Writing Novels vs. Making Music

Collaboration in Building Websites

04/23/2009

I've been working as a project manager at Gravity Switch since last November.  Before that, I ran my own Internet consultancy for ten years, and before that I was a writer for print.  I went to grad school for fiction writing and have been interested in all forms of creativity-and especially writing, music, visual art, and film-since I was a kid.

One of the reasons I was most attracted to writing, out of all those art forms, was the solitary nature of the process.  In principle, it's a very pure medium, in the sense that a single artistic sensibility has total  control over the process and content, and when the work is released to the world, its success or failure depends on just one person.

Before I was a writer, I was a musician, and I continued to play various instruments through my undergraduate days-starting with violin and finishing with electric bass-where I played informally with a number of loose groups that never seemed to coalesce into bands.  One of my great regrets from college  is turning down an invitation to play bass in a friend's ABBA cover band. . . what an opportunity that would have been!  The magic of ABBA aside, my friends in bands always seemed to be talking about managing a singer's mood swings, massaging the lead guitarist's ego, keeping the knuckle-dragging drummer sober enough to play, and having tense "band meetings."  This made me glad, on some level, that I could sit in front of my computer and control a bunch of unruly words, never having to hash things out with a bunch of other people.

After grad school, I sometimes thought about working in film, but that seemed even more complicated and removed from the ideas and craft of making art that interested me in the first place.  More egos, more opportunity for conflict and disaster, tight production schedules-everything seeming to create more distance between the artist and the work of art.

Flash forward to the present.  Web development is usually a highly collaborative process.  When executing technically demanding projects at Gravity Switch, often with fast timelines, I work with a production team:  graphic designers, programmers, and quality assurance testers at the least.  We work closely with our clients' people, of course, and as often as not, we'll work with another firm for branding, design, video, or some other specialized component that goes into website creation.  That can add up to a lot of chefs stirring the soup!

Last week, I worked with three outside consultants to write a proposal for a fairly complex project, where we'd work with a brand development consultant, a technology strategist, and a programmer who specializes in working on a particular open-source software framework.  We haven't heard if we'll get that job yet, but it was so inspiring to talk shop with masters in different fields.  I'd always thought of creating a proposal as akin to a "writer's craft" and was skeptical that a jointly-authored document could be as compelling as something produced by one individual.  In the end, the opposite was true:  I was consistently amazed by the way team members kept coming up with great ideas and contributions that I never would have thought of myself.  On the last day of proofing, just before it was time to print and bind the proposal, one of the consultants fired off a beautiful, lyrical story that we could use to open the narrative and tell how we'd understand and work with that organization.

I've always liked the feeling of finishing a strong project with a client, but making something great with a team of smart and talented people has been an unexpected pleasure here. When it's done at a high level like this, collaboration has become one of the most inspiring parts of my job.

Bill
gravity senior project manager