Best Practices Study of Museum
CD-ROM Production
6. Project Conception, Development and Production
6.1 Overview of Practices
6.2 Critical Success Factors for Project Conception, