The Money Files

This film shows me talking to Michael Savva, short film producer, about how he managed his project to get his film, Still Waters Run Deep, to the Marbella Film Festival. For those of you who have problems with Flash, the transcript follows, or watch the film at Blip.TV.

Elizabeth Harrin: Hello, I’m Elizabeth Harrin from Gantthead’s The Money Files blog and I’m here today with Michael Savva, a finalist in a short film festival.

Michael Savva: Hi!

Elizabeth: And your film recently premiered at Marbella Film Festival.

Michael: Yeah, that’s correct. It premiered back in October and it was a great festival to be able to…it’s an international festival so it’s really great to be able to premiere a short film at such a big festival; and since we’ve been at three more in the States and hopefully next year, loads more to come, fingers crossed.

Elizabeth: Okay, well that sounds like quite a massive project to take on to do a film.

Michael: Yeah.

Elizabeth: So what I’m really interested in finding out a bit more about is how did you for the life of the project manage the finances around it? So did you start off with a budget?

Michael: I did, I definitely started off with the budget. I started with a budget of something like £1200.

Elizabeth: So you started off with the budget, does that mean that it didn’t quite end up that way?

Michael: It increased up to about £1500 which isn’t that bad but that’s only taking into account the production of the film and I didn’t really plan ahead as far as what the film would become and how big I’d want it to be or where I want to take it. That’s probably where the planning lacked.

So I definitely had that kind of in mind at the beginning and had the idea that’s how it’s going to end. And it’s quite on budget, the majority of the money went on equipment and a lot of staff were able to come along on favours and help out, the crew were able to help out, and the actors were people that were doing it in exchange for showreel material.

Elizabeth: Right.

Michael: So I paid for expenses only but wouldn’t pay for their time. But then in exchange they can use the film to add to their showreel. So a lot of it is definitely planned in mind to say that, let’s keep the budget down, yeah, so it was definitely…for the production, it came on value.

Elizabeth: Okay. So did you put aside some money for contingency?

Michael: Well as I said, I put aside about £300 for contingency on the production itself. What I didn’t account for was things like the festivals afterwards.

Elizabeth: Right.

Michael: I didn’t account for how much the festivals would charge.

Elizabeth: In terms of attending?

Michael: In terms of submitting the film and just how many I’d want to submit to generally. When I started submitting to a few, I started to get a general idea about how it works and what to do. And what you get is a sense of…I emailed a lot of the old entrants into the Marbella Film Festival after I found out that I was going to be in, and I said to them, how many festivals do you submit to, what’s Marbella like, just trying to get feedback from a lot of them. And the general consensus was we entered into about 100, 120 festivals and we only got in to about 20 or 40.

Elizabeth: Wow! How much does it cost to enter a festival?

Michael: It can be anything from generally, some of them are free but very rarely you find one or two that are free. But generally, you’re talking about between £20 up to about £60, £70, £80 and it depends on how soon you want to enter, how big the festival is. They decide on the cost. Sometimes, you have to be selective about which festivals you are choosing.

Elizabeth: Yeah, because that could be easily, going to 100 festivals, £60 a time, £600. That’s half your production cost value.

Michael: Yeah. Definitely, in this case, I’ve spent so much on festivals. The film got its own place out on the internet and got its place in the world and people are quite eager to know about that stuff. I’m trying to facilitate that as much as possible. But in the case of the whole project, I didn’t take into account the festival cost. But that’s something I definitely will take into account next time.

Elizabeth: The next time, yes. Were there any tips that you could pass on about how you track things as you go along? Did you suddenly get to a point and go: “Oh no, I’ve overspent”, or were you monitoring it as you go?

Michael: I was definitely monitoring it as I was going. You have to be very cautious. As I said, equipment is probably the biggest part of the cost.  About £700-800 of the £1200 I planned was for equipment. The rest was on expenses, I managed to get a space, a garage that we used for the film and managed to get that for free. We used my house for the opening and ending shots. You try and do as much as you can on what’s around you and then who’s around you and who’s willing to help and so many  people are willing to help which was really, really encouraging. But you do definitely have to track it. I really did not want to spend over £1500 for the actual film and I didn’t which to an extent, I’m proud of. Again, taking into account the festivals, you know.

