Welcome to the APM Podcast, brought to you by The Chartered
Body for the Project profession. My name is Emma De Vita and I'm
the editor of Project Journal and your host.
One of our objectives on the APM Podcast is to share the stories
of project professionals who work outside the so-called
traditional project management sectors.
One exciting area for the profession is broadcast media
and it is from that creative world that we welcome.
Today's podcast guest Rachel Baldwin is Head of Programme and
Project Delivery at the BBC, where she leads a team of 115
people tasked with a huge variety of IT and technology
programmes, including a brand new home for the beef in
Birmingham and creating the largest orchestral recording
space in Europe in East London. But while Rachel is now a
seasoned project professional, she started her career as a
documentary filmmaker. Among her credits the top rated
factual shows like One Life Pregnant in Two Wombs and Mr
Trebus's Life of Grime, which was nominated for a broadcast
award. It may seem like an unusual
career path, but documentary making, Rachel tells us, has
more parallels with project management than it might appear.
Listening to both sides of the story, considering multiple
options, and finding a middle path forward of vital skills in
both disciplines, she says. But how did Rachel make the
career switch, and what project management lessons did she learn
along the way? Listen on to hear her chat with
project writer Andrew Saunders, who interviewed her for the
upcoming Spring issue. Why don't you start by telling
me a little bit about how you came to be doing what you're
doing? You know, what's your kind of
career path being? I went to university to study
geography just simply because I loved the subject and didn't
really have an idea of what I'd like to do.
When I graduated I on route stumbled into filmmaking because
I went to University of Birmingham and it was down the
road from Pebble Mill, BBC and we sort of inherited when they
were chucking cameras and old kit out.
It all came down the road controlling them.
So I started making documentaries as a student.
It just sparked something in me that thought actually I could
make a living doing this lightly, and I wanted to set out
for a documentary maker. So I graduated and took a job in
a corporate filmmaking company, making, you know, videos to the
a internal training. Company videos, yes.
Within a year I'd met people in the documentary sector in
Bristol, where I lived, and I got a role as production
secretary, I think, and worked my way up.
And then I sort of bravely went freelance as a researcher for
them. And then, having got experience
with that company, was then freelance and worked around lots
of companies in Bristol and finally managed to get into the
BBC. I got a job as an assistant
producer and then I went in. In 2000 I decided to move to
London and work for the London documentary unit.
I love listening to two perspectives or multiple
perspectives and trying to see, well, just to represent people's
voices accurately. And I think there's a real
parallel with what the BBC, because I work in BBC
technology, umm, but I have to work very closely with our
content, making partners in news, in the content division,
which makes everything but news. And the nations who make all the
regional and local stuff, I need to listen to their needs, work
out how we provide them with the technology they need.
And so you've got the sort of Technology Strategy and the
technology's view of what would be best.
But you've got the user requirements coming in from the
people that want to use. Yeah.
And then I've got the finance people.
So sort of bear in mind as well and running the budgets and
running big team. I think the documentary making
background. I'm naturally interested in
people's points of view. The one of my main projects I'm
trying to consider all the stakeholders opinions and
finding a middle path. Do you think it helps having a
track record as a content creator?
It really helps me understand the pressures that are the
content making teams are under from my first hand experience
and I'm keen to ensure that we make their life as easy as it
can be. That if we're rolling out new
technology we give excellent training, we provide hand
holding whilst people are getting used to the new kit.
So I think it it makes me emphasise with the demands upon
my colleagues in Compton in areas I think when you're doing
change management, listening to people's concerns and genuinely
listening to them and addressing them is the only way of of
speeding tech adoption. I think listening and responding
to people's feedback and adapting plans or solutions in
light of that is key to successful then management.
So why, why? Why make the change from this
kind of exciting, glamorous thing that you love doing to
becoming a project manager? So it is to do with having
children. So the filmmaking, even if
you're filmmaking in the UK, requires you to be quick to
respond to stories and to to sort of go out and film.
I found that when I had two quite small children based in
London I I was finding it increasingly difficult to be
able to have the freedom to drop it all and run, to exit the film
of woman that's now gone into Labour, or whatever that
observational documentary making requires you to live someone
else's life. Yeah.
Live your own. Yeah.
Interesting. And as a mother, I wanted to
live my life and have the freedom to be with my children.
Umm, I wanted to shift to a job that I could be london-based.
I don't really live my own life. Yeah, I did that in two steps.
