The Twin Weapons of Planning and Execution

A challenging project we had managed for a reputed university press was to take over production of their journals from their existing pre-press supplier. Management of this transition required creating about 300 templates within 30 days for 60 journals and delivering about 3000 articles.

To deliver the articles, the production team was divided into 6 groups, each accountable for the management and delivery of articles across 10 journals. Each group had a 6-member team to create templates and included a template designer, pre-editor, template engineer, paginator, quality controller, XML analyst and the project manager. The project manager within each group was assigned as the main point of contact to liaise with the internal team for production of the articles, with the authors for review of article proofs and with the publisher for issue compilation. A 3-member team of senior copyediting leads liaised with freelance copy-editors, both onshore and offshore, to manage the copyediting of the 3000 articles based on the required levels of interventions. For the production team, members from other journal production teams were called in to support the core team in expediting the typesetting of all copyedited articles and issue compilation.

All teams worked together and achieved on-time publication as per agreed schedules for 90% of the journals while also taking on transitioning work for other new journals not included in the original agreement.