An interactive video start-up needs to get some work done fast! It is 12 weeks until the company's next board meeting, and its founder, Abe McCallum wants to demonstrate the company's capability to encode music videos using its patent-pending technology tools in a significant way. The team hires 10 team members from an excellent labor pool and puts them to work. The team maintains a deep focus on their goals throughout the project and this allowed the team to "handle it" when the scope of the project was twice increased. The team is flexible and uses that flexibility to stay with the project until the very end. In the end, the result is quite pleasing – the team posts almost 44% more content than originally anticipated and was only about one week beyond its originally projected deadline.
Critical Success Factors:
- Great Team
- A Deep Focus
- Flexibility
I. Great Team
a. The project leadership team knew from the start that they needed 2 types of contractors working on the project: Product finders and encoders.
b. These Product Finders main role is to locate the products, people and places (P3) that appear in the music video, collect certain information about each P3 item, input that information into the Clikthrough Database and direct the Encoding team P3 items to highlight in each video. Six Product Finders were hired for the Project Team.
c. The Encoders main role is to take the instructions given to him by the Product Finder and digitally highlight the P3 items throughout the video using Clikthrough's software. Four Encoders were hired for the Project Team.
d. The project leadership team placed ads on Craigslist in the free help wanted section and got around 100 resumes.
e. From the 100 resumes received from Craigslist postings, 24 candidates were brought in for interviews. Candidate quality was very high and higher than the project leadership had anticipated. The end result was that a strong competent team was secured.
f. The Clikthrough team used behavioral interviewing techniques during the interviewing process and selected the candidates with the best background, education, work examples and stories and the ones that seemed to "get it". Here is the list of questions we asked all interviewees when they came in to our office for an interview:
- Tell me about a time when you set a goal and achieved it. What was the goal, how did you set about achieve it and how did you celebrate your achievement?
- Tell me about a work project that you worked on that went successfully. What was the project and what was your role?
- Tell me about a work project that you worked on that went badly. What was the project, why did it fail and what did you learn from the experience?
- Tell me about a time when you were given a work assignment with very little instruction and were asked to deliver. What were the requirements, what solution did you come up with and what was the outcome of the whole situation?
g. All candidates who were not hired but were still good candidates for the Product Finder and Encoder positions were encouraged to call back periodically to see if we needed their help. Only one interviewee followed through on our invitation though. This practice of inviting people to check back with the team built a comfortable reserve of contractors that were interested in coming to work with us quickly.
h. The Project Leadership Team continued to interview potential candidates for over half of the project time period to continually maintain the comfortable reserve mentioned above.
i. The team ended up staying intact through most of the project.
j. Team was not without conflict as many contractors wanted to work from home but didn't like the terms of the work from home program (which was reduced pay for projects where the contractor worked from home). The rationale for offering lower pay to work-from-home contractors was that these contractors who got to work from home were getting the privilege to work from home so the Project Leadership Team decided to adjust the hourly rate from contractors that wished to work from home.
k. Of a group of about 10 contractors – here is the post-project assessment of the contractor performances:
- 3 Star Contractors
- 4 Contractors that the Clikthrough would re-contract with immediately
- 1 Contractor was is a "maybe"
- 2 were Contractors that Clikthrough would not re-contract with.
II. Deep Focus on Targets
a. Original goal was to encode 30 videos and each video would have around 30 products/people/places (P3) highlighted per video. This would result in about 900 new P3's that were to be input into the database.
b. From the beginning of the project, a definite failure threshold for the Project Team was 20 videos and 30 P3's. This would result in about 600 new P3's.
c. Expanded goals were set about 1/3 of the way through the project and the P3 target count per video was increased. The project ended up around the 37 P3's per video on average.
d. Towards the end of the project other videos were coming in and the final ending video count for the first phase of the project was 35 videos.
e. These two foregoing changes resulted in the project having around 1295 new P3's which represented a 43.9% increase in P3 delivery targets in comparison to the beginning targeted P3 count.
f. A project tracking schedule was used to keep track of the project's progress as the project went along.
g. The Clarizen project management software was also used throughout to get a better understanding on how the whole process would work. It was a great high level tracking tool and was largely used for project planning and what-if analysis.
III. Flexibility At All Levels
a. Executive – Abe was hands off and out of the office on domestic trips and International trips during the main part of the project. However, the Project Team was still able to get clear and timely direction from Jeff Beaman, the Clikthrough CTO.
b. The contractors felt like initial targets were raised from the time they interviewed until the time they started the project. This was true. Originally, the team members were told they would only have to find 25 P3's per video. By the time they started, the target had been raised to 30 P3's per video.
c. It was also widely thought by some of the contractors that the goals had been increased twice: once from the time that they interviewed and twice when they came to training. Apparently some thought they heard 20 P3's in their interview, 25 P3's in a subsequent conversation and 30 P3's when it came time for their project training program. This was chalked up to minor miscommunication and was mostly looked over by the contractors with a couple of exceptions. Most of the contractors just rolled with it.
d. Getting the job wrapped up at the end was very challenging due the fact that the company had never launched this many videos at one time before. Many a team member from the executive level on down was in the office for probably 2 weeks solid doing quality assurance (QA) cycle after QA cycle. The intial tries at publishing all the videos was challenged and the Project Leadership Team had to work all weekend to launch the projects finally by the following Tuesday.
e. Not many involved with the project complained and instead most who were involved had fun just "living the start-up lifestyle".
Team Member Feedback:
1. Have a separate QA team that is a part of the process from the very beginning.
2. Improve the methodology of entering new people, places and products into the database.
3. Get more integrated with studios, video producers, stylists and directors to get the right information first instead of relying on the product finders to find the P3 items.
4. Include more keyboard short-cuts in the encoder software.
5. Train encoders how to fix product issues in web-services or the encoder software so they can fix obvious mistakes as they are completing their work.
6. Keeping all file management as a top priority. This includes a file check-in/check-out process and a code release mirror that lets everyone know what everyone else is doing.
7. There was clearly a need for a more detailed training manual that would stand on its own. Essentially, the feedback was that the training should be such that someone could be able to read the training manual and be able to work independently from that document only.
8. There was also a need for some of standard for hotspotting. That is to say, some contractors felt like there was so much variation between the way the different Encoders would go about marking up a video. Even though the contractors recognized that each video is unique and that the encoding is closer to an art then a science, they still felt that they didn't get enough feedback on whether their work had fit the Clikthrough standard.
9. There was feedback that we needed to improve the web services upload process. Uploading is an extremely time-consuming process. There were a lot of things the team members would like to change about this process, namely consolidating the number of pages that had to be visited to input items into the database. For example, combining the tagging process and the image upload process on one page (this way the Product Finders would be uploading all images and all tags at the same time). Just consolidating a few of the processes would probably reduce the time spent on uploading by at least a quarter.
Management Case Study - Clikthrough, Inc.
BY: Scott Gilbert and Abe McCallum