Step one was be more development, executing where our
leading teams that are coming up with TV ideas and selling them
to commissioners. I did that for a couple of
years, maybe three, And then I thought, I'm not sure this is
going to stretch me as much as I'd like my career to stretch
me. So I went to a very
inspirational woman called Anne Morrison, who used to run the
BBC documentary department. So I approached her and asked
her advice and I said I'm going to crossroads in my career, I'd
really like to find something a bit different, he said.
Ohh, there's this thing called project management that we're
implementing within the BBC now. And I really think with your
experience of producing and directing and making things
happen and bringing people together, you've got every skill
that you'd need. There are some tools and
techniques that you need to learn, but why not come and
interview for a job I've got coming up?
So I went for the interview and got the job.
It was a six month freelance contract to the project manager,
a strategy for indie supply. Ever since then I've been at
BBC. You must have done a decent job
then. I I did, but I was learning, not
literally on the job. Yes, I must admit I've really
loved learning all the different frameworks and all the different
techniques you can use. Tell me about the things that
you've been working on most recently that kind of one of the
projects that you're working on at the moment, I have worked on
recently that have been most impactful.
I'm currently head of Programme and Project Delivery BBC
Technology. Well, actually for a subset of
BBC technology, the big bit which is broadcast and end user
technology and that entails overseeing about 120 projects
per annum, a big portfolio of technology delivery and that can
range from fitting out whole new headquarters in Birmingham,
which we're currently planning. So we're creating a brownfield
site, redeveloping and my team of planning the technology fit
out of that new building. We're also creating the home of
music in East London at East Bank.
We're exiting Maida Vale, which is a existing studio where we
were called Orchestras and pop and Classical Settings, and
we're creating completely new home in the Olympic Park.
Right, yes. Cody Spank Yeah, name my team of
fitting, currently planning and procuring a fit out.
So to create Europe's biggest orchestral recording space, and
also to create some studio functionality for recording
radio shows. Those are two examples of the
responsibilities, include the BBC's IT infrastructure and all
our IT, So my department looks after all broadcast technology
and all IT. How many people on your team?
At present it's about 115, mainly in London and Salford,
with some homeworkers. The mix of disciplines is I've
got the BBC's head of business analysis and her team in my
department, I've got head of Change and engagement and her
team in my department and then a lot of programme of project
managers. How does it work then?
Project management as a profession, How does it set up
at the BBC? How do they?
How do they use it? We have three types of project
manager. We've got project managers,
technical project managers and delivery managers.
Agile project management is well established, right, particularly
where software development is required.
And we have called those individuals delivering managers
because we want to distinguish between your average project
manager and someone that's more product focused and focused upon
software engineering and delivery of new functions and
features or new products. So that those delivery managers
are all in the product area. There are some the outwardly
facing consumer products like iPlayer.
Yeah, Phones, There are also some in technology group because
we've got our own internal products that enable us to do
the work that we do in the media supply chain or indeed some of
our internal processes like finance and HR.
So there are delivery managers across the BBC looking after
software, internal and external. Then there's the technical
project managers. I'm the professional lead for
the BBC for that subset and and they tend to deal with technical
project delivery, delivery of technology and as a result
generally reasonably large spends with procurement
requirements, commercial considerations and also an
understanding of how to bring technology to the users in a way
that encourages adoption. So they've got slightly
different skills from other project managers who we don't
call technical, who perhaps might be doing that sort of
thing that I did when I first started, which was bringing
together stakeholders to agree a strategic approach to something
and an implementation plan or transforming an element of the
business, changing how the business process works or
looking at savings and bringing new ways of working to bear to
change an operating model. So we've got PM who aren't
technical, who deal with more transformation delivery.
So that's the first thing is we've got three types.
The delivery managers tend to be embedded within the product.
At our Triangle product Manager software engineers, they tend to
be focused on particular products.
Uh-huh. My technology project managers
we deploy to projects. We have an annual funding round,
so I seek capital investment for the portfolio.
We get a set of projects agreed and we then deliver within that
financial year those things or we can have multi year
programmes where we're working across a longer period to
deliver the technology to enable the BBC to do what it wants to
do for the audience is or perhaps to make a more efficient
way of working. I think we're reasonably mature
organisation in that there is an understanding that one needs to
be focused upon benefits and there's also an understanding
that you need to reuse the right project management for for the
right challenge. So if you want to do process
redesign, you might use a lean called kit.
If you want to deliver software, then an agile methodology.
If you want to deliver a a new news studio for news at 10,
which is what we did last year, that's very much a waterfall
project. You know what steps need to be
taken in what order. You can plan it out quite
precisely and so we use the right approach, which is a
wonderful technique to manage that.
I will appreciated are the benefits of project management
as discipline by the kind of you know by the senior managers
senior management team at the BBC.
