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If you are ever to be found on a sinking boat, the person you would want standing by you to organise the rescue effort would be ex-Wren Diana Levy. Not for her ex-Wren qualities however, (after all, she is a Wren who never went to sea), but for her calm, decisive manner and sense of humour.

So how does a landlocked Wren become production manager at the distinguished Royal Horticultural Society? It was a long journey that started with eight years in the Royal Navy’s Education and Training Support branch. This was followed by a short and, it has to be said, rather unsuccessful burst of ad sales at publishing house Macmillan, before Levy’s skills were recognised and she became a production assistant with the same employer. Then, by her own admission, it was a case of slowly “working my way up the ladder” to production manager at the Institution of Electrical Engineers. She moved to the RHS in January 2005.

Good mentors
Levy thinks the secret of her career success is: “Taking on as many new and different projects as I could get production experience on, and in as many areas as possible.” The importance of good mentoring is also apparent. “I was very lucky to have had a great production manager at Macmillan, who taught me a lot of what I needed to know to start with,” she says. “The rest of my knowledge has been learned by doing the job day to day, through some training courses, and by talking to other print buyers and – an under-utilised resource – to my suppliers.”

What keeps Levy’s interest? “The fact that I never actually know what I’m going to end up doing from one day to the next. I plan what I’m going to do each day, but the diversity of the role means that I often have to manage various production issues for several different and unplanned projects during a day, and invariably end up doing something that isn’t on my to-do list.”

Ensuring quality
The past year has been busy. Levy was part of the team that refreshed the RHS’s monthly journal, The Garden, making sure the quality of the print matched the design team’s expectations. She is also involved with an increasing number of print projects for the RHS’s charity. Levy worked with the RHS’s environmental policy adviser during its first major print and paper audit and, to top the list of achieve­ments, produced the RHS’s first standalone digital edition.

She says that she has seen a rapid shift from paper-based processes to automated processes, and uses email to request quotes from suppliers, instead of sending out letters. Printed media packs are no longer de rigueur, as interactive versions are used. She adds that you need to build up those crucial relationships with suppliers and work together.

This is an exciting time for Levy. “Print buying is no longer just about putting ink on paper. It is essential to be able to work in completely different ways and utilise a wider variety of print processes.”

But one cloud lies on her horizon. She thinks that the seemingly unstoppable march of print management companies could spell the demise of some in-house print buyers, which would have a serious impact on the availability of skilled print buyers in the future and limit supplier choice as printers could be forced to lower costs and consolidate to survive.

While her best achievement has been not missing a deadline in 13 years, Levy did once, in the early years, forget to buy paper for a job. So if you are cruising with Levy, you might want to check that the lifeboat is bobbing along behind the main boat before you leave dock.