Project Management for Musicians

Working in the music industry involves a never-ending series of projects. For musicians, managers, and industry entrepreneurs, this could include founding a new business, going on tour, a major marketing campaign, getting a Website up and running, and much, much, more. These projects come in all sizes, budgets, and levels of complexity, but for each, setting up a process for planning, executing, and monitoring your work is crucial in achieving your goals. Project Management for Musicians will provide you with an overall approach, with many specific tools, to help you successfully complete your music industry-related projects. You will develop a clearer sense of the work you want to do, and be able to break down abstract ideas into realistic components—along with realistic action plans to accomplish them.

Project Management for Musicians begins by exploring your ultimate vision of success, described in clear, methodical, tangible ways in order to bring it into the realm of possibility. From there, the course focuses on how to break down the goals of a project into smaller, more manageable units of work. Then, you’ll learn ways of accomplishing the work while monitoring to ensure it’s done in support of your intentions. You’ll discover tools to help at all stages of the project’s lifecycle, including planning, execution, and closure. The course explores how to keep the project on budget, run according to schedule, and yield the best results possible, with the least possible chance of failure. You’ll also learn to create reusable tools and systems, so that completing similar projects will be easier next time.

You will learn project management techniques by applying them to relevant music-related situations, as well as to your own real work. It presents interviews with highly effective musicians and industry experts at all stages of their careers, from various segments of the music industry—a rock band leader, educators, a producer, administrators, a production manager, and others. You’ll see how they do their work, hear them talk about their priorities, and then explore the project management structures that suit the type of work they are doing.

We will discuss a wide spectrum of approaches to project management that are useful for music projects, including those that have their roots in aerospace and aviation, manufacturing, and software development industries. The approaches include traditional project management, agile software development, scrums, Getting Things Done, Six Sigma, lean manufacturing, and others. It is a diverse and targeted tool set suited for the vastly complex spectrum of projects that music industry professionals are likely to undertake.

Ultimately, the reason to study project management is to improve the quality and reach of your work, so that you can be as successful as possible in the music industry and your musical endeavors. Weekly assignments in the course are tailored to your interests. With the learning gained in this course, you will gain the skills to advance your own project forward.

By the end of the course, you will be able to:

• analyze visions great and small, and develop systems to bring their work to successful conclusions
• map project management tools to your vision and scope, so that the tools you use help fulfill your goals
• mitigate risk to budget, timeline, scope, and level of quality
• manage teams effectively
• organize work flow, synchronizing all efforts to be in support of the ultimate project vision

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