Quiz: The Run Sheet and the Production Book

Target: 70% or higher.

Section 1: Multiple Choice (1 point each)

1. The chapter's threshold concept is:

  • A) A production book should contain everything
  • B) A timeline says what happens; a run sheet says who does it
  • C) Documents should be printed rather than digital
  • D) The run sheet must be minute-by-minute
Answer **B).** **The difference is one column and it changes the document's function entirely.** A timeline is a description — nothing in it will fail visibly, because nothing in it is anybody's. **A run sheet is an allocation, and a line with no name is immediately visible as a line that will not happen.** *Reference:* §26.1

2. The five fields of a run sheet line are time, what, who, cue, and:

  • A) Duration
  • B) Location
  • C) The exception
  • D) Priority
Answer **C) The exception — what to do if it cannot happen.** **And it is the one nobody includes.** *"If not — [what], [who]."* Ten seconds per line. **Every line on the critical path gets one · every line with a single point of failure · and every line whose failure is silent.** *Reference:* §26.1

3. Roles rather than names fail because:

  • A) Roles are less formal
  • B) A role cannot be looked at, and its wrongness is not visible
  • C) Vendors dislike them
  • D) They take more space
Answer **B).** At 1:40 p.m., "rentals" is four people in a field and none of them has read anything. **A name can be found. And when the name is wrong** — when Marco has been replaced that morning — **the wrongness is visible**, which a role's is not. **Where a name genuinely is not knowable in advance:** the company plus *"lead, name on the day,"* **with a blank filled in at 7:05 a.m.** A blank that gets filled is a mechanism; a role is not. *Reference:* §26.1

4. The production book's ten sections begin with the run sheet and end with:

  • A) The strike sheet
  • B) The vendor packs
  • C) The emergency page
  • D) The contracts
Answer **C) The emergency page** — last, and **it should be the easiest thing in the book to find.** A coloured tab, different paper, anything. **Printed twice** — one in the book, one folded in a pocket — **and one other person is told it exists and where.** A planner who is the only person who can find it is a single point of failure on the one page where that matters most. *Reference:* §26.2, §26.4

5. Which of these does NOT go in the production book?

  • A) The floor plan
  • B) The strike sheet
  • C) Vendor contracts
  • D) The cue sheet
Answer **C) Contracts. They stay in the car.** They are a laptop problem, not a field problem. **A one-line summary of any clause that governs the day** — the curfew, the removal deadline, the alcohol condition — goes on the exceptions page. **Also out:** the budget · correspondence · **and anything that has not been read since it was printed.** A production book that is too thick does not get opened. *Reference:* §26.2

6. The contact sheet is sorted by:

  • A) Alphabetically
  • B) Importance
  • C) Arrival time
  • D) Vendor category
Answer **C) Arrival time.** **At 8:10 a.m. you are looking for whoever should be here and is not** — and an alphabetical list makes you scan for a name you have not yet thought of. **And every vendor needs a second number**, because a mobile in a field with no signal is not a number. **Collect them all at −4 weeks; it is one question in one email.** *Reference:* §26.3

7. An escalation tree is finished when:

  • A) It covers every vendor
  • B) Every branch ends somewhere
  • C) It fits on one page
  • D) The couple have approved it
Answer **B).** **A tree with a branch that ends in "then I don't know" has not been finished.** And one branch has no hierarchy at all: **a guest who is seriously unwell means emergency services, immediately, with no first-second-third.** *Reference:* §26.3

8. The run sheet should be:

  • A) A4 portrait, so it fits a folder
  • B) A5 landscape, 11pt minimum
  • C) On a phone
  • D) A3, for legibility
Answer **B).** **A5 because it is held in one hand. Landscape because the eye scans a row.** 11pt minimum because it is read at arm's length in falling light. One hour per page, **never breaking mid-block.** Plus: times and names in aligned columns · ★ on cues · **nothing in colour that matters** · tabs findable by feel · **a rubber band, not a clip** · and rain protection. *Reference:* §26.5

9. Of the three derived objects, the one used most is:

  • A) The production book
  • B) The pocket card
  • C) The vendor pack
  • D) The seating chart
Answer **B) The pocket card** — one side of A6, eight times and four numbers. **The book is for the other ten per cent.** **And the most under-used is the A3 wall copy**, taped in the kitchen and where the crew break: **one print, and it answers about forty questions the planner would otherwise be asked.** *Reference:* §26.5

