Optimizing Video Production Through Expert Project Management

Intuitive Project Management from the Get-Go…

Even before we’d formalized the role and processes that allow SVG to increase our efficiency and capacity, our Chief Executive Officer and Founder Christina Skillman has always, even unwittingly and intuitively, been adeptly performing the types of work in the course of our video production commissions that technically comprise project management: scoping the work, establishing budgets and schedules, anticipating and responding to risks, controlling quality, and ensuring the stakeholders were “satisfied customers” all the way through delivery of the final product and processing of the balance invoices.

Project Management allows SVG to tailor our approach without missing a beat:

Integration Management

From the outset, SVG ensures that all project components, ranging from our initial discovery to the pre-planning and production, or “shoot day,” to the post-production, or “editing,” process, are coordinated and aligned with the project goals. This involves defining project objectives that will inform the creative brief, identifying project stakeholders, and establishing project timelines.

Scope Management

SVG defines the project requirements, especially where we may need to enlist specialists like drone camera operators, voiceover talent, sound and color correctionists, or a 3D animator.

We use Asana as our project management information system (PMIS), where we can create an ersatz “work breakdown structure” and manage project changes in lockstep with our client.

This helps to ensure that we can track every “work package,” or in this case, “task,” and ensure that the final deliverables meet our client’s expectations.

Time Management

SVG uses time management tools such as a Gantt chart style workflow timeline view in Asana and an understanding of the critical path to manage project timelines.

For example, we can reverse engineer the editing time we’ll need ahead of a trade show deadline, but we recognize the finish-to-start dependency between finishing filming the footage before we can start editing it!

Understanding dependencies like sourcing music and b-roll ahead of editing a Version 3 that will include these style points for client feedback ensures that we can anticipate and keep things flowing, in turn allowing us to parallel process tasks so overall video production projects get completed on time – and within budget to avoid rush fees.

Cost Management

SVG’s cost management approach involves creating project budgets, and in our line of work, those dollars and cents typically translate to a calculation of time in hours for our specialist teammates (e.g., editors, graphic designers, sound mixers, and others).

We also plan how we’ll manage project risks, many of which usually arise from requests not covered in the original scope of work.

We always collaborate to ensure that video production projects are completed within the budget and that potential adjustments are clearly understood and mutually agreed before we proceed with additional work or billing.

Quality Management

SVG uses simple but effective quality management processes to ensure that the final deliverables meet the highest standards.

This normally involves creating quality control processes, establishing quality metrics, and conducting quality audits. In video production, this might take the form of careful copyediting to ensure that we’ve accommodated all of the requests in the next video version shared for review.

For our purposes, quality also tends to be a somewhat subjective measure of our clients’ satisfaction with not only the video deliverable but also the experience of working with our whole team.

We make sure to ask our clients what we did well or could improve upon next time, at the successful close of each project.

Human Resource Management

SVG is fortunate to employ strong creative, production, and post-production teammates across a range of specialties, ready to serve on each project’s modular team, interfacing with our clients’ representatives.

By way of training and development, we’re constantly teaching each other at SVG our best tricks and tips as well as educating our clients about the video ecosystems and their limitations and possibilities.

When our project team is highly skilled, motivated, and understands our process, we know we can deliver the best possible results.

Communications Management

Effective communication is crucial for the success of any project. SVG’s approach could be summed up as “communicate early and often” and “challenge assumptions,” rather than establishing an unnecessarily detailed communication plan for each individual project.

We always explain from the outset that all of the actionable and essential communication should happen within our Asana project plan, while our SVG team “talks amongst ourselves” in the Slack messaging application throughout our workdays, and we tailor email communications to any peripheral stakeholders, whether we’re brokering voice talent, a courtesy invitation to review a draft for a marketing stakeholder, or a question about invoicing to an accountant.

We’re vigilant to make sure the right people get the right information via the right channel at the right time!

