Viola Media, run by Violet Lesseps, had developed a specialisation in videography for festivals, arts and outdoor events when it won a contract to provide videography support for the production of online Masters degrees at a UK university.

Violet knew that the work would be interesting but potentially challenging. The university had already subcontracted project management of the online programmes to a large US-based publishing house, which had experience in short commercial video production. One surprise was the high degree of hand-holding and support required by professional lecturers. Violet had assumed that lecturers who could talk for several hours in traditional face-to-face lecturing would easily warm to the video medium. This was not the case. Delivering short introductory videos for an online course was not the same as delivering a full-blown twohour lecture to a class of students. To shoot the videos, the production crew would generally come to the lecturer’s institution for a day, with possibly one additional day for location shoots. This time had to be exploited fully. Pre-production was extensive. Nearly a year into the five-year project, Violet’s processes were extremely efficient and Viola Media succeeded in winning more work from other publishers and universities directly, and the US publisher decided to bring Viola in-house. The problem arose when the US publisher decided to conduct an internal benchmarking study. It found that Viola’s costs were far higher than its other divisions. The adherence to time budgets for videography and editing were broadly comparable with the teams in the USA, but Viola Media generally spent far more money and time on preproduction. Moreover, the US parent was frustrated because a good deal of the pre-production time was unquantified. How should the publisher respond to these findings?