Film Making and the ‘Q’ word 02

Process Mapping for Digital Production Workflow

A paragraph hidden near the end of my last diatribe contained an exhortation to use a simple system.

Define what you do, frequently check that you do what you say you do, fix what you did wrong and then check to make sure you don’t make that same mistake again.

And the subject of this month’s piece lies in the first four words.

To pick a contemporary issue budget crunch forms a central problem for production. Despite the proliferation of channels to the viewer there loads of limits on budgets. The pressure to get it right first time, every time has never been higher.

And this is getting worse as the old production paradigms struggle to deliver quality at ever reducing resource levels.

What McDonalds can do with teenagers the world over is nothing short of a miracle. In fact what they can do with all employees and suppliers is pretty damn good.

Repeatably and reliably McDonalds produce substantially the same product anywhere in the world using local resources. And their secret? Their systems! Like or hate the product you have to admit that Ray Kroc started something really clever in 1961. And a crucial part of systems is defining what it is that you do.

Now here’s a caveat to that last statement. You don’t have to go into massive detail or even the same amount of detail for each thing that you do. The trick is to look at the bits which are crucial and just have to come out the same way every time; like getting paid.

So where to start? For a while in the early days of this century, when I was broke from writing a book, I drove cars onto ships in the port of Southampton. It is undemanding work so long as you stay ‘switched on’ and after a while I got to know Richard Bull, the Quality and Environment Manager. Pretty soon he convinced me to become an auditor and in so doing I got an education.

Richard Bull runs the business management systems for several ISO registered companies and he does this all by himself. He can do this because he keeps everything very simple. So simple that I don’t believe many other managers really comprehend it. But then MBAs can be quite abstract for the real world.

So, Process Mapping? Well one way to do this is to start at the very simplest level - the top. If you’re reading this magazine then you are probably engaged in making films one way or another. To me film making is still film making in the way that hovering is still hovering. Film is the eponym.

You could say that starting with a specification you go through a realisation process and end up with a completed film:

But my stupid drawing isn’t much help. Realisation covers lots of things and explains very little. So let’s add some detail. As well as a script we need a lot more stuff in there. Things like crews and locations and budgets and, well, all this:

Although I am not making any attempt to be comprehensive, it now begins to look a bit more like something that might just make a film. And each of the elements, inputs like Crew, can be described in the same way. You get into the detail like this:

Post Production also feeds the Realisation process a bit like this:

These drawings are often known as Turtle Diagrams and compare well with other methods of describing what you do.

A production is a series of interdependent processes and is therefore like a chain in nature. Chains break at and only at their weakest link. So mapping out what you do will help you identify the weakest link. If a link is strong then you won’t need to look at it too much as it doesn’t put the production at risk.

We hear lots about risk and risk assessments these days. Well one thing that falls out of this way of looking at a process is a risk assessment. There will be aspects of workflow that impact upon post production. In fact, there will be aspects of all of the surrounding inputs that impact upon the central process. And assessing them will tell you about the risk associated with each one.

And having a process map will give you a way to ensure people know how you do things. This will also give you an indication of what training or instruction is needed in order that everyone is competent to do make their contribution. So less time and resources get wasted and the budget goes further.

It’s one thing to say how you do something but it’s altogether different to prove it. And that’s what I want to cover next.