Risk Management

SVG’s risk management approach involves identifying potential risks, creating risk mitigation plans, and monitoring project risks. This helps to ensure that potential issues are identified and addressed before they become major problems.

For us, that may take the form of a delayed video production shoot, a delayed physical or digital relay of needed assets, updated cost assumptions, the unforeseeable unavailability of teammates to perform editing or reviewing by milestone dates, requests out of scope, corrupt data files, or, trickiest of all, working together in the subjective “realm of emotion,” as we co-create original media that our clients and their clients, in turn, need to “like.”

We have to prioritize the likelihood and impact of risks and decide where to put our energy to prevent those that we can and effectively resolve those that we couldn’t or didn’t, as they arise.

Procurement Management

SVG identifies any project’s particular needs that extend beyond our typical internal and extended network capabilities, so that we can partner with vendors who could help.

These might include freelance video treatment specialists and composers, casting directors and actors, or van rentals for special equipment, just to name a few examples.

This helps to ensure that project resources are available when they’re needed and that the project is delivered on time and within budget.

Stakeholder Management

SVG’s stakeholder management approach involves identifying project stakeholders right from the beginning, defining their needs, expectations, and impact, and developing a stakeholder engagement plan, or, more simply, figuring out who to involve about what and when in the course of the project.

This helps to ensure that all stakeholders are engaged and informed throughout the project. For example, if a Marketing Director who’s not active on the project team needs to review before a video is finalized, we may need to find out if it’s merely to sign off or if they’re likely to suggest significant changes.

That way, we can plan to share it with them at the right juncture, for example, when it’s starting to look close to final with music and graphics, but before we make the ultimate round of revisions for approval that can’t be changed further without additional cost and/or time to the project.

Project Management “ITTO’s” and “Phases” Applied to Post-Production

SVG has applied the concept of “inputs, tools, and techniques, and outputs” or “ITTO’s” to describe our post-production process for a typical brand video.

In this case, an output like raw footage from a shoot day is needed to get a transcript of the audio. The transcript becomes the next input, to be reviewed by the Creative Director to highlight sound bites for the Editor to keep in the next cut, and the output is a set of edits to make.

Those documented edits become the inputs in the next row, moving across to the Editor to edit together a rough cut of the video, which becomes the next output, which wraps to the next row as the subsequent input, and so forth.

As we collaborate with clients, we also apply the concept of “phase gates” behind the scenes to track how we progress through a project. For example, we use the Asana “Approve,” rather than “Complete” task functionality to indicate when we are confirmed to proceed to the next phase of editing, for example, from a Version 2 with an approved narrative to a Version 3 with proposed style points incorporated.

This articulation helps us all adhere to the original statement of work with mutual agreement on versions that have met the established requirements to proceed and how much more revision we can accommodate at each phase within the original scope and budget.

This proves useful not only for us but also for our clients. Sometimes they’d like to see their video edited in two different ways to decide between, but they need to evaluate whether it’s worth the additional expense for that extra version. They might choose to update the budget to accommodate that new deliverable. Or the budget constraint may help them focus on the best consolidated approach to editing for the next single allotted version.

Understanding what’s included and what would be possible but extra helps them to evaluate their higher priority—additional features vs. cost containment—in such cases, so that we can remain in agreement on proceeding to the approved or properly adjusted next phase together.

Integrating Project Management Tools for Continued Video Production Success

There’s certainly, by design, a lot of overlap and dynamic relationships between these knowledge areas. We understand the synergies between them and how a change in one impacts others that may need simultaneous adjustments.

While we tailor our management of each knowledge area to the scope and scale of our clients’ projects, Skillman Video Group relies heavily on the framework of these ten knowledge areas of project management as critical components of our approach to video production to ensure that projects are delivered on time, within budget, and to a high level of quality.

By thoughtfully incorporating industry standard project management best practices intuitively into our production process, SVG is able to provide our clients with the best possible video production services and experience.