10

Page 1 of 2 Information Management & New Technologies in Design & Media Arts

©2011 Miami International University of Art and Design

Project Management and Collaboration

By early 2010, the ArtShirts operation had grown to a 10-member team. John Daley remained president, head designer, and chief manufacturer, while the following resources were added to support the company:

• A marketing specialist, Laura Mason • A human resources director, Annie Dunn • A financial accountant, Edwin Gore • A Web site director, Walter Little • A creative director, Lucas Moore • A legal director, Cynthia Wu • Two project management specialists, Ella Landy and Gina Hunt • A developer, Roddy Brown

John purchased Basecamp, a project management and collaboration tool, to provide support to this expanded team. This tool allowed internal ArtShirts’s users and their external vendors and contractors the ability to plan and collaborate on a project without the restrictions of a firewall. The Web-hosted solution allowed users to create production timelines, assign tasks to internal and external stakeholders, send reminder notifications to task leaders, post files in multiple formats, and upload creative compositions for review, comment, and approval while keeping all stakeholders informed of the project progress via e-mail.

Once a batch of t-shirts was completed by John using Adobe Photoshop for design imaging and ArtShirts’s silk-screening machinery for production, he provided samples to the creative director, Lucas Moore, for photography coordination. Lucas used Photoshop to edit the photographs and then used Basecamp to create a project identification (ID) account. The marketing specialist, Laura Mason, was then requested to develop a marketing plan to advertise the new products. Laura completed a Microsoft Word-based work-order request form and uploaded its related project ID in Basecamp each time she needed creative assets developed by Lucas. This form provided Lucas with Laura’s strategy, call to actions, asset sizes, formats, and targets. Lucas delivered initial creative compositions for Laura to review via Basecamp and once those were approved by Laura in the same system, Lucas would build out all of Laura’s requests and provide her with a .zip file via e-mail of the assets she requested. Lucas would then communicate the final-product asset locations on the Rackspace image server to the Web site director, Walter. Walter then updated his merchandising spreadsheet and wrote new copy for the products. Walter also shared all copy with Cynthia Wu via Microsoft Outlook to ensure company brand and privacy compliance. After Cynthia’s approval, Walter uploaded the product information into the company’s e- commerce system, Magento Enterprise. He also scheduled a “go live” date with the developer, Roddy Brown, for the new products to launch on the Web site. Roddy wrote new HTML or Java code required to execute Walter’s launch plans, and loaded the code and assets on the company’s Web site “staging” server environment for quality assurance (QA) review by Walter. Once the QA process was completed by Walter, Roddy moved the Web site code from a “staging” server to a “production” server, thus publishing the new copy, code, and products for public consumption. Once a product was sold on a Web site, the finance department received order notifications from ArtShirts’s Magento Enterprise system or directly from Amazon. The financial accountant, Edwin Gore, used these daily reports to audit ArtShirts’s books at the end of each fiscal month using

Page 2 of 2 Information Management & New Technologies in Design & Media Arts

©2011 Miami International University of Art and Design

Intuit Quickbooks software. He also used the reports to file federal, state, and local taxes using Automatic Data Processing (ADP) tax software. In addition, all vendor invoices were reviewed and approved by John and then processed for payment by Edwin.