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Design
Management Advice and Solutions for Themed
Environments
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ABOUT MY BOOK Project Management is the process used to robustly vet the Big Idea by providing process lanes for a Team that includes the birth parent Artist at its nucleus. However, to be successful Project Management needs more than just a framework for artistic, technical, functional, and business transactions. It needs to address the human physics that come with scary smart people working under pressure to help the Big Idea get stronger so that it overcomes all the reasons not to build it. The human glue bridging the gap between pure process and effectively harnessing the Team’s talents is the Project Manager, and that person’s role is at the heart of this book. Val
Usle
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Val Usle is a Theme Park Project and Design Management Consultant. With over four decades of service to the Walt Disney Company he touched nearly all the major domestic and international projects that Walt Disney Imagineering pursued during this time. The body of experience that emerged created skills and knowledge that clients can benefit from in three major areas. The first is DEVELOPING AND MANAGING TO A PLAN. Theme park project teams are short-lived entities that require their leaders to assemble a diverse group of people, quickly align their interests with the ‘Big Idea,’ and help them land on a DELIVERY PLAN that balances with business constraints. But the plan does not stay in balance long, as each day brings scope, schedule, or budget challenges. In this environment, being a leader means your team expects you to be a PROBLEM MAGNET. This does not mean you can solve every issue, or should, but it does mean you are obliged to listen hard, stay engaged, and assist where it is vital or rational. Val’s insight on the critical nature of upfront planning, as well as managing the realities that press upon the plan during its execution, was gained from leading progressively larger and more complex projects over time. The second is INTEGRATION. The number of different disciplines involved with theme parks can easily exceed that needed for complex projects such as hospitals. But beyond the number of varied talents, the engagement of artists makes the industry different. Unlike the Sistine Chapel where all the beauty flowed through one hand holding a small brush, themed entertainment requires the vision to flow through the hands and brushes of many. Avoiding ‘Tower of Babel results’ from so many different and passionate people mixed in the same arena, is only done through DEEP INTEGRATION where everyone has an understanding of the overall plan, while at the same time owning and mastering their part of it. Theme park integration can’t be mailed in and Val knows that a leader’s job is to be the NUMBER ONE FACILITATOR OF INTEGRATION. The third is PROCESS. This is being able to see and explain the human physics and milestones needed in a very artistic organization to move a team from Blue Sky to Grand Opening in easily understood terms. Management leveraged Val's project experience, teaching skills, and appreciation for how things work ‘behind the curtain,’ when it tasked him to be one of the co-authors of Imagineering's original PROJECT MANAGEMENT GUIDE as well as a subsequent major refresh, THE TRIANGLE OF SUCCESS. Even in today’s world of virtual design and construction, every Imagineer still applies the matrix management and life cycle principles co-authored by Val in the Eighties. Val's last project for Imagineering was as the lead Design Manager for the new Star Wars Lands being built in California and Florida. Each of these fourteen acre sites will host the most intense and deeply thematic settings Imagineering has ever attempted, and Val successfully led both through their master planning efforts. Since leaving Imagineering, Val has established KIMBLE CREEK CONSULTING to offer services leveraging his thematic design experience to assist clients’ internal staff in the areas listed above. |
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