MAKING THE THING HAPPEN - QUICK START (Free Introductory 1 hr.)

 FREE 1 HOUR INTRODUCTION TO
MAKING THE THING HAPPEN –
MASTER CLASS

Project management literacy for the whole organization — not just the people with the title.

You’ve been in the meeting. The agenda gets covered, everyone nods and people file out. A week later, nothing’s moved because many people left the room not knowing what was actually theirs to do. That’s not a people problem. That’s a clarity problem, and on most projects it quietly becomes the most expensive one.

In this hour, we start where projects really live or die: who owns what, and when it gets done. You’ll meet a handful of tools that turn good conversations into work that actually happens: the stakeholder register (who’s really in the room), a RACI chart (who’s Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed, and why saying it out loud ends the “I thought you had it” problem), and the one habit that should close every meeting — naming who, what, and when.

You’ll come out of this introduction seeing your own days differently. Every meeting, every hand-off, every “wait, who’s got this?” suddenly visible, and finally fixable before it falls through the cracks.

WHO IT'S FOR:

• Founders, entrepreneurs, and small-business owners
  
• Nonprofit leaders and arts administrators
  
• Marketing, agency, and creative professionals
  
• Team leads and coordinators who run projects without the PM title
  
• “Accidental” project managers — anyone handed the project without the training It’s for people who move projects across the finish line, in any field.
     

Taught by someone who has spent twenty-five (25) years putting these tools to work in the field – and is still using them today. The tools are the discipline’s standards; what you get here is how they hold up in the wild.

MEET THE INSTRUCTOR, TOPHER WOLFE
CL Project Management Consultant

For twenty-five years, Topher Wolfe has worked in film and television as an Assistant Director. The job has a deceptively simple description: the Director is in charge of what you see on the screen; the Assistant Directors are in charge of getting it there. Note the plural — it’s a team. From 2nd 2nd AD to Key 2nd AD to 1st AD, Topher has worked the floor from every position.

For the better part of the last decade he has been a 1st Assistant Director — the person at the center of the floor — on scripted television series for Showtime, NBC, Peacock, TNT, BET, Apple TV+, and FX. Crews of a hundred or more. Immovable deadlines. Decisions measured in seconds, with real money riding on each one. The way he describes the job: “I don’t tell people how to do their jobs. I tell them where they need to be and when they need to do it.”

Nobody on a film set calls that project management. But that is exactly what it is. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and the Directors Guild of America’s Assistant Director Training Program — one of the most selective professional programs in the industry — Topher has spent his career walking into rooms full of experts, each one the master of a single department, and getting all of them to move as one.

His expertise is the space in-between departments. It's getting a complicated thing done — on time — in a room where everyone has mastered one piece of it. It's the same job whether you're making television or running an operation that can't afford to fail. Topher lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he’s an avid football fan, a cornhole fanatic, and a self-described mediocre golfer who loves to grill.