CraftCon Notes
There’s several things that are either too in-depth or too esoteric to discuss in session, so I pulled them out into this page. Currently being written before the panel discussion, but will be updated afterwards.
Productivity Links
Critical Path Analysis
This part falls under the “too boring to teach”. I know I was bored out of my mind learning it in college. Here’s the scoop: When you have multiple interdependent tasks, particularly when some of them have long lead times and/or “glue drying” times and/or you have more than one person working on a task, there are some tasks that will become the “critical path”. These are, in short, the tasks that determine how long it will take to do something, which is the tasks that you need to keep an eye on.
Here’s an example from last week. Our plotter will plot 10 sheets an hour. We typically see 40-50 sheets in a drawing set, so we’re frequently having to start plotting around noon to get stuff out at a reasonable time. The trick, however, is that if the lighting package is 10 sheets, the rigging package is 10 sheets, and the AV package is 30, we actually have three independent tasks that can get completed and plotted sequentially in the same amount of time. That is at noon we start plotting lighting. One person continues working on rigging, another on AV. Around 1pm, we start plotting rigging (maybe minus the last detail sheet). Around 2pm, when the plotter finishes rigging, we start plotting the AV stuff. At 5pm, we now have lighting, rigging, and AV all out of the plotter, and we gained ourselves another 2 hours to work on AV, and another 5 hours to mess around with the last rigging sheet.
Truisms
9 women can’t make a baby in 1 month.
The corollary is that 9 women can make 9 babies in 9 months.
Good/Fast/Cheap - pick two
You know this one, but it mostly applies to outsourcing things– you can’t have it all three ways, not matter how hard you try.