Tag: Project Management

Producing Various and Sundry

Freakonomics asks, “What makes a good boss?”

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

I came across Javier Grillo-Marxuach’s “Eleven Laws of Showrunning” in the context of the entertainment industry not having the best management training for showrunners, the creative captains who steer a narrative show through all aspects of pre-production, production, and post-production. One of the notions raised in yesterday’s post was the fact that, well, a lot of people in a lot of industries are promoted to a management position… and the results are less than ideal.…

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Producing Writing

The 11 Laws of Showrunning by Javier Grillo-Marxuach

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

One of the nice outputs of reading Maureen Ryan’s Burn it Down, that I referenced last week, was to learn about Javier Grillo-Marxuach’s guide “Eleven Laws of Showrunning.” (PDF link) This guide was mentioned in the context of needing good management. So many showrunners are writers who have created the ideas of the show and are expert at both writing and solving writing problems, but they so often have zero managerial experience. Not only that,…

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Producing Writing

Fast. Cheap. Good. Pick Two.

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

Many of you have seen the sentiment expressed in the title above, but it’s always worth remembering… and remembering we, as a species, will likely figure out how to go faster than the speed of light before we break the above constraints. A post by writer Mark Evanier reminded me of how these constraints can often come into play in the writing world, which led to a good musing on his part: How does one…

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Various and Sundry

Circle Back on Jargon and Put a Pin in It

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

Last Wednesday, I was in more meetings than not, so when it came to figuring out a good “wonky Wednesday post,” this article by Olga Khazan in The Atlantic resonated with me. Basically, the article points out how much of the jargon is not only used in business and office settings a form of the office culture, but that it’s also, shall we say, an act. Both from my background in theater and anthropology, I…

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Producing

Perfect is the Enemy of Good: YouTuber Edition

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

Given the traffic some of my project management posts get, I figured I should get back to being wonky on Wednesdays or other days. I’ve recently rediscovered the Vlogbrothers, aka John and Hank Green, and have been cycling through their videos at a fast pace. That’s easy, because most of them are under 5 minutes and they contain some thought nuggets that fire the synapses in the most delightful way. So then I came across…

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Producing Writing

Lessons Learned: Trilogy-writing Edition

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

In traditional project management, the last phase is closing. It means the project is accepted as ‘completed’ on some level of formality. Not only that, what with project managers loving to document things, they like to document ‘”lessons learned.” In other words, what will you do better next time? What might you try to avoid doing altogether? What definitely worked? While users of agile and lean frameworks may think of continuous improvement, a good concept…

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Producing Various and Sundry

You Can’t Do it All – Enterprise Edition

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

We haven’t had a wonky Wednesday in a while, have we? All right, so let’s tackle something that affects businesses big and small. In fact, it affects families, too. How many times have there been “too many things” to do or deal with in a week? As it happens, I deal with project selection at work — and it makes me long for the family-based stuff. Why? The number of players involved in “what to…

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Producing

Meetings and Purposes: Different Types of Meetings

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

If you’ve gone through the trouble of regularly creating a meeting agenda and gone a step further in crafting the agenda so it has an easily understood purpose and objectives, you’ve probably realized a central truth. Not all meetings are created equal. No, I don’t mean that some meetings are an abysmal waste of time and may, in fact, endanger your long-term health. Unfortunately, that may be true. I mean that you’ve probably realized that one…

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Producing

Meetings: Agendas, Purposes, and Objectives

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

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?…

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Producing

When it’s good to have an agenda: meetings.

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

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…

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