Meet our newest Project Manager!

We’d like to formally introduce our newest interactive project manager, Laura Nash. Laura joined us mid-September after completing a cross-country move from Seattle, Washington. She’s got years of experience producing digital media from concept development through post-launch strategy. Her production background includes work for Random House, Disney Online, Penguin Books, and Discovery Networks. In her spare time, Laura loves directing and stage managing theater.

As Interactive Project Manager at Manning, Laura will provide leadership on individual projects as well as overall creative vision and direction. She is especially well versed in app development and promotion. Oh, and if you aren’t sold on her yet — Celine Dion once sang her Happy Birthday. You’ve got to admit that’s pretty cool.

At Manning, we believe that good work comes from a very simple formula: hire talent, plan well, work hard.

Good work comes from good planning. Good planning comes from the right questions. Take our current bundle of fun for Project ChimpCARE.

First question: “What do they want?”

The Lincoln Park Zoo wanted to make a piece promoting Project ChimpCARE .

Next question: “No, what do they really want?”

ChimpCARE wanted a piece that illustrated how chimps were mistreated in entertainment, showed why people shouldn’t support chimps in entertainment, and showed how zoos are integral to rehabilitating those chimpanzees.

So we pitched an iPad children’s book.  It was a different way to get to the target audience and achieve all the goals of the project. Even though it wasn’t what they had originally envisioned for this project, the zoo embraced the idea and let us run with it.

That freedom allowed us to throw ourselves into crafting something that both reflected the objectives of ChimpCARE and let us demonstrate what we could really do as a company.

We started pitching story outlines back and forth. Versions and versions later, we had our outline.

We started writing. Seventeen drafts later, we had our story.

We started storyboarding. A hundred chalkboard drawings and digital sketches later, the book was starting to take shape.

We had a solid month of illustrations (24 illustrations in 25 days. Keep an eye out for Natalie’s post about exactly how much work that is.)

Then, after all of that, we can get to work on the iPad. All of the interactive design and development that goes into turning a story into an app is, according to our estimates, about a million hours more.

That’s a lot of work.

Every single step of the process was deliberately planned, everything was approved by the zoo as we went so there were no surprises, and every person on the project knew exactly what was happening and who to ask if they had any questions. Most importantly, we kept the project goals in mind while we worked through each part of the process.

Last question: “Was all that work worth it?”

Absolutely.

I, like a number of my Manning colleagues, come from a film/video background. One thing that you learn early in this medium is that pre-production holds the keys to success for a moving picture. For whatever reason, however, pre-planning for web projects can seem mysterious, pointless or as a means to pad budgets. Just like a film production, pre-production and planning are vitally important for web success. I have a stumbled across a number of succinct and well written articles about planning and preparing for web projects that I would like to share. Continue Reading →

I thought Mitch’s recent post about his coffee making philosophy was a pretty interesting way to explore what he’s all about. So for the sake of comparison, I figured I’d also do a post that related my working style to food preparation. Suffice to say, there are some significant differences.

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I was a non-coffee drinker not too long ago. Then one day, in the middle of an intense project, we landed another intense job with a very short turn around. Conference calls with Europe before sunrise, some late nights, and a lot of stress led to my introduction to the bitter brew (I prefer mine iced [it was summer, but I also have a strange obsession with frozen water] with a kiss of French Vanilla Coffee-mate [okay, maybe a little more than a kiss]). In just a few months I have drank a lot of coffee.

I have learned that everyone makes coffee differently; some prefer it strong, some weak. Eventually I had to learn how to make it myself. So I approached this educational experience just like I approach cooking. I read the directions on the back of a pack of Starbucks grounds and grabbed the coffeemaker’s manual from the web. Then, I followed those directions; over, and over, and over making small adjustments as needed (turning down the carafe warming plate to avoid the burnt taste, making less coffee with the same ratio to avoid waste, moving to different machines and brewing methods, etc).

We are all creatures of habit. Some people haphazardly dump some amount of ground coffee and water. My habit is to research the heck out of something then repeat the same process time after time.

I have really started to enjoy cooking over the couple of years. But I do not cook like a lot of other people. I prefer cookbooks that are more encyclopedia than recipe repository. I have learned two thing about myself via cooking and coffee: I am a process oriented person, and very consistent. You may not like my coffee (it is strong) or my homemade gyro meat (ground turkey, not lamb; made meatloaf style) or granola; but it comes out nearly the same every time. Yes, this can be boring to some people, but I actually like it. This process/detail orientation drives my wife crazy some times, but she puts up with it because I make damn good coffee and cookies (baking is far more chemistry lab than cooking).

I know this recipe will never lead to a hip, innovate restaurant or the creation of an awe-inspiring piece of art. I am okay with that because I enjoy what I do and I think that it has merit and value.

UPDATE: Check out Patrick’s follow-up post about the art (direction) of chili cooking.

As a project manager, planning is an important part of my job. Unfortunately, not everyone plans as well as they are capable of. Being a methodical person, I like methodology. Here is the simple planning method that works for projects of various sizes that I have employed for a few years, complements of David Allen.

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