How Channel 4 brought project management to the top table
It’s a white-knuckle ride for the broadcaster as it goes through unprecedented strategic change. Opening three new sites across the UK, preserving creative energy at a time of industry disruption, grappling with a market in massive flux – what better time to set up a project management office to execute the CEO’s strategy? Emma De Vita gets the inside story.
Everything about Channel 4 is how you’d imagine the UK’s edgiest public-service broadcaster to be. In July, when Project stepped into its Richard Rogers-designed London HQ, all glass and steel, the atrium was festooned with Pride bunting and posters celebrating Hollyoaks’ Soap of the Year victory. It was buzzy, colourful and full of hipster beards and trainers. Wait, was that Kevin McCloud who just walked by?
Channel 4 first hit the airwaves in 1982 (with Countdown, no less) and is a lean, intellectual and messily creative place with a ‘fly by the seat of your pants’ mentality. Last year, CEO Alex Mahon unveiled a new corporate strategy that involves splitting the organisation into a new national HQ in Leeds and creative hubs in Bristol and Glasgow, while reducing the headcount in London. And with an unpredictable digital future in the offing, there has never been a better time to impose the disciplines of project management.
Cast: Sonia Sharma
Project management head honcho
Enter Sonia Sharma. Her current role involves starting up the broadcaster’s first ever enterprise-wide project management office – relatively late when you compare it to the BBC, Sky and ITV. Sharma first joined Channel 4 from manufacturer Mars three years ago to set up the broadcaster’s tech project management office. Her job done there, she stepped into the role of head of corporate planning and manager of the project management office in February, sitting within the newly created ‘office of the CEO’ on the hallowed third floor of the Horseferry Road HQ. She reports to CEO Alex Mahon’s chief of staff Lynette Huntley.
With the tech success under her belt, Sharma was hand-picked to do the same across the 800-strong organisation. “The office of the CEO is the right place [for project management] because of the recognition you need to make it work across the organisation. You will only get that if you get the CEO’s sponsorship,” she explains.
It may take a little while to get up and running, though. “I see my first year here as really trying to build the business case around why this needs to be a proper function,” she says. “I need to show that project management can bring benefits in terms of saving money, bringing in efficiencies and doing things well.”
She’ll have her work cut out to realise her ambition of a properly resourced department with trained project managers who can move around the business. In its 37 years, Channel 4 has been entirely focused on commissioning, with its support functions springing up ad hoc when needed. Unlike the BBC and ITV, Channel 4 commissions all its programmes and content from external production companies.
The call of culture
Channel 4’s creative and fire-fighting mentality is what appeals to Sharma. After 17 years at Mars, she appreciates the lack of bureaucracy. “Here, I can create an entire process over the weekend and then go to my boss on Monday, and they would say, ‘OK, let’s roll it out’. That is brilliant for me.”
The relentless adrenalin-rush of such a reactive culture plays into Sharma’s hands. Many people talk to her about feeling ‘exhausted’ and wanting to find a better way of doing things, and it’s her job to show that project management is the solution.
To convert people to her cause, she goes for a ‘softly, softly’ approach. She built the tech function gradually, beginning with information-gathering and then prioritisation. If people aren’t used to project management and you suddenly start talking about PRINCE2, they’ll switch off, she warns. “You’ve got to get people to understand what all these new things are, but then do it at their pace.”
Sharma’s approach is to win like-minded allies and use them to spread the word. If she finds resisters, she works hard to win them over. She runs ‘leadership cinema sessions’ in Channel 4’s in-house cinema, where she updates executives on what is happening and what they can expect next. These are supported by team meetings and one-to-one sessions, which she calls ‘project therapy’.
Breakneck speed
Sharma is working fast. In five months, she has identified the nine biggest projects at Channel 4 and put frameworks, templates and governance in place. “People see change happening really quickly when they weren’t expecting it,” she says.
Channel 4 now has a cluster of seven ‘Super X projects’, each worth more than £3m and defined as business-critical. Of the original nine, one has been completed and two have been grouped together to become a programme. These Super X projects range from Channel 4’s ‘nations and regions’ strategy for its HQ relocation to Leeds and its creative hubs in Glasgow and Bristol, to sales, digital and IT projects, such as the All4 subscription service and the development of the Digital Content Unit.
“Programmes and projects from all areas of the business can be classified as Super X if they satisfy certain criteria and are approved for inclusion by the executive team. These are subject to a higher level of governance and scrutiny in order to provide the required support throughout the lifetime of the initiative and improve the chances of success,” explains Sharma.
To deliver on this, she has set up project boards, including an executive project board. “We are trying to do a hell of a lot of stuff,” she says. “We need visibility of the information so the executives can make the decisions they need to.”
Skeletons in the cupboard
Sharma has discovered a number of ‘down the back of the sofa’ projects where people are running projects without the relevant job title or training. “They are managing small, medium or even large projects, and they don’t really know what they’re doing, which is just quite scary.” She laughs nervously.
In the long term, the project management office will only work if Channel 4’s executives see tangible benefits. “At the end of the day, you’re successful because you’ve helped make someone’s job more effective and efficient, and that is, in essence, what project management does. It reduces the risks, it makes things run smoother and it makes your delivery more successful.”
Sonia Sharma’s top tips
- Understand the expectations of all key stakeholders
- Focus on resisters and use promoters to your advantage
- Ensure that changes are being implemented at the right pace
- Keep things simple
- Communicate and collaborate to get the answers
- Allow for exceptions and be flexible
- Don’t sweat the small stuff
- Think ahead. How can you help avoid accidents and delays?
- Be creative and have some fun experimenting with new methods
Sharma’s strategic sponsor (and the CEO’s ‘chief troubleshooter’)
Lynette Huntley is CEO Alex Mahon’s chief of staff. Previously director of government and regulatory affairs at media watchdog Ofcom, she is skilled at taking the strategic view.
