Casting Calls

Like IT, movie-making is overall a people business, McElroy says, and so IT can benefit from the same approaches to assembling and motivating talent. That starts with being proactive - taking steps to identify and nurture key talent through mentoring, challenging and development strategies. But it also involves clever casting, to ensure you can bring exactly the right person to the job.

"Casting is important in any Hollywood movie. The same is true behind camera of course, and it's also true if you're not even making a movie. If you're working in an office with a group of people, if those people that you're working with are complementary to each other, then you may be able to achieve a team effort and achieve great goals. However, if you've got half a dozen individuals with different agendas, bent not on the collective endeavour but maximizing their reward, it's a different story. The reason you may have outsourced something is to do it cheaply and quickly. But once employed, a freelancer or contractor may have exactly the opposite - and unspoken - agenda, which is to stay on this job as long as they possibly can. Now if you understand that, or allow for that possibility, then you can manage it. It's when you fail to manage that possibility that you get caught."

It also helps to recognize that in some instances, mixing cultures (that is, putting in-house staff alongside consultants on project teams) may not work, McElroy believes.

You should identify key motivators for talent - whether it's the challenge, the credit, stock options or a bonus. You need to get the entire team to agree on the mission, and then sell the vision, varying the pitch to focus on particular skill sets. And, McElroy says, you must manage face-to-face, honestly and promptly.

Once you have assembled your talent and teams you need to prepare comprehensive schedules and budgets before you set teams in place, redraft in consultation with said team, and then get them all to sign off on the lot.

Under the Hollywood Model a movie starts with a script that becomes a "breakdown" when broken down into its constituent parts, which then informs creation of the schedule. It is crucial that everyone involved in making that schedule work embraces and accepts it. "You have to get the team to first embrace the vision and understand it and agree on it, and then second, [agree on] the process of achieving it and to explicitly endorse the process by participating in it and embracing it," says McElroy. "Unless they do that, they're likely to hijack it or trip it up in some fashion."

When selling that vision you pitch it to team members according to their skill set, he says. So you tell cinematographers that you are going for a particular look or that the best lighting is available to them, and you make an entirely different pitch to the wardrobe people than you do to the actors. However you tailor the message, though, you must make sure it connects with the big vision. Once your team has fully embraced that vision, McElroy says, you should go out and sell or at least explain the vision to the stakeholders, be they client, consumer or government department.

"If you say: 'We're going to be producing X, Y and Z and it should be available to you in November', and your stakeholder says: 'November is no good to me. It's my peak selling season, so unless I have it in my warehouse by September forget it', then you go back to your team. You tell them it's no longer November, and here's the reason why it has to be August. Alternatively you might say: 'You know what, we're going to let November slip through to March, which will give us more development time'.

"If you are armed with information from testing your vision with your stakeholders, you can more easily change your methodology to achieve your end result."

McElroy says you should track progress closely using: weekly status reports (against schedule), weekly budget reports on a line-by-line basis (that is, cost to date, cost to complete, percentage variation, explanation - adjust and accept) and clear reporting lines with formal handover at completion. "If you're dealing with independent contractors then QED they're independently minded and self-starters. So they might not feel the need to share with you their progress, and their progress may not be what you expect it to be. You have to track very carefully how they're going," he says. "You can only do that if you have pre-agreed a schedule that allocates a certain number of days to a task. You then have discussions throughout to check progress against that deadline, obliging people to report honestly on their progress.

"Hollywood relies on daily progress reports to check the number of scenes shot against the schedule," McElroy says. "We then do a weekly cost report, which is cost to date, cost to complete, variation and explanation, so that you can say: 'We're halfway through the shoot schedule, but we've only achieved one-third of what we were scheduled to achieve. There's a gap of 17 percent. Does that mean in the second half we have to go 50 percent faster, or do we accept today that we're going to be 17 percent over budget?' Now, these are management decisions that can be made if you've got the right information."