Okay, so building on last’s week’s post, let’s say you’ve decided that one key ingredient to successful meeting is an agenda. You’ve built your coalition of people who don’t want to waste time in meetings and perhaps pummeled dissenters with stale donuts until they capitulated. Maybe you even have a meeting facilitator –the one who pitches the donuts the strongest– to keep things on track. So now what do you do to make the meeting agenda stick?…
I’m going to post on project management topics in what I’ll call a new wonky Wednesday tradition. Since we’re now deep into the New Year (well, for the Federal government anyway), I thought I’d delve into the bane of so many people’s existence: meetings. To paraphrase a common sentiment about writing, I don’t like meetings, but I love having met. Why? Because within any enterprise, there’s decisions to be made and issues to be hashed out and…
I realized I hadn’t been posting much about producing and project management this year, so here’s a series of short posts going over some of the concepts I cover in the project management training I do. Previously, I has talked about a method for managing your schedule: the 0-50-100 method of reporting and tracking completion percentage. Again, for context, this is all about how to report completion percentage for a (presumably baselined) schedule. In other words, first you do…
I realized I haven’t been posting much about producing and project management this year, so I’ve decided to do a series of short posts for a few weeks going over some of the concepts I cover in the project management training I do. If you want to spend more time managing your schedule and less time staring at it, at one time or another, you’re going to hear about the 0-50-100 method for managing tasks.…
An article by K. M. McFarland in Wired about Warcraft the other week got me thinking about how the global marketplace for films has been changing. Simply put, Warcraft has done dismally in the U.S. box office. Just $46 million as of last Friday. Against its $160 million production budget, that’s awful — all the more so when you realize that $160 million doesn’t account for “prints and advertising,” an ever-growing expense that can often…
So, one of the things I obsess about, when my synapses are not otherwise engaged is what the future of TV looks like and how TV programs are being made. So I was very interested in a pair of articles I read this past January about the idea of “Peak TV” as well as one earlier this month about the potential production pipeline problem HBO may have with new shows. And of course, I enjoyed…
I tweeted out Vox’s rundown of shows that were renewed, canceled, or ended via the Team J twitter a couple weeks ago, though it’s since been updated further. Last Tuesday, they not only updated that list, but Todd VanDerWerff did a great rundown of the various reasons a show might get canceled. Within that explanation comes a great overview about how TV shows make money. For those of us looking to understand the economics of making…
Kelley Carter (not to be confused with Agent Carter) has a great article about Nate Moore and how we’re seeing some new superheroes on the big screen. Besides being an interesting look at the ongoing development of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the article reminds me how much one passionate person can make a difference.
I have been dealing with a number of deadlines for the past few weeks from Team J to my own writing… and of course, with my project management hat on, I’m always looking for ways to manage the lists and lists and lists of to-dos more effectively. I’m sure I’m not the only project manager who gets calm by organizing or revising a to-do list. For all there is to do, it does feel like…
I love to learn more about the nuts and bolts of how productions get made as it teaches me what I should do (and can conceivably do) for the indie productions I work on. So I found this feature article by Caroline Framke in Vox about how an episode of The Americans gets on the air quite absorbing. And I don’t even watch the series (yet).