Editorial Project Management: Challenge your assumptions

A publishing programme lives or dies on the quality of its project management. Every book, every article, every blog post is a project that must be managed from conception to publication and beyond. It has to serve the purpose of the overarching organisation, and mesh with the work of other teams in the workflow. Whatever our role in the process - commissioning editor, project editor, production manager, desk editor – the publishing programme will struggle if we don’t manage our projects in a consistent, holistic, and realistic fashion.

It was useful to spend time away from my desk to think about these things, to challenge my assumptions and to hear how other professionals go about their work. The Editorial Project Management course was an ideal environment to discuss how publications are made and how we can improve our processes to do a better job.

The course author and trainer, Sarah Sodhi, is a first-rate teacher who has come by her knowledge through hard experience. The course is a mixture of best practice and lessons learned, and Sarah is wise enough to understand that it’s as valuable to hear about things that don’t work as it is to hear about things that do. The delegates were engaged and knowledgeable, we worked well together on the course assignments, and I benefited from hearing about the way they handle their workloads.

The better we manage our projects, the more we alleviate the stress of looming deadlines, wayward authors, and constricting budgets. We are all project managers, whether we like it or not, and this course taught me a lot.

Craig is a Managing Editor and attended Editorial Project Management in November 2018. Follow him on Twitter @smithylad