Digital Imaging Tutorial

9. Management

Key Concepts

introduction
project life cycle
in-house vs. outsource
in-house facility
project budgets
communication
project monitoring
looking beyond

additional reading

SETTING REALISTIC TIMELINES, OBJECTIVES, AND EXPECTATIONS
It is the manager's responsibility to recognize and plan for a project's life cycle, which encompasses the following stages:

Pre-project activities, including identifying goals and methodologies, securing resources and institutional commitment
Ramping up, the stage from project initiation to first scanning batch
Production, where the greatest productivity occurs in the middle of this phase
Project wind down, a time to conclude the effort and for dealing with problems that have been set aside
Post-project activities, principally associated with mainstreaming maintenance responsibilities for digital products

Recognizing the life cycle of a project enables a manager to develop a project timeline, where the beginning and end are clearly defined. In between, the manager must marshall resources to create project deliverables on time and within budget. Project steps and workflow must be characterized, and the several Web sources listed at the end of this section provide useful information that may be adapted to your particular circumstances.

Timeline development is facilitated if the institution has experience with similar efforts or can undertake a pilot phase where time and resources associated with project steps can be quantified. Creating a base level timeline using a software program capable of generating a Gantt chart such as Microsoft Project enables the manager to note process sequences and dependencies that will be affected by unanticipated delays in production. A common mistake is to overestimate production capabilities, especially in the early phases of a project. These tools facilitate project monitoring, enabling managers to respond more effectively to bottlenecks, competing requirements, and the like.