EA case study - Project portfolio

Our project portfolio starts from the business side, not from an IT perspective.

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Background

The main challenges with film production in Sweden today are

  • The cost of doing film productions is still high and often more than clients are willing to pay.

  • The audience is not prepared to pay enough and often enough for films produced in Sweden or elsewhere.

  • The individuals in the business quit as it’s not a sustainable way of working for a longer period of life.

We have a number of Business Goals, but we have choose not to publish them yet.

However, the similarities between feature film productions and larger IT-projects are striking. They both overpromise and underdeliver to their clients.

Common problems are productions takes more time and cost more than budgeted. And with a film is it impossible to update afterwards to get a better experience.

Even large Holllywood movies tank as their stories are not good enough. High production value and A-list stars don’t guarantee a profit today.

List of projects

This is the reasoning behind why we focus on these nine projects in the list rights now. There are three additional projects going on, but not mentioned for competitive reasons.

Current project list, with Capabilities in parenthesis, looks like this:

  1. Setting up a new business with employees and contractors with all associated administration takes it’s time. But as most companies in the film business in Sweden don’t have any more employees than the owner are we already one step ahead. (Financial, Invoicing, Supply-chain, HR, IT and Management)

  2. Lack of needed contracts is paramount in majority of productions and we need to manage this area to be on the safe side. (Legal, HR, Sales, IT and Production)

  3. Utilization right now is to low, therefore we need to improve our sales process and implement an easy to use CRM-system to track sales and measure KPI’s (Sales and IT)

  4. We also need to be better at marketing and communication to reach new clients in prioritized customer segments & product categories (Marketing & communication)

  5. We need a better tracking of who have participated in which production and in with which role. We have a need for a common register that follows our Architecture Principles and our future infrastructure.

  6. We need methods and IT-solutions for better estimation and planning of productions in deployment and pre-production (Production and IT)

  7. Better workflow in post production using new and/or other tools in both post production and earlier. This us very much sector specific IT-solutions like NLE’s etc. (Production and IT)

  8. Implement KPI’s for GDPR. (Everywhere)

  9. Better risk management when running productions than the film business have today (Sales, Production and Management)

Very much non IT-related questions to solve in projects, but that is business as always. Lots of process related questions and if implemented in IT, you need good information models.

Several of these projects have overlapping processes, use same information and IT-systems which makes it like a classic case of Enterprise Architecture.