person ought to be sufficient to start, right? Right.

But maybe you are talking about a construction project. Or maybe you’re the administrator of a school district. One mistake people commonly tend to make is thinking that by throwing more money at something, it is automatically going to get better, or that by putting more workers on a work site, the building is going to go up faster. More = better. No, not always, I’m afraid. The real power behind any project of any kind is method. And not just method, but innovation. How are you going to go about doing this? Why are you doing this? Has anyone done this before? These are all things you might consider.

Overall, the general structure of development should go from dreaming big to at the end deciding what is the least expensive way to get this idea started? And also, what is the way that will take the least amount of time? After you have answered that question for the various different issues that may be involved, you move into the next phase.

The Pre-Action Build(or PAB)

The next phase in our translation of project management from the film making industry is the one that is comparable to Pre-Production, but in this case, I’m going to call it your Pre-Action Build, or P.A.B. The Pre-Action Build is similar to what you might go through with pre-production in a movie. By the end of the development phase, you should have finalized many of your decisions. Going back to the creation of this website as an example, the my PAB would be the setting up of the site’s overall structure.

First of all, I had already done the development and full creation on the original retail store. So I knew that unless I wanted to pull some drastic, probably very inefficient measures, I had better leave its current structure alone. My goal was to add in this blog, as well as the other features of this website like its audio/video content onto the existing structure of Dirty Mechanism itself. But how was I to do that when the store had its own market, and the main website with blog and other content was likely going to have its own unique market as well? I had to form a plan that would integrate them.

To carry out my “Pre-Action Build” is the same as setting up the systems that would later complete the goals that I had intended. So this consists of, in this case, setting up the different pages, getting the layout designed and online, and overall building the template on which the rest of the content will later be built.

For another project, you might encounter a different way to go about the PAB. For instance, say you have a project to lose a solid 50 pounds of weight. Your developmental phase would be forming the actions you would take to carry out that process, which would likely consist of changing your exercise routine and looking for the right diet. Your PAB might be buying the foods for that diet, getting new exercise equipment for your home, or if you do not have the money for those things, the first part of the PAB in the ultimate completion of this goal might be to set out to produce more income for yourself so that you can afford to set up the beginning components of what will later carry out that process.

Essentially we can say that the Pre-Action Build, or PAB, is setting up the systems, template, and/or foundation that will allow the ultimate end to your goal to be successfully completed.

Take Action and Keep Acting! (or TAKA)

The third point of this process is to Take Action and Keep Acting, or as an acronym, T.A.K.A. TAKA is comparable to the production phase in film making - the time when the movies are actually filmed!

Going back to the example of this website as a project under this system, DirtyMechanism.com, at heart, is a blog. To make the blog successful to my goal, the blog needs to have traffic, feedback, a community, it needs to somehow help me earn money, and most importantly - the content of the website itself must be of high value to others. Well, the first thing I need to do that is content, and content is going to be something that, ideally, would not stop. Or at least, would not stop for a long while. The TAKA part of the project process for DirtyMechanism.com’s blog is the writing of the content itself. Content must be written, and keep being written.

Let’s say that you want to apply the concept of TAKA to becoming successful with relationships. If you stop trying to aid relationships in their prosperity, then chances are they will never get there for you, or also for the other person. Remember when you were a teenager and you had no clue about dating or really anything about the opposite sex? Or hey, maybe you don’t even know anything now! The only way to change any of that outcome and output, however, is to keep trying. If at first you do not succeed, try try again.

In terms of your career you might have a job that you like, and you want to keep. You know that that job is going to earn money for you and take care of your needs, but it will only do that if you keep going to work everyday, keep showing up on time, and keep putting forth a good performance for the employer. This is the phase of a project that requires the most patience.

Take action and keeping acting, or TAKA, is to say that you must carry out the routine processes of any particular project in order for the project to succeed.

Polishing, Optimizing, Securing, and Adapting (or POSA)

Instead of post-production, where a movie is put together into its final form, we have, speaking in general terms of any one project, POSA, or Polishing, Optimizing, Securing, and Adapting.

To make sure that this blog is going to succeed I will need to, during the TAKA phase, keep up with POSA, which is to say I will need to polish the content I already have, optimize the site’s technical and physical design, secure the site via means of both literal security as well as what might be promotional methods, and I will need to adapt to new developments that come along, such as new technological trends or new prospects making their way across the internet.

Put more simply be their individual definitions in the process of POSA:

• Polishing means to make sure that whatever components of the project that currently exist, remain at a high value.
• Optimizing means to find ways to do the processes of your TAKA better, as well as possibly reworking the systems that you had originally made in your PAB.
• Securing means making sure that nothing comes along and ruins the completion process. In some cases, you may have already encountered an obstacle. To secure means to both deflect and prevent obstacles from taking place.
• Adapting is fairly self explanatory; with whatever comes along, always find a solution to improve upon it, work around it, or defeat its defeating qualities all together.

Completion and Release (or CAR)

Just as if a great film director has done everything they need to ensure that the project will come out great when it is released in theaters, any general project leader will have a successful result during CAR, or Completion and Release, if they have done the first four phases of the project process correctly.

For this particular website, I would say I am still in the first four phases. But perhaps when I have gotten to this last phase of CAR, I will have the things I had originally dreamed of. Or perhaps, there will be many different projects on a single project. That can happen too. You might have sub-projects of primary projects and so on. Perhaps the first sub-project for DM(Dirty Mechanism) might be producing $100,000 per year in income collectively, before taxes. Then again, you also should recognize when a project has become successful on its own grounds, on a level that perhaps happened merely because of your efforts. I’ve had to realize certain kinds of success that different projects have had for me over the years.

I had originally intended to write a book and see that book as a book. It took a number of years, but it happened. I intended to start up my own company and see that company produce a great product. It happened with my production company, Barton Ct. Productions Inc. So I think it is very important to always consider the levels of success you may already have. You might look at a project at one point and say, wow, this is great! I’ve gotten this far, so where can I take it next?! In terms of everything that I’m going after, that is certainly how I see it.

I think it is also important to note that throughout the five phases: Development, PAB, TAKA, POSA, and CAR - you may be able to skip certain parts of these processes. If you still link that back to the film making analogy - you could say that some films are improvised, sometimes the only thing you can say for a documentary is that you must go out, film, and hope that perhaps somewhere you will capture the story that you’re looking for.

Check out Project Management - Part 2 - Building and Using a Team.