Negotiating deadlines

We're starting to get into a rhythm with the production - Rick and I kicking off on Mondays in Herefordshire and then parachuting to Milton Keynes for a slew of meetings and anything else we need to do here.  By next month we'll be in full flow, filling a website and knocking out video, but for now it's all about pinning down details around a succession of tables (and sometimes floors).

Progress Meeting with LTS

Today's most important meeting was one of the big ones, sitting down in all the extended team of creative  professionals that will help us to roll out the course in October. These guys are a central part of why the OU had such a good reputation for it's teaching materials, but sometimes you'll find different professionalisms pointing in different directions.  The result can be quite a gulf between a team of academics producing content and an LTS team whose priority is form.   A good way through is to take the time to appreciate one another's professional expertise and judgement, as well as to make sure we're sharing what it is that's exciting about the project.  Luckily we've some very good people to work with, always worth listening to.

Building up trust is important, because we have different points of responsibility in the workflow and different sets of other projects we're dealing with in parallel.  So if deadlines slip, things can get tetchy.  There's no accounting for really bad luck, but personally I'd rather head of problems before they happen if possible.  A colleague last week told me "Until this comes back, you can tell me anything, as long as it's not a surprise" about £25,000 he was effectively lending me to get a conference off the ground.  It's not a bad approach and one I hope we can deliver on.  The schedule is tight, but tomorrow's first job is to look again and see if we can tighten it up again to make the space to get the very best support we can.  Setting realistic and real deadlines and meeting them is a good way to getting there, and will get the job done with less suffering all around.