Respecting the Production Process

A lot of my colleagues think the agency model is dying. Hiring an agency is expensive for the clients and lot of companies are building their own internal "agency-style" creative teams in house to help cut costs. I don't think this means the end of the agency model as we know it simply because companies haven't yet learned a key rule that agencies have: Respect the Production Process.

You'd be surprised how many companies bring me on to manage a large scale project but then constantly try to expedite timelines, cut corners, or skip process milestones all together in the hopes of getting the project done faster and cheaper. Here's the thing...you can't cut corners. You have to respect the process. 

Take the proper time to assess the project scope

I can still hear my mentor drilling it into me like a military drill instructor. "Define, Design, Develop and Deploy. If you deviate from this, you will fail." And he was absolutely right. You must define your project (What are we bulding? Why are we doing this? What business/creative objective are we trying to solve?) before you can design it, develop it, and deploy it. Too many businesses try to go straight into design without even knowing what they're building. Why do they do this? The two main reasons is A) They don't have any time because the deadline is too tight or, B) they simply don't know any better.

I'll be honest, when I was a young producer I made this mistake. "Tony, the client needs a mobile site redesign done, and we need it in four weeks." Four weeks is an absurdly short amount of time to build a mobile site. Hell, it takes about 3 weeks just to iron out the technical requirements document in pre-production. But, I was young and dumb and wanted to impress. I was also too afraid to say no. We moved forward and the project was a colossal failure. We started designing immediately without thinking about the User Experience which led to layout problems and extended creative development. Our production teams found use cases that didn't have pages designed for them. It was a complete disaster, but I learned a very important lesson on that project. ALWAYS respect the process and don't be afraid to push back. Now, if a client wants a mobile site done in 4 weeks, I sit down and explain to the limitations of that kind of timeline.

Remember, Good Producers Are Educators

You have to be willing to educate people on proper production processes. The age of facebook and tumblr and square space make people think that digital production is so easy and so fast. The fact of the matter is, people don't know the actual work that goes into all the shiny things they see on the internet and it's up to you (the producer) to educate them. The project starts and ends with you. If it fails, you're responsible, so don't produce a project doomed to fail simply because you didn't educate the client on proper production process and proper timelines for projects.