Join your book publishing colleagues for the final luncheon of the 2015–16 season! This will also be our annual meeting, at which member organizations will vote to fill vacant positions on the MBPR board of directors.

Your job title might be project manager. But just as likely, it is editor, managing editor, production editor, production manager, publishing coordinator, editorial coordinator, marketing manager, marketing coordinator, digital projects manager, or publicist — just to name a handful — but managing projects is a core part of your job. Whether your project is a bound book, a catalog, an author event, or an app, adding project-management principles and best practices to your workflow will go a long way to ensuring the successful execution of your projects.

Join us for a discussion with three experienced project managers as they share their essential tools and strategies for managing the scope, time, cost, and risk of their projects. The final ten minutes of the session will be reserved for Q&A. So, come with questions!

Panelists

Andrew DeYoung is the director of product development for Sparkhouse Family, a children’s imprint of Augsburg Fortress. Before moving into product development, Andrew worked in a variety of project-management roles at Augsburg Fortress, first as a project manager, then as the manager of project management, and finally as director of operations. He lives in St. Paul with his family and is the author of The Exo Project, a young adult novel forthcoming from Boyds Mills Press in 2017.

Rachel Holscher manages Bookmobile’s Design & Digital Publisher Services department, which offers a variety of services including design, typesetting, production/print management, and eBook conversion and distribution. Over the past seventeen years, she has had the pleasure of working with many wonderful publishers, such as Graywolf Press, Coffee House Press, Milkweed Editions, the University of Minnesota Press, and Hazelden Publishing. Bookmobile started off under the name Stanton Publications as a typesetting house in the 1980s, became a leader in digital printing, and is also home to Itasca Books Distribution & Fulfillment.

Jaime Taylor is a certified project management professional, Six Sigma black belt, and certified scrum master. Jaime has worked in project management and continuous improvement for more than twenty years for a wide range of companies in many industries, including service, banking, e-commerce, technology, manufacturing, aerospace, defense, printing, and publishing. Currently, Jaime is working with Capstone, leading their Workflow Optimization Program, which includes workflow standardization, project management, process improvement, and technology roadmap for global product development.

Elizabeth Dingmann Schneider will be the moderator. She is a senior project manager for Red Line Editorial. In her ten years in the publishing business, she has also served as senior project manager for sparkhouse/Augsburg Fortress and publicist at Lerner Publishing Group. She is currently wrapping up her first term on the Minnesota Book Publishers’ Roundtable Board of Directors.