10. The four run-sheet phases should be written:

  • A) At the same density throughout
  • B) At four different densities
  • C) As four separate documents
  • D) Only for the build and the reception
Answer **B).** The build every 15 min (dependency-driven) · **the ceremony block every 2–5 min (cue-driven)** · the reception every 15–30 with clusters · the strike moderate. **The commonest error is writing all four the same.** A build written every thirty minutes hides a dependency; **a reception written every five minutes is unreadable and mostly empty.** *Reference:* §26.6

11. A vendor pack should include:

  • A) Only that vendor's tasks
  • B) Their tasks plus the three things around them
  • C) The whole timeline
  • D) The contract
Answer **B).** **What is before, what is after, and the next hard anchor.** **A caterer who knows the toasts are at 20:15 knows what their overrun costs and will tell you they are running behind. A caterer who only knows "service 18:40" will absorb it silently.** **Context converts an executor into a participant, and it costs three lines.** *Reference:* §26.6a

12. "Generated, not kept in step with" means:

  • A) Derived documents are regenerated from one source, so a change is made once
  • B) Documents are written from scratch each time
  • C) Vendors generate their own extracts
  • D) The book is assembled automatically
Answer **A).** **"Kept in step with" is a task somebody has to remember to do, eleven times, under pressure, at −6 days.** Generation is a property of the system. **The test is fifteen minutes:** change one time and have eleven correct documents in your hand. **Longer means the system is manual, and manual systems fail on the Thursday.** **And the discipline: never edit a derived document.** If a pack is wrong, the source is wrong. *Reference:* §26.7

Section 2: True/False with Justification (1 point each)

13. A thorough production book is a thick one.

Answer **False. A production book that is too thick does not get opened**, and thickness is the enemy of use. **Ten sections, tabbed, in A5, is about sixty pages.** If yours is a hundred and twenty, **two of the ten have become filing cabinets** — usually vendor packs (which should be one page each) and the ceremony section (which should be an order and a set of cues, not a liturgy). **What is out: contracts, the budget, correspondence, and anything that has not been read since it was printed.**

14. A planner can run a wedding entirely from a phone.

Answer **It works until: the battery, the signal, the rain, the glare at 4 p.m., and the fact that a phone cannot be handed to somebody.** **The specific failure that matters most:** at 4:26 somebody asks a question and you unlock, find an app, scroll, and read — **while they watch you.** A binder falls open at the right page. **And a professional dimension that is unfair and real:** a planner looking at a phone reads, from six feet, as a planner looking at their phone. **Carry both. Phone for calling and sending; paper for reading and showing.**

15. The production book should be assembled as early as possible.

Answer **False. −7 days, and not earlier.** **A book built at −3 weeks is a book with three weeks of drift in it** — and worse, it feels finished, so changes get patched in rather than regenerated. **The order is fixed:** Chapter 24's confirmation loop and two-document comparison at −2 weeks · **Chapter 25's re-derivation at −10 days** · FINAL timeline at −9 · then the run sheet. **And not later than −7 either**, because the run sheet is three to four hours and it needs a read-through, printing, and a Friday.

16. The read-through is optional if the run sheet has been carefully checked.

Answer **False, and the reason is about how reading works.** **Silently, the eye completes what it expects.** A blank in a column is not a word, so it is not read — and two entries for the same person on different pages are never adjacent. **Out loud, the sentence has to be complete.** *"At eight forty, [nobody] moves four cocktail tables"* is audibly wrong in a way that a blank cell is not. **And the same-person collision is exactly what took this book twenty-three chapters to find** — a signing witness at 5:08 and a photo wrangler at 5:10 — **which forty minutes out loud would have caught in a fortnight.**

17. A vendor who puts their pack in a van without reading it means the pack failed.

Answer **False.** Most vendors will glance at it and put it away, **and that is fine.** **The pack's job is to be available when they need to check something**, and the one time in ten it is consulted is worth the nine it is not. **What would make it a failure is if it were not there** at the moment somebody needed to know when the toasts are.

Section 3: Short Answer (2 points each)

18. Write five run sheet lines with all five fields, covering a cue-driven ceremony moment.

Sample Answer | Time | What | Who | **Cue** | If not | |---|---|---|---|---| | **16:24** | ★ Planner's hand raised | **Planner** | — | — | | **16:25** | **★ PROCESSIONAL — song 1** | **Trey** | **Planner's hand DOWN** | Beatriz signals | | 16:29 | **★ SONG CHANGE — Alicia enters** | **Trey** | **Party clears the head of the aisle** | — | | 16:53 | Rings | **Danny** | **Rev. C. says "the rings" and looks at you** | **Best man has spares** | | **16:58** | **★ Rosa moved out first** | **Elena** | **Recessional starts** | **Beatriz** | **Three things about those lines.** **Four of the five are triggered by a cue rather than a clock.** The time tells the planner whether the day is on plan; **the cue is what actually fires it.** **Two carry a redundant signal** — the officiant's look, the hand raised then lowered — **so the cue survives a missed word.** **And the exceptions name a person, not an action.** *"Beatriz signals"* is executable; *"the planner will handle it"* is not. *Rubric:* Five lines, five fields each; must be cue-driven rather than clock-driven; must include at least one redundant signal; full credit's exceptions name people.