“Channel 4 as an organisation is a bit like a brain. It has lots of different nodes that need to connect together,” she says. A project management office is a way to create the neural pathways that join these nodes together. Setting one up became a passion project for Huntley.
She explains that, at its best (like broadcasting the London 2012 Paralympics), Channel 4 pulls together multiple functions to deliver something special. But the days of cobbling things together are over. “Our world is getting way more complex, and we are in a market in flux. We’re working out how to change how we measure ourselves, what we prioritise and what our strategy is in a world that is constantly changing.”
Deep breath. “In that environment, we just can’t afford for it all to be in one person’s head. There is a real need for the top table to have visibility on everything that is happening. The frameworks that project management and planning offer enable that in a way that the ad hoc approach just doesn’t.”
This and the interconnected way that Channel 4 operates provided two of the main reasons for setting up a project management office, Huntley explains. The third was to empower middle managers, who are typically at the coalface of the business, to be the ones to make key decisions.
Something’s gotta give
The pressure to institute change came in a pincer movement from the top and the bottom. “The CEO said: ‘You’ve convinced me that we need this, so it comes with my authority,’” says Huntley. This came at the same time as managers realising that resources needed to be better directed and prioritised.
She admits that she was “slightly terrified” by the prospect of introducing project management, which was so closely associated with the tech department, to the rest of Channel 4. “I was not fully convinced it could be cross-fertilised into very different cultures and projects,” she says.
The creativity that drives other parts of the business is not always process-led. “How do you apply those disciplines to a non-linear thought process?” Huntley wonders. Sharma has pulled it off, she says, because she had already got under the skin of Channel 4’s culture. “She is putting in place the discipline while taking account of the many subcultures that exist within this building,” says Huntley.
But there are some parts of the business where project management is strictly off-limits, like programme commissioning. “Why would you? It’s not a project, it’s ongoing,” says Huntley. “As a creative business, more holistically, you could probably go overboard on project management. That will be the art of it – making sure we’ve got enough to work better and think more clearly, but not so much that it kills what is precious about a culture that inevitably has to be a bit messy.”
Executing strategy
Channel 4 attracts people who love ideas. “There’s a danger that we could spend all our time strategising,” says Huntley, explaining that the risk is that project management could make senior managers’ eyes glaze over. The hard thing about it is that “unless they live it, they probably won’t get it,” she says.
Channel 4 has never previously had the resources to build a project management office, but it has become a necessary means of executing strategy. “This organisational change is the biggest in Channel 4’s history,” Huntley reflects. “Alex [Mahon] has really got it and sees that there needs to be better discipline to get stuff done. She has set a new strategy, and once you’ve done that, you’ve got to execute it. If you don’t have the right things in place, stuff won’t get done. That’s the value she sees in it.”
Cast: Frances Morris
Sharma’s project management ally
As head of business assurance at Channel 4, Frances Morris is a key ally of Sharma. They have worked closely together on creating methodologies and aligning risk, and Morris also sits on the governance steering committee for the Super X projects.
Morris says that one of the most powerful things Sharma has done is bringing together the department heads with a stake in the strategic projects. “It helps people to connect with the wider strategy and gives them greater visibility. They start to feel a bit more empowered, because they are seen as adding value as part of this trusted group,” she says.
It’s a safe space where projects can be challenged – and supported – and broader enterprise risks spotted. “Sometimes, your walls can close in a bit and you only see the risks within the confines of your projects, but those broader enterprise risks that can come out of these projects will be flagged more readily through this process because you have more minds looking at it.”
She appreciates that what Sharma is trying to achieve is about taking the best bits of project management that support agile decision-making and “running that up the food chain, not binding people in protocol”. She believes that Sharma’s position in the organisational structure is essential, “because she has been lifted out of IT and put in with our chief of staff sitting on the third floor within the office of the CEO. It says a massive amount, and it sets the scene for how important this is. If Sonia were sitting on the lower ground floor in the IT team, that would create a very different vibe.”
Cast: Barry John
The advocate
Barry John is Sharma’s advocate and former mentor. As head of sales operations at Channel 4, John says that everything she is doing to centralise, organise and streamline projects is not only making them more efficient, but also freeing up managers to do their jobs better. The centralised framework that Sharma has put in place for projects and the depository of information that she is building mean that managers can deliver their projects as expected, he says.
John is responsible for the first big project at Channel 4 to use Sharma’s project framework end-to-end. It’s a video-on-demand project that enables Channel 4 to create a new way of information being passed from advertiser to broadcaster to target audience in a customised way.
“We realised that her framework was a more efficient and effective way of managing a project,” he says. “My team is starting to think in a different way that allows us to implement projects differently. It’s very obvious why you would want to do this and what the benefits are.”
He thinks there is a definite need for more project management at Channel 4. “These Super X projects are only the tip of the iceberg,” he says. “We certainly need to do more around helping managers understand how such things can help them, and make sure that they understand that any piece of work their team does is a project to a certain extent.” But Sharma is “only one lady in an organisation of 800 – she has a lot of ground to cover,” he adds.
And finally…
Those at the top of the Channel 4 are being won over by Sharma’s determination and patience. Huntley seems enthralled by the discipline and boundaries that creativity often needs in order to thrive. “I feel like, when I enter Sonia’s world, I’m in this calm, orderly space. It’s so nice, because everything else I do is so chaotic. I just love it,” she gushes.
It’s an impressive start for Sharma, but only time will tell if her ambitions for the project management office will be achieved. If season one of Channel 4’s great project management adventure was setting up the tech office, and season two is establishing that model across the business, what might season three hold? It’s a cliffhanger.
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