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This article originally appeared on YourStory.com.

I recently got the opportunity to be part of a software building contest organised by my company. My team and I had been in such contests earlier too, but this time we also had to make a short film about the software and submit it to the panel as our contest entry.

Once we completed the software, we kept aside one day, assuming that would be enough to make a five-minute film. After all, we had all watched numerous films in theatres and in our homes and it did not seem too tough a task. But here is where we ended up — it first took us one week to decide on the theme, finalise the location, arrange a professional camera, and schedule the shoot ensuring everybody’s availability.

After that, it took us another week to write the complete script, coordinate among team members, and shoot raw scenes. One more week was spent on editing and adding background score, titles, and effects. So overall, it took us three weeks to make a five-minute film that we thought would take only a day. This led me to think about what would happen if an entire film had to be made with cast and crew members, locations, dialogues, situations, and so on. What level of planning would it require? Do filmmakers follow some process? How do they manage it? I had a lot of curiosity and I started reading about it in my spare time.

The more I read about it, the more complex it appeared to me. Filmmaking is not as simple as it appears from the outside. It is the result of thorough planning and sheer hard work in executing the plan and requires dedicated teamwork. Having been in the software industry for a long time and having recently begun reading about filmmaking, I have been able to identify a lot of similarities between filmmaking and software development.

The process of filmmaking is agile. In the context of project management, the word ‘agile’ denotes something that is characterised by the “division of tasks into short phases of work and frequent reassessment and adaptation of plans.” When the script (requirement) is ready, they divide it into small pieces (story) and put them into schedule (sprint). The director (product owner and project manager) keeps track of items (backlog) and keeps submitting it to the production house (customer) to get it assessed. You may also notice pair programming in some of the aspects of filmmaking like direction, choreography, and music.

Films are modular and maintainable. Each component of a film has a separate existence and all such components are plugged in with each other to make a complete film. If they have to modify any of the components, e.g. scene, sound, language, subtitle, etc., then they do so without affecting any other components. For instance, when a movie in one language is dubbed into another language, they just work on the language part and then plug in the new language into the rest of the components to create a film in a different language.

Filmmaking needs planning, efficiency, and processes. Filmmaking is very complex but the right planning makes it possible. Also, in filmmaking, every resource, including budget and time, is limited. In fact, they don’t get dedicated team members — each cast and crew member is involved in more than one assignment at a time. The set, shooting location, and studio are all available for a limited time. You have to be highly efficient and process-driven to complete the given work within a given deadline and budget with the given team and resources.

Any schedule slippage or estimation variance will cost the production house, and that is not permitted. Also, they generally shoot scenes in an order that's different from the sequence in the script and it must be tracked and documented throughout the making process. Where in the story are they located? Is an actor reacting to something that hasn't happened yet? Is a window on set already broken? What time was the wall clock showing in the previous scene? If you get lost for a moment and don't remember what came before and must come after, you will end up with something you hadn't wished for.

Innovation and technology are necessities for filmmaking. Like in the software industry, film technologies keep changing and film crews must keep up with the pace. From still to motion, from silent to sound, from black and white to colour, everything was possible because of the new technologies and innovations in the industry. Film technologies keep evolving and helping the industry offer fine picture quality, better special effects, superior sound quality, and curb piracy. However, sometimes, new technologies and innovations are needed not to achieve better results but to achieve the same results on lower budgets.

Apart from hard skills, filmmaking must need soft management skills too. Director Danny Boyle says, “95 percent of your job is handling personnel. People who’ve never done it imagine that it’s some act, like painting a Picasso from a blank canvas, but it’s not like that. It is mostly about handling people’s egos, vulnerabilities, and moods. It’s all about trying to bring everybody to a boil at the right moment.

Our main job is to hire talented people and get the space right for them to work in.” This also entails organising the film unit in such a way as to achieve their vision, getting the best out of them, and sometimes (in fact, most of the time), handling their conflicts too. This requires skills of group leadership, as well as the ability to maintain a singular focus even in the stressful, fast-paced environment of a film set. A director — the film’s project manager — needs to be flexible enough to deal with unexpected challenges and be open to suggestions that could make the product better.

It's not rocket science but it is hard. It needs planning, processes, leadership, people management, time management, creativity, innovation, technologies, budgeting, marketing, problem solving, and so much more. Filmmaking demonstrates an excellent project management technique to learn from. It’s the finest case study.

As an audience, I enjoy films. As a project manager, I admire filmmaking.

In Ukraine, we often hear that the country needs more startups -- that product companies are good for Ukraine, while outsourcing ones are not. We can argue a lot about the advantages and weaknesses of various business models if we don't take into account the fact that the product ecosystem is a logical part of the service ecosystem. Israel's IT market perfectly exemplifies it. About 15-20 years ago, Israel was an outsourcing appendage of the US. Yet, nowadays Israel's economy is one of the most innovative economies in the world -- often compared to Silicon Valley.

In fact, similar transformation processes take place in many countries and even in certain companies. To prove it, I am going to describe a project we have been developing at GlobalLogic recently.

FileSystem Connector for Avid

There is a unique customer that we have been working with for nearly 10 years:  Avid, the developer of the world's most preferred solutions for the television, music, and film industries. Avid's products are used to create numerous movies and record and broadcast concerts and many other events (such as the Olympic Games or the world tours of music stars).