19. Name the ten sections in order and say what two of them are for.

Sample Answer **1. The run sheet** — first, always, because it is what you are holding the book open at. **2. Contacts** — the second-most-turned-to page. **3. Floor plan and seating chart** — somebody will ask where table nine is. **4. Vendor packs**, one page each, in arrival order. **5. The cue sheet** — lighting, sound, music. **6. The photo plan** — timeline, family matrix, PEOPLE list. **7. The ceremony** — order, readings, cues, restrictions. **8. The strike sheet.** **9. The exceptions page** — rain, a missing person, a failure. **10. The emergency page** — last, and the easiest to find. **Section 4 exists because a vendor arriving at 11:00 should be handed a page rather than told a time** — and because the pack's three-things-around-them lines are what let them tell you when they are running behind. **Section 9 exists because the alternative is a planner improvising a rain decision at 1:40 p.m.** It is Chapter 25's variants, printed: what changes, who decides, when, and which four people do the twenty-five minutes of work. *Rubric:* All ten in order; two explained with a reason rather than a description.

20. Dinner moves twelve minutes at −6 days. Which documents are wrong and how do you fix them?

Sample Answer **Six are wrong:** the run sheet · the caterer's pack · **the bar's pack** · the DJ's cue sheet · the announcement script · the photographer's pack. **The one that gets missed is the bar's**, and the reason is instructive: **the bar has no line at 18:40.** Nobody thinks of the bar when dinner moves. **But the toast pour is 100 flutes in the five minutes before the toasts** (Chapter 15), and the toasts are downstream of dinner. **A second-order dependency, in a different vendor's document, with no visible connection to what changed.** **How you fix it: you do not fix six documents. You change one line in the source and regenerate.** **And then:** reprint everything, **re-date everything — including documents whose content did not change**, so nothing on site carries an old date · re-issue with a change summary at the top · and chase acknowledgements. **Never edit a derived document.** A pack edited directly is silently overwritten by the next generation. *Rubric:* Must find at least five of six; must identify the bar's as the missed one and explain why; must fix at the source rather than document by document; full credit re-dates unchanged documents.

Section 4: Applied Scenario (5 points)

21. You have taken over a wedding at −9 days. The previous planner has left the industry. 270 guests, a hotel, a 2:00 ceremony, dinner 5:30, first dance 8:30, curfew 1:00 a.m.

What exists: a master timeline, v4, dated eleven weeks ago · a spreadsheet of vendors with company names and one number each · a seating chart · an email thread of 340 messages.

What does not exist: a run sheet · vendor packs · a contact sheet with people's names · an escalation tree · any record of what has been confirmed with whom.

Produce: (a) what you do in the first four hours; (b) the order you build things; (c) what you do about the 340 emails; (d) the two documents you would build even if you ran out of time; (e) what you tell the couple.

