Project Greenlight

I'm so hooked on Project Greenlight. I love movies and I'm the kind of person that actually listens to director commentaries and watches all of the DVD special features. Project Greenlight is like DVD featurettes on steroids.

I'm particularly fascinated with the process by which movies are made. The line producer is the movie's project manager. The line producer knows everything about the mechanics of day-to-day production. The fifth episode aired last night and the line producer, Ben Ormand, has emerged as the hero of the story. There was a scene last night where Ormand, after a day of shooting, calculated how much money was wasted that day. It was $5,000 wasted on actors who were not used because of a number of factors.

I think project management in other industries can learn a lot from Hollywood. For example, being that I'm in software development, I think I could learn a lot from Ben Ormand on managing complex projects. I'm a very strategically minded person. I can look at large development projects and know that, for example, in six months, I can produce a complete, custom software solution for a large company. However, the day-to-day stuff is not planned out in advance. There are many reasons for this. One of the reasons is there is no formula for how many lines of code should be produced within a certain amount of time. I noticed on Project Greenlight that every day was mapped out by the line producer and crew prior to shooting. Obviously, film costs money, people are paid by time, and none of this is cheap.

Is it possible to apply the filmmaking process to software development? I don't know. My philosophy has always been that each industry seems to remain isolated in its own bubble. People who move from one industry to the other always have something valuable to share.

I will keep this in mind as I start the project plan for my next project. Already I'm thinking I can have more tangible milestones and I can break development costs down to a smaller level to tell if I'm on track. I'd love to be able to know if money is getting wasted sooner and stop the financial bleeding like the line producer did on Project Greenlight. Most of the work I do is based on the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). It's an old model and I'm thinking it's too old.

Watch Project Greenlight, it's good television and it really shows how the business of filmmaking is not unlike other projects.

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