Live Shot Manager — Ideation Session

Ideation Session

We held an ideation session with technical directors and the director of Production Systems Engineering in order to generate ideas and solutions to create an object instantiation and review workflow for the Live Shot Manager initiative. By framing the problem at hand and encouraging the group to use divergent thinking, we all came up with great insights that will help in the design process.

Contents

Presentation

Framing the problem

At the beginning of the session, we introduced why we are trying to create the Live Shot Manager and what purpose it will serve. We presented the current workflow of how producers, bookers, TPMs, TPCs, and Sat Ops work together in order to get real-time live shots up on air. Current workflows were shown to highlight the pain points users face when sending each other Excel sheets and having to engage in unnecessarily heavy communication. We shed light on why building the Live Shot Manager and automating some of these manual processes would be of value. Proposed workflows and requirements were given to the participants in order to guide their thought process during the multiple rounds of ideation.

Click here to see the presentation deck from ideation session for content registration.

Screenshots from our Ideation Presentation Deck

Requirements

We collected requirements from Rob Barton, Senior Technical Director of MSNBC, during our discovery session as well as from our introductory meetings with key stakeholders.

Ideation Session

Design Charrettes

In the ideation session, everyone sketched and/or listed their ideas for the Live Shot Manager. There were three rounds of design charrettes with the first two being individual rounds and the last round being pair-up with a partner. After each round, everyone presented their ideas and we held group discussions about the strongest points. At the end of the session, we were given three stickers to vote for the solutions we felt strongly about. The final results are listed below.

Sketch from Photo | Ideas (number of votes)

  • A | Dynamic data fields and UI with “Remote or Local” being a required field to determine the necessity of Sat Ops review (5)
  • B | Unique LSM ID (1)
  • C | Timeline view with all shows on the left and different color indicators of the objects by hit time on the right (3)
  • D | Accordion view on sidebar grouped by category with user presets and the ability to rearrange category cards (4)
  • E | Sending notifications to specific users in the system (1)
  • F | Filtered list view of pending objects (1)
  • G | Action items for reviewing objects for Sat Ops: Approve or Contact TPM (2)
  • H | Toggle-able views between timeline, list view, table view (1)
  • I | Global timeline of every control room and a side panel with the status of each control room (4)
  • J | Notifications for added parameters to an object (1)
  • K | Checklist for Sat Ops reviewing each line of an object (1)
  • L | Include “Last Created” and “Last Updated” information to increase accountability and allow for easy communication (2)
  • M | Log of changes for each object (2)
  • N | CSV export for expired shots for tracking and reporting (1)
  • O | Must be multi-browser (PC and Mac) friendly (1)
  • P | Multi-shot integration on the large monitors in the control room (1)
  • Q | Color indicators for grabbed and taken and icons for Sat Ops review; have a 2 level process where producers and TPMs/TPCs are working together in the first phase before submitting an object to Sat Ops in the second phase (2)