I consulted with Ooligan Press on how to raise communication, transparency, and accountability in their workflow
In a group project for a Publications Management course, three other classmates and I were tasked with finding a way to make Ooligan Press’s workflow leaner and more efficient. Most of our focus wasn't on which tasks in particular could be shortened in the production of a book, but how all tasks could be shortened by fixing the problems underlying the workflow. I pinpointed four opportunities for improvement in the press and brainstormed with other group members on how to maximize these proposed problems and solutions.
All opportunities for improvement dealt with an increase in these four areas:
- Communication
- Transparency
- Accountability
- Institutional knowledge
Most of the solutions involved the use of a great project manager tool called Trello. Both of the screencaps on this page are from that web application. I was delighted to initially propose this tool to Ooligan Press as an improvement from Google spreadsheets, and hope they continue to use the application in the future.
The document below was designed by Katie Allen. While I initially proposed the four problems, solutions, and reasonings presented, the ideas were expanded, embellished, and finalized by my group members. I was responsible for finalizing problem two: ambiguity in task responsibility on the managerial level.
Addendum: Because Ooligan Press is student-run, evaluating members of the press is a necessary part of assigning a grade to student work. While I believe—for the sake of this consultation experiment—that a project manager at Ooligan Press has more say in whether or not department-generated work is suitable for a project than a department manager does, having the former evaluate the latter doesn’t produce enough positives to warrant its inclusion into the workflow. That section of the above group proposal doesn’t represent my current beliefs about effective hierarchal structure.