Elizabeth: At the beginning when you set out, you had a target in mind and you wanted to go…

Michael: Oh, definitely for the production, you have to…

Elizabeth: To hit to that.

Michael: You definitely have to because otherwise, it can very easily…because what you have, you have people around you saying: “You need this. Oh no, no, no, you need this type of light as well. And you gonna need this as well.” And you have to go: Well, hold it. This light is £400. I can’t be paying £400 for a light. It’s crazy.

Or another thing, there’s music as well. I needed two bits of music in the film. And originally, I wanted some pretty big tracks that were registered, I can’t remember who it was, I think it was a Paul Simon song.

Elizabeth: Right.

Michael: And in the end, they wanted like £900 for four seconds of the song.

Elizabeth: Wow!

Michael: And it kind of hit me that I can’t go ahead and spend £900 on four seconds of a song but then not pay my actors. It just seems wrong and it kind of defeated what I wanted to do originally. Originally, it’s all about getting people together who are inexperienced and trying to get together whether you’re a soundman, a DOP, or a director, you’re all people out there.

So what I did is went to look for unsigned artists and listened to loads of music online and went to loads of bars and listened to loads of music and find some artists that are out there. And in a way, it’s worked out better. One of the bands, Camp David, have gone onto loads of stuff out there and they’re promoting us, we’re promoting them and it’s worked out a lot better.

Elizabeth: The music on film is really good and it’s very appropriate to what’s going on. What’s DOP?

Michael: Director of Photography.

Elizabeth: Alright, okay.

Michael: Yeah, the music was really important and it’s something that worked out better than I planned if I’d gone ahead and paid £900 for four seconds of a song.

Elizabeth: It’s astronomical.

Michael: It’s ridiculous. Yes, it really, really turned out better but something I didn’t account for as far as that much money. I couldn’t just spend that much money for four seconds.

Elizabeth: Yeah. What was your best bargain?

Michael: Best bargain? Well, the floor in the garage is a fake floor so I spent a couple of nights in a van going out and getting pallets, putting it together and then getting some bolts down and making a fake floor. That was really a good bargain in that it was functional. It did what it needed to do for the sense of the film and it’s pretty much free. That was probably definitely.  The actors as well. They were amazing because they were able to just turn up know the script  such hectic environment be able to just deliver. And at 4 in the morning, they’ve been tired. They’d been working for 12 hours. They were definitely a bargain, definitely.

Elizabeth: I’m sure they’ll thank you for saying so.

Michael: Oh, they know it already!

Elizabeth: Great, alright! Well, thank you very much. Where can people find out more about the film?

Michael: Well, the film, website is www.stillwatersfilm.com and you can go ahead and there’s trailers and clips and information about all the actors we used, all the music we used and the people that worked in the film, the DOP, director of photography or whoever else, anyone so that’s all on there and the production company is called New ECW and you can go to that site and you find out about what we’ve done and what else we’re doing hopefully next year.

Elizabeth: That’s great.

Michael: Thank you very much.

Elizabeth: Thanks!

You’ve got a big pile of projects to do, and more requests coming in all the time.

There’s not enough money or people to go round.

What should you keep?  What should you scrap?

Take a look at the existing projects. Are any of them underperforming?  What can you cancel?  Can you salvage the work in progress to get something out of it before it’s cancelled?

Are there any in-flight projects that can be suspended until more resources are available?  Can you speed any of them up to make people available for other work more quickly?

Look at the new requests.  What can you reject straight away?  What’s a good project, but can be deferred?

How do you calculate the contribution that project management makes to an organisation's bottom line?

Like this:

It seems ages ago now that I gave a webinar on managing money on projects, but it is taking a long time to answer all the questions that I didn’t get round to doing during the live session.  Thanks to all the fabulous participants, who asked such brilliant questions!  I am still trawling through them hoping to answer them all, and here is today’s batch of managing money Q&A. 

Is there an industrial standard for a ball-park of the Project Management cost during estimation for all IT projects? Does it vary for Application Development projects versus Application maintenance projects? Also, does platform matter?

