A Project’s Post Mortem
A few years ago, I participated in a project to put together and publish an official proceedings of a children’s mental health research conference for a large university. This was a 4-day conference which consisted of several types of presentations including papers, discussion panels, symposiums, and poster presentations, and thus generated hundreds of individual publications. Our team was called upon to design the look of the publication, create a standards guide, edit all of the accepted papers, and put it all together to be distributed during the conference.
What went well
The team was knowledgeable and experienced, and therefore very capable to perform the necessary tasks to deliver a high quality product.
The team had worked together for a long time, so we had great synchronicity with the ability to support each other’s efforts.
The project sponsors and key stakeholders were invested in the project and contributed to project success by putting their total support behind the team.
There was sufficient budget and resources to produce the product as envisioned by the product sponsors.
What went wrong
Time: this was a major issue with the project. We grossly underestimated the time it would take to edit each submission and get it ready to include in the final publication. Although we gave authors the guidelines for their submissions, we did not have an efficient vetting process. Consequently, too many papers were accepted that did not follow the publication guidelines and therefore had to be extensively edited. This added a lot of overtime to the project because the delivery date could not change. Subsequently, the budget had to be increased to cover all of the overtime.
What should have been done differently
Create an efficient vetting process to ensure that all submitted papers have followed the required guidelines in order to decrease the amount of editing.
Change the call for papers and final submissions date (make it sooner) to give editors more time to vet the papers, send it back to authors for changes, and still have time to do minor edits and create the final publication.
Conclusion
Although the project was delivered on time and the resulting product was excellent, the budget had to be increased by 20%. This could have been avoided if we had put a solid process in place to ensure papers coming in were following guidelines, and had given ourselves sufficient time to correct errors. Live and learn!