There are formal programmes to support all of our strategic
objectives being delivered. We've got the Director of
transformation who reports directly to the CEO.
And yeah, they totally get the fact that they need project
management because if we're going to meet the deadlines
we've set for ourselves, you need visibility of how far we've
got with stuff, umm, someone to run the budget.
So that project and make sure it, it delivers not only on time
but the quality everyone set out.
Yeah, yeah, I do think BBC leadership generally really does
right project management profession and need and
recognises the need for it at senior level in project
management. And so you have quite a lot of
responsibility. So I was the programme manager
for the technical relaunch of BBC Three on telly and that's
six months work bringing all the right people across technology
and distribution together to effectively enable the
transmission of BBC Three audience again.
The people that run the Chapel, hey, we're more interested in
are we going to launch editorially or what continuity
voices do we want for this launch?
You know how we going to position this channel with a mix
of content that we can offer within the budget?
Yeah, they do not know anything about how their pictures get to
audiences. And nor would.
They be accepted to. So the project manager or
programme manager as I was then, is required to make sure that
every different technical element is considered to ensure
that their needs are met. Basically the only person in the
organisation that was really across all of the technical
stuff with me, right? Yeah.
Is this is project management seen as a kind of tool in
modernising the BBC to kind of you know to for for the future
And it's in it's in the kind of world of you know in this kind
of fragmented media environment that we that we live in now.
Yeah, absolutely. There's a range of
transformation initiatives way to ensure that what we're
offering the audience is, is meeting their needs.
So as technology unfolds different devices, different
ways of streaming content, our offer has to keep pace with what
people need and in fact lead lead it, you know.
So we've got, you know, amazing teams ahead of the curve
thinking what can we deliver next?
There's a sort of trade off or there's a sort of there's a,
there's a tension at any rate between they're sort of creative
process of content production and the, you know, the more kind
of rigid process that kind of structures around project
management. How do you give people enough,
strong enough process to defer them to do their jobs, but not
so much that you're kind of hampering the sort of creative
side and I suppose. I don't think we're ever, ever
hampering the creative side because we're constantly
enabling it. Yeah.
Yeah, the big tension is between aspiration and what's possible.
So there is an aspiration to launch a new studio On this date
and I look at that and think, hmm, right, you haven't got
enough time or money to do so. Umm, so it's my professional job
to to go to really senior colleagues and say I I do
understand that you would like to have this studio go live by
this date. Let me just talk you through all
the steps required to get to that point.
Yeah, demonstrate why actually we need two more months setting
out to do UM. And then actually, if you take
the time to explain quite clearly what is or isn't really
feasible and can demonstrate why, to be honest, most of the
senior people I've worked with have acknowledged, OK, right,
well, we better, we better plan it for two months later or come
on, let's do it six weeks later and you're going to have to nip
and tuck, right? OK.
Yes, yes, yes. So there is a tension between
there's a lot of things many people across the BBC would like
to be doing and very brilliant ideas.
Clearly we need to prioritise which ones would you do and also
we need to be realistic about how much time and effort and
cost those things will take. I think you have done some APM
qualifications. What's the role of organisations
like APM in kind of building the kind of profile of the project
management profession more widely?
As the BBC, when the Chartered Project Professional
Qualification was launched, we absolutely lent in and myself
and a number of us got chartered.
I've really valued that qualification because it gave me
an opportunity to to look back at what I'd learned and really
consolidate my practise, to sort of think through how I'd used,
what I'd learnt in practise, what had worked well, what
happened. I have done lots of training
where the BBC often ask our project managers to take the APM
PMQ right? So that's something we really
rate and what. Is there is there something
particular about it that makes you that makes that makes you
choose that one? It requires the person taking
the qualification to assimilate the information, but also to
play it back in written form. So there's a bit more thinking
and critical analysis applied, right?
Right. Yeah, has been learnt.
And so yes, I like. Personally, I like the fact that
people have to write long answers because it requires one
to have sort of assimilated. Yes, critically analysed and fed
out. Yeah, the answer, The response.
That you've come to, yeah. Yeah, so it's, you know, it's
it's it's a really robust learning exercise, learning, you
know, way of embedding knowledge and I think you weren't.
Trained as a professional, as a project manager to start with.
So this is something that you kind of came across in your
career and you know, what are the aspects of it that you've
that were kind of, you know, harder than you thought it was
going to be? In my present job, the hardest
thing is being asked to deliver projects at very short notice
and very little warning, right? Because we really do want to to
meet the needs of people that are asking us to do delivery.
