This week, as you read this, I’m in Venice with my wife celebrating our first ten years together. (Aren’t you jealous?) I had every intention of getting ahead of my game and writing a post in advance about Gantt charts, as promised last week. Unfortunately, life got in the way (as tends to happen), and I’d rather post a quality discussion of Gantt charts than a quickly-whipped together one.

In place of either of those things, then, I present to you a revision of a post for my personal site that I wrote during the summer of 2010 as my summer tenure as technical director at the Weston Playhouse (which produces FABULOUS work, by the way) was drawing to a close. In it, I talk about incorporating project management thinking and techniques into the production process.

One of the cornerstones of what I teach my technical direction students–specifically in the project management class I teach, but more generally in relation to every production they work on–is that if they’re pulling late nights to get the job done, then they have made a mistake somewhere. Part of their responsibility is to assess for the producing organization the feasibility of a particular set design in terms of both time and money, and, when that design is inevitably too big or too expensive or too complex to achieve well, to collaborate with the artistic team of that production to wrestle the scope of the project back to something that fits within the limitations of fiscal responsibility and labor availability. (This can happen in any number of ways, of course: different material choices, manufacturing techniques, changes in level of detail, adding overhire labor, etc.)

I was quoted last summer in Stage Directions magazine about the challenges of planning in a summer theatre environment: “The tough part, for me, is balancing the need to be working ahead with finding a way to allow the director and actors to still discover things in rehearsal in an organic way.” This is a major challenge–summer theatre productions often have a ridiculously short gestation period (generally about two weeks of rehearsal at most). And in that compressed time frame, it is easy to feel pressured into a “get it done” mentality. Additionally, it is hard to remember that taking the time to do a little planning, organizing and assessing–which sometimes feels like time taken away from just getting it done–is vital to ensuring that the work you are able to complete is of the highest quality.

Regardless of the time constraints–or, frankly, because of the time constraints–planning is still essential for completing the job well. The idea that a project needs to fit within specific logistic parameters of time and money is not a new idea, of course (who hasn’t seen the sign, “Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick two”?). What is amazing to me, however, is that for an industry that’s so good at cannibalizing and bastardizing the best (and sometimes worst) of what the rest of the world does, theatre–at least summer theatre–seems completely oblivious to the vast enormity of resources, research, and information about the project management process. (It’s almost as if there is a belief that utilizing a project-management-based approach to the summer theatre extravaganza would nullify the artistic merit of the work–it reminds me a little of that old saw that you have to suffer to be a great artist.) Concepts like critical path method, PERT technique, and Gantt charts have been around for a long time, and provide useful frameworks for evaluating the time and funding required for a project to reach completion. Granted, these approaches have been designed for large-format construction projects, but they are relatively-easily scalable to the scope of a summer theatre season (or even of a single summer theatre production).

In essence, what all of these approaches provide are ways of visualizing and quantifying the tasks required to complete a given project. Most importantly for our purposes in theatre, they provide means for comprehending the amount of time each task in a project will take to complete, and consequently how to organize the order in which those tasks are completed in order to best utilize available resources. This information leads to an understanding of whether a project can be on time, and whether there is any lag time or slack time between and within tasks. This information, combined with accurate cost estimates, allows a technical director to have clear data with which to discuss a project’s scope with the artistic team. He or she can point to a particular step/task in a project (say, using an oil-based stain on a show floor) and identify it as the step that might cause a show to be completed late; once this has been identified, a discussion can ensue about whether the oil-based stain is a necessary choice, whether there are ways to expedite dry time, or whether there are other steps that can be shuffled or shortened to make room for this step.

Unfortunately, these methods (CPM, PERT, and Gantt charting) can only be effective if the time is taken (and there is the time to take) to do them. Which is where we were unsuccessful during the summer of 2010: by the time I saw scenic design materials in most cases, I felt like it was too late in the game for me to be able to do any sort of assessment of scope (much less any sort of exhaustive critical path assessment). I was concerned that taking the time to do that, and then taking the time for the artistic team to reassess their vision of the scope, would mean we’d get started so late that we wouldn’t be able to actually complete anything on time. It was my opinion that we’d reached the point of diminishing returns: every day taken to reassess the vision of the production would mean yet another day we wouldn’t be able to actually build anything, which would mean needing to reduce the scope further, which would mean more time…and so on. I’ll be the first to admit that this was my error–I should have taken the time; it’s an important step in the process, and one I shouldn’t have let myself skip. However, the fact that designs came in so late–in spite of the best efforts of the production manager–is what left me feeling so under the gun. This, added to the fact that a good portion of the shows were big enough that they were barely achievable, meant that for most of the summer we were in a self-destructive cycle–the extra time and effort put in to complete one show took time away from assessing the next, which meant that show required extra time and effort, which took time away from assessing the next…and so on.

All of this is to say that it becomes essential, in a busy summer season, to consider the entire enterprise–from first show to last–as one large-scale project. A work breakdown structure that only encapsulates one production in a season as busy as ours was misses the essential interactions between productions, which can have significant impact on each other. Effectively utilizing techniques perfected over the last century on large-scale projects could mean better-quality productions mounted with more efficiency, less anxiety, and potentially fewer injuries. Additionally, the planning step each department head should take–where they assess scope against time and money, and develop a plan of attack–is a vital task that cannot be excluded from that project; time must be set aside within the project of the overall season for these tasks to be completed.

Additional resources:

During the 2009 USITT conference, the Technical Production Commission presented a panel on the application of project management techniques to technical direction (the slide presentation from that panel can be found here). A great introductory text on this material is Larry Richman’s Project Management Step by Step, which I have my graduate students read. The Project Management Institute also provides a great many useful resources. Microsoft’s Project software can be a useful tool (though it can feel overwhelming to the uninitiated).