This post originally appeared on the Manning Productions blog.

I like that our agency has a variety of clients. Some are big, some small. They come from different industries. Each client contact has a different job description. That variety helps keep our work fresh. But it also allows us to see how smart our clients are, each in their own ways. They know their business, customers and business goals like the back of their hands. The reason they hire us is because they value what we do, and what we do falls outside of their areas of expertise. I would like to think that we do a good job of forming partnerships with our clients, to become the means to extend their brand, their presence and their business goals to exciting new markets. I hope that we help them articulate their frustrations and aspirations to find unique and successful solutions for them. I hope this is the case, because the alternative scares the hell out of me. (more…)

This post originally appeared on the Manning Productions blog.

Curtis asked me to write about the “big crunch/big bang” of digital content distribution.  I think this is a wonderful topic, but not something I can address at the moment. I would like to do a fair bit of research and reflection before tackling the subject. In the meantime, here is something completely unrelated. A couple of weeks ago I swear I saw a post in the NASA twitter feed that contained a nasa.gov branded shortened URL. I have combed the hundreds of posts from that time period but can’t seem to find it; perhaps I imagined it. Maybe I am crazy… like a fox. (more…)

This post originally appeared on the Manning Productions blog.

As it should be obvious by now, I am Manning’s productivity nerd. I am a lay member of the cult of Getting Things Done. I wanted to offer up a brief observation from my day-to-day work. Like the GTD project planning model, the GTD system consists of five discrete steps:

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This post originally appeared on the Manning Productions blog.

A couple exciting things happened yesterday. Nearly all my attention was focused on the launch of the new First Vehicle Services website. Meanwhile the rest of the world was focused on this. Steve Jobs said that it is “our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary product at an unbelievable price.” Adam at Gizmod said it sucks. My wife said “maybe we could get an iPad instead of the netbooks we have been looking at,” (no link, she said it in real life.) Well, I still haven’t gotten a chance to read or watch anything about the device, so I will leave the opinion to others. However, I do know a couple things.

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This post originally appeared on the Manning Productions blog.

Last week we had a conference call with a client, one of the largest professional associations in the world. Twitter came up a few times and I couldn’t help be think of one of my favorite Twitter publishers, NASA. This led me to do some late night research on NASA’s Twitter strategy. What I found was interesting and thought others might find value in what I discovered. (more…)

This post originally appeared on the Manning Productions blog

I am currently reading Ashley Friedlein’s book, Web Project Management .  While not exactly up to the project management standards of the PMBOK, the book presents a complete web project management method. I will post a review once I finish reading and have had sometime to test the method. Meanwhile, the book offers little tips in addition to the method itself. One early tip: Do It Yourself accelerated learning. The author advocates that a web project manager try to create an entire site alone. This includes generating the idea, strategy, “costing”, design, programming, … The idea is to put yourself in the shoes of other members of your team to learn what challenges they face. The goal is to improve your client and team communication skills and learn empathy for your teammates.

I really like this idea, but I feel like the author missed a benefit: undertaking the entire process of creating a site will give you a better understanding of the big picture of production and project management. This exercise allows you to see parts of the process that you may not even know exist. Discovering holes at one point in the process will teach you what you should have done earlier and should implement in your daily work.

I have attempted similar exercises in the past, but mostly to learn new production skills. I would really like to try this someday on a new project to focus on the project management method.

This post originally appeared on the Manning Productions blog.

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.