But sometimes things do come up at short notice and we have to,
we have to assemble a team pretty quickly and against
aggressive deadlines. So in my current role, that's
the most challenging thing. How do you persuade?
People that the sort of because I mean a lot of what you're
doing is, is, is introducing changes to the way people do
their jobs and and how do you persuade people that these kind
of changes that you're introducing are things that they
want to get on board with. Well, I've got an excellent head
of fans and engagement. You runs a team of seven or
eight people who are professional change managers and
so they've got their own change toolkit.
Initially we look at what are the benefits, the organisation
who owns that benefit. So it might be the cost saving
or audience value. So that's sort of gives us our
why, why are we doing this. There might be more than one one
reason, but normally one or two benefits.
So that's the sort of the why that we can say out loud to
everyone to explain why we're doing something and then we look
at the change impacts. So you look at what impacts this
change would have on the individuals or groups and teams
to change impact assessment and work with those groups who are
going to experience the change to really listen to what their
concerns are. And some of them are really
valid. They have thought through stuff
that we haven't thought, yes, I mean for that.
And we adapt our plans in light of that feedback.
And the idea is to get the people that are subject to the
change to really understand why we're doing it and believe in
the solution and feel confident that they're part of the future.
It is about making sure they are going to get trained and shown
how best to do their jobs in this new.
So the short answer is I've got brilliant change team.
But the longer answer is people have to believe in the future
and that they're part of it and that they're going to have the
right skills to be able to work in that organisation, mostly as.
A lot of it is, a lot of the resistance is, is fear about
getting left behind or becoming, you know, relevant or something
like that, so. It absolutely is I I learnt a
massive lesson which was on another favourite programme of
mine. The Digital Production
Partnership was a partnership between BBC, ITV and Channel 4,
and it was at a moment where the filmmaking industry had to move
from giving tapes with information in a piece of paper
inside the tape box. Yeah, companies make films for
the telly, giving a tape with a piece of paper inside it
describing the technical detail of what's on there.
How long this etcetera, whether it's mono or stereo or stereo.
But the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 recognised that that we needed
to become more digital and we created a partnership and
not-for-profit partnership at the time to bring together the
industry to move from tapes with bits of paper in two files and
metadata on XML. Yeah, spreadsheets, yeah, being
delivered. So we had to set a new standard
for what that file format would be and what the metadata, the
information, how that would be structured.
And we standardised that across the industry, which involved
working with all the broadcasters. 7 In the end all
came on right Sky and everyone. So we've got a pan industry
consensus on this file based delivery standard.
And then we have to work with the production companies that
making the content, all the post production companies that were
post producing and editing and finalising these files to show
them how to do the files and all the kit manufacturers, the
technology required to make these things.
And then? Within the broadcast there's all
the workflows that media supply chain had to receive these
things and process them ready for going out on telly and I
player everything. So the Digital Production
Partnership was one of my favourite ever programmes to run
and I I worked on it for four years.
It was a massive pan industry change programme and what I
learnt there was if you engage early, listen genuinely to
people's concerns you can then absolutely you've got time in
your programme to then respond and adapt And we ended up doing
major like a year long set of events where we train the whole
industry. I've been now to do this, yeah.
Yeah, utterly. Bonkers.
We wouldn't necessarily have chosen to do that unless we'd
heard him Fearful they were. So it's a bit.
Just to summarise the bit, is the BBC a good place for the
beer? Project manager?
Yes, if you. Absolutely, yeah.
Honestly, there's some really big projects that, you know, you
can launch new TV channels, new studios, you can transform
operating models within divisions or across the whole
BBC. You can do quite detailed
business process redesign on a small scale or you can bring new
audience offers to bear by introducing new products.
Sounds you know, not that long ago that was a project.
Yeah, it's now a real great product and you can work.
You're working with journalists and creatives as well as
technologists and change managers, as well as business
operations people and the people that work at the BBC.
I tend to find a really passionate and really driven and
really bright and can do so. It makes it really, really
collegiate place to work. Thanks to Rachel for giving her
time to both Project Journal and the APM Podcast, and thanks to
you for listening. APM.
Members can check out our big interview with Rachel in the
forthcoming Spring issue of Project, which will land on
doormats in March. If you don't currently receive
Project Journal, then you may want to consider becoming an APM
member. Head over to
apm.org.uk/membership for the details.
For. More insights into project
management in the media sector? Delve into our podcast archive,
where you'll find interviews with project professionals from
Channel 4 and global media agency Wavemaker.
Links are in the episode description.
That's it from us for today. As ever, we want to hear your
comments, feedback and suggestions at
apmpodcast@thinkpublishing.co.uk. Thanks for listening.