The purpose of Avid’s solutions can be understood better if we look at one of the areas of the company’s expertise. Imagine a studio designed to support a full cycle of TV news production. To air a 30-second TV program, say, about Jamala’s triumph at the Eurovision song contest, the studio performs a colossal amount of work on data transformation.

First, the news studio downloads the official stream of the concert or its own recording shot at the venue (in both cases, tens of hours of raw video). Next, someone describes the contents of all the recordings and puts them into the studio multimedia library. Another person outlines the subject of the story for the event coverage. Someone else prepares a text that the speaker would read. Somebody cuts the video for this story, handling hours of recently shot video, as well as some old recordings that show the first performances of the singer. Finally, another specialist adds infographics to show voting results. When this story is on the air, the TV channel's logo is put over the video, and other pieces of information appear in a ticker.

It sounds like a very complicated process, yet,Avid’s solutions automate the procedure significantly. On the other hand, automation brings some technical constraints. For example, within the above described process, you cannot add a video from your flash drive or a smartphone. Avid experts considered this problem but couldn't solve it within its existing product roadmap or its global plans. This issue -- along with Avid's recent launch of an ecosystem for third-party developers -- inspired us to develop our own product called FileSystem Connector.

The idea is simple: using the platform API, we enabled users to (1) add standard media files to the production system, (2) index and search for the files within external media or network storages, and (3) automatically convert the files into convenient formats and register the files in the system. It may sound simple, but only because all the technical aspects are hidden from the user.

From Idea to Solution

At the time, we managed to justify our idea to GlobalLogic's management team and get its support. We were given a kind of a carte blanche: a team of six and several months of time. Within that term, we have created a full-featured application. It was efficient -- not due to some brand new approach -- but because of an advantageous combination of  Avid’s existing solutions, automation, and facilitation of file processing, as well as the positive user experience it provided.

Avid was satisfied with the result as well. This is why we were invited to showcase FileSystem Connector at Avid Connect in Las Vegas. This is a huge conference for thousands of Avid’s partners and customers from all over the world (including such giants as NBC or FOX). We presented the product just after the company CEO’s speech at the opening ceremony, and later we conducted a detailed technical session for the customers and partners.

After Avid Connect, GlobalLogic and Avid presented the product to the TV industry representatives at NAB, the world’s largest exhibition for broadcasters. We experienced strong interest by prospective customers. Many users have long dreamed of such an obvious feature. However, it wasn’t easy to implement it within a framework of creating a complex product inside a big company. That is why our little startup came in very handy.

A Startup within a Service Company

We are continuously developing FileSystem Connector, such as adding new features and optimizing the performance of the existing ones. However, the most important and complex aspect of this project is not a technological one. 

It should be understood that GlobalLogic is a service provider, and developing our own products is not the company’s priority (GlobalLogic’s organization structure is simply not adapted for such activity). We would need to change the vision of our sales managers to build an appropriate sales channel for ready-made solutions. We would need to work tightly with the legal department to draft a user agreement and to control the licensing of the product. We would need to interact with the marketing department so that we could work out an effective positioning and a promotion strategy for our own products along with the company’s services. We would need to manage the process promo videos creation, as well as other types of advertising. Moreover, it is important to persuade the company’s management, which probably takes our project as a little experiment that will not necessarily hit the target.

Obviously, it is quite hard to run a “classical” start-up. The same goes for our modest product project inside a huge service company. Every day we solve problems that have nothing to do with product development, we negotiate with the management team, and we look for uncommon solutions to our uncommon problems.

Conclusions

Despite all the challenges, our plans are grand. We want to develop this initiative within other domains, where we already have the experience and understanding of business components of the products that we create. In other words, we want to level up these projects, combine them into a single practice, and offer a new kind of partnership to our customers. It may include the development of their product ecosystems by means of independent third-party applications, revenue-sharing contracts for development, counseling, etc. In fact, it is the primary motivation to further create our own products.

Another point is that such projects help develop engineering talents. We felt that this initiative was an excellent experience for the team, which has obtained new skills and tuned up its product development approach. The ability to understand the customer’s business and independently find technical solutions for business tasks is probably the main thing that distinguishes code writers from software engineers these days. I believe that the importance of these qualities and the demand for them will grow further.

Finally, internal startup-like projects help level up the company’s flexibility. Although a little alternative project can become a thorn in the side, I think that projects of this kind are the ones that help businesses adapt to change and stay innovative. As the saying goes, companies can be quick or be dead. So if a company decides to learn how to change, it should learn to do so quickly. 

All in all, I don’t want to say that this project will change GlobalLogic's business model at once or that eventually all service companies will switch to product-making. Most likely, the service model will still dominate the Ukraine market for many years to come, mostly because of the legal and regulatory environments' imperfection. On the other hand, I am sure that specialization in certain promising areas (in our case, media asset management) can provide companies with an opportunity to develop a business based on their own solutions. And as for engineers, product-making provides a good background for professional growth, deep engagement in solution development, and a training in solving business tasks along with technical ones.

This blog was originally published on DOU.ua on May 30, 2016 by Roman Cherednyk, a senior engineering manager at GlobalLogic Ukraine.