There is no industry standard for ball-park project management costs for IT projects.  It depends on the complexity of the project.  A small project that requires very little oversight, with competent and experienced developers and engineers, may only need a small amount of project management time.  A complex, never-been-done-before project might need project management effort at practically full time.  I don’t think the type of project, or the platform, matters much.  What matters is the skill of the project manager and the complexity of the project.  Look back at the statistics that your PMO has about percentage of project management time per developer day.  If you really, really, don’t have a clue, start with 20%, which is one day of project management time per developer week.

Should I track project costs if I have never been required to do this? And if so, where would I begin since this would be for my information only, for now, with the intent of presenting to upper management (sponsors) to show value?

If you want to do this as a learning exercise, then go ahead.  You are not required to do it, so don’t let it take up too much of your time.  Are any other project managers required to do it?  If so, why?  Maybe they work on projects of greater strategic significance or with higher external costs.  Ask your PMO why you don’t have to track costs – you might be reassured by the answer.

If you’d still like to do so, you could start with tracking your time, and then talking to the Finance department about the daily rate for resources so you can put a financial value on that.  If you are only managing a project with people resources, and not other expenditure, you can track how much effort it is taking to complete the project. If you are spending money on other things, like buying computers or hiring a contractor, you can add those in too.

Do you have publicly available SharePoint templates (e.g. budget tracker)? Or url?

No, sorry. Although this is an excellent suggestion.  I’ll see if I can sort something out. On another note, why would you want to use a SharePoint template as a budget tracker?  It’s not designed to be a spreadsheet so that is going to give you a lot more work to do.  Use a spreadsheet programme, and get it to do all the maths for you.

Salary and contractor costs are sensitive information.  How do you share the entire budget with the team without divulging this sensitive information?

You don’t.  Sharing capital expenditure – buying things – is different from sharing operating expenditure.  To be honest, not many project mangers have access to salary information for the people on their teams anyway.  That’s normally data belonging to the line manager.  You may have day rates set by the company for different types of resources, which are not the same as salary figures.  These will be publicly available.

Read Part 1 here

Read Part 2 here

Read Part 3 here

Read Part 4 here

You can see the whole presentation online here, via a recording of the webinar.  I’ll have some more Q&A for you soon!   Got any questions?  Leave me a comment and I’ll answer them in a future post.

Is project management a cost to be reduced or an enabler for cost reduction? This was the question asked at the Austerity Debate in London last month.  Donnie MacNicol, Director, Team Animation, presented his view.

Project management is likely to be seen as a cost to be reduced, he said, in organisations which do not have mature project management structures.  In this situation, project management is not linked to strategy and it is ineffective.  Projects delivered are not the right projects, and they don’t deliver appropriate benefits.

Project management is likely to be seen as an enabler for cost reduction in an organisation where project management as a discipline is understood and well-implemented.

The role of organisational culture

Organisational culture is a key driver for how project management is perceived in the business.  “Project management typically requires people to have a certain level of openness,” he said.  How does this work across an organisation where other departments are not like that?  It certainly makes it harder, he explained.

Culture has an impact on the PMO, which supports the organisation in achieving its strategy.  It also has an impact on how well this strategy is articulated.  Getting the strategy implemented isn’t something we can spend too much time on now, he explained.  We’re now in a position where we have to make large scale changes using a directive style – because we have to change things quickly.  In a time of austerity, organisations need to be responsive and flexible, and that means implementing and adopting change speedily.

He also explained that how we brand the project, programme and portfolio management internally has a big impact on its success.  “Do you understand your organisational culture and the impact it has?” he asked. 

The vote

Attendees at the austerity debate were asked to vote on whether project management is a cost to be reduced or an enable for cost reduction.  Some people put their hands up to show they thought it was a cost to be reduced.  However, many of them also put their hands up to show it was an enabler for cost reduction too.  Overall, the ‘enabler’ opinion won out, with the majority of people thinking that project management facilitates cost saving in companies.

Project management is an enabler, but I think that those people who voted for it to be both an enabler and a cost to be reduced had it right.  It is both those things.  We need to be delivering projects in a cost-effective way.  We should be looking at the cost of project management and working out how we can best make savings to make the PMO (or P3O) as efficient as possible.  Only then can we really use project management as an enabler for cost reduction in the enterprise.