[atoav]

As someone who studied film/arts I always thought the art world was a disorganized mess. That was, until I worked at some corporate places and realized that in the art/film world you have at least the artist/director with a clear stance towards the project.

A good film set runs like a well oiled machine with an extremely clear division of responsibilities. Decisions can be made fast, because time is of the essence (the sun only shines so long). This is cool, because if I do the camera I usually don't need to worry about anything else. But usually I also don't have to do anything else: For the duration of the shooting, the film becomes all I need to worry about. I get food, I get a place to stay and most importantly: I chose to be there.

Meanwhile in corpoworld there are X meetings with people who don't even know why they were invited, don't wanna be part of it, are not given the time/resources/mental headspace to be there and then corperate wonders why the project doesn't goes as swimmingly as it could. If your people already do two jobs and the project becomes a third, guess what: they are going to avoid doing too much and maybe if you are lucky some poor sap carries that thing over the finishing line alone. But if that is the outcome, wouldn't it have been better to free that person from their daily duties and put them in charge of the project and whom to talk to? The resoueces of the company would have been better spent, the result would have been better, the thing would get done quicker etc.

If you want to take two things away from this post:

- put someone in charge of the project, make sure they want to do it

- Daily cruft is the enemy of projects. Free people from the rest of their duties, even if it is just a day of the week, e.g. "on Fridays Frida works on project X".

[ListeningPie]

How do you evaluate whether someone wants to do a project? If a boss asks, "Do you want to do this project", seems like another way to ask "Do you want to remain employed?"

[jimberlage]

It’s important for your boss to frame that differently if it’s truly optional.

They can’t leave it at “do you want to do this project?” They need to follow up with, “It really is optional, I won’t be hurt if you say no.”

They also can’t do it with a big decision first. They have to frame small decisions that way sometimes, to build trust that when they say you have the ability to decline, they mean it. Then, they can ask that way on big decisions.

If a decision isn’t optional, they should phrase it a different way. I use something like - “I need you to do this project - how does that make you feel?” I want them to tell me if it’s a hardship, but I don’t want to imply that I’m leaving the door open to a different outcome necessarily.

[herpdyderp]

Establishing a culture where that assumption is not the case and engineers can say “no I’m not very interested in that”. Also a boss that can actually read people (correctly).

[wting]

After the roadmap is finalized, as the manager I ask every one on my team to stack rank at least N preferred projects from the roadmap. I map preferences to projects with some optimizations (e.g. career progression, avoiding knowledge silos), review it with everyone, and then commit for the roadmap.

If there's grunt work that no one wants to do, I distribute it fairly among the team. Fairly can be splitting it up evenly among the team (everyone refactors _n_ files) and sometimes it means we round-robin the responsibility (e.g. quarterly compliance reviews with auditors). Obviously this depends on the team size and role in the company, but I think it's only come up a few times over ~4 years.

[atoav]

I mean, there is many ways to do that, but one way is to instead of asking a single person you let people apply. For projects that are not as attractive you up the compensation/bonuses till someone is interested.

Then they made the choice themselves and even if the project sucks in the same way, they made the choice themselves.

An important rule of low/no budget film-making is: no mattee who is in your crew/cast, know why they agreed. For an established actor that might be trying out a new or different acting style, a different role, whatever. For the sound guy it might be learning the tools, or going to a certain landscape or some compensation. Know what motivates your people besides the salary and treat that motivation like the most valuable secret intel tou could have ever aquired.