For the NAB show 2014 we offered a MacbookPro as a prize for our AmberFin Academy presentations. We had a really good response and some fantastic conversations with many customers and new contacts who didn’t realise that there were video artefacts that could be removed by great transcoding. The best story was from a couple of visitors who were tired and had just come to sit down and rest their feet. After a couple of minutes they both sat up straight and started paying intense concentration to my presentation on ACC – Advanced Cadence Correction (or Inverse Telecine to give it another name).
After my presentation had finished they said that most of the content they received had the problems we were showing but didn’t know that it could be fixed. They also didn’t know where it came from. They went away with a couple of T-shirts and a buzz of excitement knowing that their heads were full of knowledge and problems they had could now be solved
One of the reasons that the AmberFin Academy has been successful is that we’re very honest about how problems come about and how they might be fixed. We especially like to talk about the reason that chaining together business processes might be good if you only think about each element of the business, but when you string everything together, systems break. There is very little written in our industry about failure. I recently read a fantastic article from the education industry about why things fail and I found a huge overlap between the discussion of IT project breakdown described in the article and the experience of many IT projects that I have seen run into problems in our industry. One of the key factors that generate problems is in the definition of the project, the identification of stakeholders, and ensuring that you’re adding business value.
Why am I talking about running projects now? It won’t have escaped your notice that I haven’t named the winner of the competition yet. The competition project identified its stakeholders well – we have had many entrants who have followed the rules enthusiastically (and some who bent them equally enthusiastically). The competition project added business value – especially to the people wanting to win. Unfortunately in the definition of the project we decided to only use twitter as a communications link. This means that until the winner actually responds to us then we don’t know that they really exist. Please check your twitter notifications and messages. You might be the winner. If you are the winner, then please respond to your twitter message so that we can send you the prize. If you don’t respond soon, then I’ll have to pick another winner. [UPDATE: Congratulations to the #AmberFinAcademy MacBook Pro winner: @Pinou_]
Thank you to everyone that entered. If you haven’t yet signed up for Bruce’s shorts, then please do so. I am planning the next series and I value your input on the subjects that you want me to cover.
Until next time
Bruce
