Leading the project management of a new OTT service
A large multinational corporation facing project management and operational challenges in its digital media division turned to members of Pivotal Allies to help them with the launch of a new OTT (over-the-top) video service. While the operator had a legacy video service supporting millions of subscribers, they recognized a need to offer a more robust broadband-delivered video product to existing and new users.
The challenges this MVPD (multichannel video programming distributor) faced were complex. The service offering was to span multiple countries and required the cooperation of many functional departments. A lack of process and structure across these teams made it difficult to move forward, allowing deadlines to slip and costs to multiply. For this operator, time to market was critical as their market was experiencing an ever-expanding set of competitors.
While this company had a clear set of goals of where they wanted to be, and both the technical and content resources to support the mission, they struggled with building a framework and process for getting there. They turned to Pivotal Allies expertise and proven processes to build the operational structure to meet their launch goals.
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Getting Started
The Pivotal Allies leader immediately jumped in to assess the organizational structure, identify bottlenecks, and propose an initial framework to generate forward progress. These efforts included activities such as:
- Working with the existing teams to define the major workstreams, tasks, and milestones necessary to meet critical dates.
- Implementing change-management procedures that provided cross-functional inputs, prioritization practices, and implementation plans.
- The creation of dashboards to maintain and communicate project status for team members and executives. These dashboards provided near-real-time project status, highlighted at-risk tasks, and provided ongoing schedule updates.
Spanning this cross-functional team were multiple stakeholders including management, video operations, programming, development, marketing, finance, legal, and outside vendors.
According to an executive at the MVPD, the Pivotal Allies project manager’s “… ability to collaborate seamlessly with cross-functional teams during ideation, preparation, launch, and during critical technology transformations on our OTT platform showcased his remarkable commitment to our collective success”.
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The Project’s Operational Requirements
Once the project management foundation was built, documented, and signed off, the project quickly pivoted to the question of building an operational plan. The Pivotal Allies team took inputs from the various internal teams and proposed an alignment of service delivery that could be segmented across four operational teams. This included Content Operations, Product Operations, Monitoring, and Customer Care. By intelligently aligning operational needs across these four disciplines, the project could move forward quickly with contained resources that could be coordinated across functional teams.
Creating the delineation of operational teams provided the agility and control to meet team deadlines and coordinate platform change requests. As a cross-functional group, it additionally allowed for productive oversight across the overall team schedule and status.
There were several operational components developed to ensure the success of this project.
- Identifying cross-team dependencies, roles and responsibilities, best practices, and the formation of a multi-discipline project management working group.
- Defining new processes and adopting existing procedures – This includes the creation of SOPs (standard operating procedures), an incident management playbook, and the distributing of these new reports and procedures to team agents.
- Creating Operational Resources – This new service required the build-out of an entirely new digital master control hub for the management and operations of linear and video-on-demand services. Defining the project plan, maintaining the schedule, coordinating third-party vendors, and implementing the project fell to the Pivotal Allies leader.
- Staffing – The new service and operations demanded working with various teams to define staffing, skill requirements, and headcount budgets for operations and staffing the previously mentioned digital master control hub.
- Training- Using newly defined procedures, training programs were developed including demo exercises for both existing and new employees, contractors, and partners.
The Pivotal Allies leader was also the impartial project manager throughout this program. Identifying risks and projecting status throughout the organization was paramount in maintaining program success. As the central arbiter in the project, reports were compiled and filtered from individual departments and partners to communicate a single-source of truth throughout the company. In providing this leadership role, the Executive suite was able to maintain oversight in this new venture, ensure vendor alignment, quickly review funding requests, and gain overall confidence in the program.
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Narrowing Project Management Scope
The Pivotal Allies project manager expanded focus from overall service ideation and preparation to support the service and delivery requirements, specifically overseeing Content Operations. This meant working through the specifics of what it would take, technically and from a licensing perspective, to ensure the offering’s linear and on-demand assets were available on day one.
As a large multi-national MVPD, this provider had licensing rights to tens of thousands of assets. However, overseeing the licensing rights of such a large asset library required new infrastructure to ensure video encoding requirements were set and content windows were respected and implemented. The complexity of enforcing 12,000 VOD assets licensing rights across availability windows required a new approach. To meet this need, the Pivotal Allies project worked across the operator’s teams to create, publish, and award an RFP for a new rights management platform. This required product definition requirements such as licensing rights, metadata management, content-encoding, and delivery demands.
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Launch and Operations
The launch of the OTT service was a remarkable success. Pivotal Allies relentless pursuit of progress and their ability to create a solid execution framework was cited as a contributing factor to this effort. The company now boasts a robust OTT platform, competing at the forefront of the industry.
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Pivotal Allies Contribution
In following up with the customer during and after launch, they cited the Pivotal Allies leadership with successfully contributing across the following areas:
- Foundational Concept Development: This operational framework set the stage for the video service’s success.
- Agile Project Management: Implementing a solution-driven approach while incorporating agile processes, including facilitating an environment of innovation and achievement.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Addressing one of the key obstacles, they drove and managed seamless collaboration with cross-functional teams ensuring a cohesive effort from ideation to launch.
- Data-Centric Project Management: A focus on data-centric and analytical thinking resulted in streamlined project deliveries.
- Effective Communication and Delegation: The ability to organize, communicate, and delegate improved team coordination and efficiency.
- Operational and Technical Expertise: Utilizing your operational and technical skills, as recognized by various colleagues, for multi-country team collaborations and addressing technical nuances in projects.
Pivotal Allies provides outsourced project management and operational services to enterprises seeking to benefit from experience and discipline.
We provide successfully validated programs and experienced talent to support streamlining internal operations and processes to reduce overhead. We aim to assist you in becoming faster, more predictable, and more cost-effective in your missions.