The best thing about having a fantastic team on your projects is – well, just that- you have a fantastic team!
The challenge with teams though is they comprise multiple people, working from multiple places and times in multiple different ways. Everyone has a different focus and set of priorities but presumably, they’re all working for the one goal – your business.
So how do you bring it all together? And where does everything go? Is it on desktops, in folders and shared drives? And is some kept with a third party, and is some in notepads? Or is it held by people who have inadvertently become the “keepers of all knowledge” – the poor overburdened workers whose desks and inboxes are weighed down with questions – where is this? Where is that? Do you remember who…?
Storing your organisation’s IP in the heads of a couple of overworked people is a bit like keeping your savings under the bed. It’s easily lost…not growing with interest. And it’s not leveraged by other members of any fluctuating, freelance team. You could easily be paying people to do the same work over and over again, without ever creating a higher base, starting from scratch each time.
This is the IP of your organisation. It’s critical. It should be banked. Easily accessed with one click. Forever. That’s centralisation.
Consider how many times in an average year an employee – freelance, casual, or full-time -reaches out on behalf of your organisation to find information on a service or a cast member, or a location, or an idea… and where that information is retained once found.
- Say your casting brief suddenly changes and you need to put your hands on every cast option from a callout along similar lines in a previous year – but the team managing those applications has packed up and moved on.
- Or someone discards a potential cast member for one show, completely unaware they’re the exact right fit for another.
- You might have sent a team to recce five locations – and they took photographs, got the lowdowns on parking restrictions, checked rates and access – is that information banked in a meaningful way for later?
Digitisation allows for the processing of vast amounts of data. Big teams build and grow vast amounts of data as they work – valuable IP – and if you’re not leveraging it, centralising it, retaining it, the inevitable fact is you’re not going to keep up with those that are.
