Live By The Widget, Die By The Widget

I'm sitting here at home chill-axing after a couple challenging weeks at PVC. This is a busy season for our print production. We had three departments needing well over 1,500 sq. ft. of large format printing for their series set designs. Unfortunately, in the middle of the first set our printer went down. I had never really had any significant problems with the plotter before. To make things worse the technician needed a week before he could even take a look at it.

I had to break the news to the departments, that their sets might not be done in time. Props to them for understanding and quickly moving forward with setting up some "Plan B" solutions. Fortunately, toward the end of this week a church volunteer offered to let us borrow his plotter until ours finished being repaired. MIKE ROCKS!!!

In the middle of dealing with this situation I posted a tweet "Live by the plotter, die by the plotter." This has now became a sobering thought for me. How much have I become dependent on one widget. The more dependent one becomes on a specific resource the larger the void if that resource is not there.

Here are a few practical lessons I learned from this experience:

• Frustration won't fix the problem, exercise calmness.
• Don't be overly optimistic the widget will be up and running quickly.
• Have some "Plan B"solutions ready to go at all times.
• Keep a current list of who can service all widgets used in production.
• Have art deadlines due weeks before production deadlines.
• Set clear expectations to those affected when widgets go down.

Widgets more often then not will break down. While those times can be full of stress in frustration it can also be a opportunity for creative solutions to flourish.