Sample Answer **(a) The first four hours.** **Not building. Establishing what is true.** | | | Time | |---|---|---:| | **1** | **Call every vendor.** Not email. *"I've taken this over — can you confirm your arrival time, what you're delivering, who will be on site, and their mobile?"* **And: "is there anything you agreed with [previous planner] that I might not know about?"** | **2 hrs** | | **2** | **Call the venue.** Access, curfew, what they are providing, and their on-site contact | 20 min | | **3** | **Call the couple.** Twenty minutes, and mostly listening | 20 min | | **4** | **Build the contact sheet from those calls** — by arrival time, with second numbers | 40 min | | **5** | **Write down every discrepancy** between what vendors say and what v4 says | 20 min | **Fourteen calls, four hours, and at the end of it I know what the wedding actually is** — which the 340 emails would not have told me in four days. **And the second half of question 1 is the important one.** *"Is there anything you agreed that I might not know about?"* is Chapter 24's confirmation loop, and at −9 days with a departed planner **it will find something at almost every vendor.** **(b) The build order.** | | | | |---|---|---:| | **Day 1** | Calls · contact sheet · **discrepancy list** | 5 hrs | | **Day 2** | **Re-derive every duration** from the vendors, not from v4 (Ch.25 §25.9) · **rebuild the timeline as FINAL** | 4 hrs | | Day 2 | Issue FINAL with a change summary. **Chase acknowledgements** | 1 hr | | **Day 3** | **The run sheet** — four phases, five fields, exceptions | **4 hrs** | | Day 4 | **Vendor packs** · cue sheet · photo plan · ceremony order | 3 hrs | | **Day 5** | **Escalation tree · emergency page · exceptions page** | 2 hrs | | Day 6 | **Read-through, out loud.** Fix what it finds | 1 hr | | **Day 7** | **Print. Two books, pocket cards, two A3 wall copies** | 2 hrs | | Day 8 | Rehearsal. **Mark up in pen** | | **Note that the timeline is rebuilt rather than updated.** A v4 that is eleven weeks old, from a planner who has left, is **an input to a new document rather than a document to amend** — and pretending otherwise means inheriting assumptions I cannot verify. **(c) The 340 emails.** **I do not read them.** **Two hours, once, searching only for four things:** anything containing a **price or a payment** · anything containing **"confirmed" or "agreed"** · **anything from the couple that sounds like a decision** · and **anything about the ceremony, because that is the hardest to reconstruct.** **Everything else is superseded by fourteen phone calls.** **And the reason not to read them is not time — it is that reading them substitutes for calling.** An email thread tells you what was said; **a phone call tells you what is currently true**, which at −9 days is the only thing that matters. **One exception: I keep the thread, unread, and I search it whenever a discrepancy appears.** It is a reference, not a briefing. **(d) The two documents if I ran out of time.** **The contact sheet and the run sheet.** In that order. **The contact sheet**, because at 270 guests with fourteen vendors, **the failure mode of taking over late is not knowing who to ring.** Everything else can be improvised; a number that does not exist cannot be. **The run sheet**, because it is the only document that names a person against every line — **and at a wedding I have not planned, the tasks I do not know about are exactly the ones with nobody's name on them.** **What I would drop, in order:** the photo plan (the photographer has their own) · the cue sheet (brief the DJ verbally and mark it on the run sheet) · vendor packs (**a phone call at arrival does most of the job**) · the exceptions page (**and I would feel this one**). **What I would not drop: the emergency page.** It is twenty minutes. **(e) What I tell the couple.** > "I've spoken to all fourteen of your vendors today and I want to tell you where things actually stand, because I'd rather you heard it from me than found out. > > **The good news is that everything is booked, everybody is coming, and nobody has been let down.** That is the main thing and it is true. > > **What I've found is four things that were agreed and never written down**, and two where a vendor thinks something different from what your timeline says. **None of them is serious and all six are fixed by Thursday.** I'll send you a list. > > **What I'm going to do is rebuild the timeline from scratch**, from what your vendors have told me this week rather than from a document from June. **It'll look different and mostly it will say the same thing.** > > **And one thing I'd ask.** Between now and the day, **if you agree anything with anybody, tell me** — even if it's small, even if it feels obvious. **That's the only way this goes wrong now, and it's the one thing I can't fix on my own.**" *Rubric:* | Criterion | 0 | 1 | 2 | |---|---|---|---| | First four hours (a) | Reads the file | Calls vendors | **Calls, and asks the confirmation loop's second question**, plus builds the contact sheet from the calls | | Order (b) | Lists documents | Sensible order | Order, **plus rebuilding rather than amending v4**, with the read-through and printing scheduled | | The emails (c) | Says to read them | Says to triage | **Does not read them**, searches for four specific things, **and explains that reading substitutes for calling** | | Two documents (d) | Names two | Names contact sheet and run sheet | Both, **with reasons specific to taking over late**, plus what gets dropped in order and what does not | | The couple (e) | Reassures | Reassures honestly | Honest, **leads with what is fine**, quantifies what was found without alarming, **and asks for the one thing only they can do** | *Scoring: (a)=1, (b)=1, (c)=1, (d)=1, (e)=1.*

Scoring and Next Steps

Score Assessment What to do
Under 50% Needs review Re-read §26.1, §26.2, §26.5. Redo Part A.
50–70% Partial Do B.1 and B.3. Build the artefacts rather than reading about them.
70–85% Solid Proceed to Chapter 27. Do C.2 first — the read-through.
Over 85% Strong Proceed. Deep Dive: case-study-02.md, then C.4 and E.2.

Regardless of score: do C.2. Take any run sheet and read it out loud, alone, start to finish. Forty minutes, and it will find something.