Though I’ve never been much of an MS Project geek and don’t see all that much practical value in a PMI certificate (producing is really a people not a process profession), I‘ve always been a big believer in the power of smart project documentation. The fact is that without detailed creative and technical requirements and production schedules it’s difficult to make world-class and large-scale interactive experiences, particularly when you do most of the technical development in-house and work on short timelines.

At CP+B, our Integrated Producers do a lot of writing, including RFPs, project statements,  production schedules, daily status emails, and project evaluations, and use a variety of project management and collaboration tools such as Basecamp, Bugzilla, Jira, and our own job and allocation tracking system. All of these documents and tools are invaluable to the production process, but I’d have to say one of my current favorites is our CP+B Interactive Production Checklist. When you’re working on a bunch of fast and nearly impossible projects, it can be hard to keep it all together. This is a simple tool designed to help you stay a few steps ahead . And as much as we rely more and more on cloud-based software to run our projects, there’s still a need and place for the simple checklist to help get the job done.  

Some of the checklist tasks and language are relatively specific to producing interactive at CP+B, but if you do what I do, you may also find it useful. Or maybe you have ideas about how we can make it even better? Either way, I thought I’d pass it along.

Thanks to the CP+B developers for inspiring us to make this.