My master’s in the urban and regional planning program took some convincing to allow me to take Book Publishing Studio for credit. Planners tend to specialize in an area, like transportation or land use. I am very much a generalist. I find value in the cross-pollination of ideas. There often are surprising overlaps between seemingly unrelated fields if you analyze their strategies, goals, and vision. I proposed to approach book publishing at Ooligan Press through this analytical lens, focusing particularly on their project management workflows.
Ooligan Press has departments that specialize in each phase books go through to get published and project teams that follow a single book through its life cycle. This unique approach ensures that both specialists and generalists contribute meaningfully to publishing a book, according to their skills and interests; a balance that can be tricky to achieve in planning.
In broad strokes, the life cycle of a book starts when a manuscript is submitted to Ooligan Press for publication. If accepted, the manuscript goes through a couple of rounds of editing and designs for the cover art are rendered. A marketing campaign is then orchestrated for the launch. The project team contributes to each of these phases, collaborating with each department that specializes in the current phase of development. There are several books in any stage of development at any time. This structure allows Ooligan Press to move at an agile pace on several projects at the same time, leveraging the specialized skills of each department when needed and utilizing project teams that ensure the overall life cycle of each book is moving along at a good pace. This workflow also means that every team member earns relevant experience in book publishing according to their skills and interests.
If you are a book publisher, perhaps I’ve just described a truly basic, almost banal aspect of your work life. If you are a planner who has ever been under the inertiatic weight of a public agency, perhaps you can see why I am so fascinated with Ooligan Press.
A typical municipal government is made up of departments that each serve a different need. Given the huge responsibility of managing the needs of an entire city year-round, work groups are organized into highly specialized groups with highly specific tasks. This can make it difficult to solve a problem that falls outside of our specifically outlined responsibilities, which makes us slow to respond to new challenges. Our hyper-specialization fragments our work groups into silos, from which we are often powerless to escape. Silos disconnect us from each other and ultimately from our mandate to serve the public efficiently. Hyper-specialization can also dull our creativity, which further reinforces our silos, making the walls taller and more slippery than they need to be.
It feels near impossible to break free of silos from the inside. Silos are not an exclusive malaise of the planning world either. I would argue that witnessing the work that happens at Ooligan Press would benefit people working in many different industries. When you consider that the work at Ooligan is performed by a rotating cohort of students enrolled in book publishing each term, you begin to realize just how impressive their work output actually is. Ooligan Press proves it is possible to organize in a way that allows specialists and generalists to meaningfully contribute to a single mission. And while one could argue that the scope, scale, etc. of Ooligan makes it an unfit example for planners in the public sector to follow, I’ll say this: stepping out of the planning sphere and into Ooligan provided an energizing jolt to my career, and I will return to planning with new ideas and approaches to work across our silos. That inspiration alone is worth following the work of Ooligan Press.
Written by Alan De Anda-Hall.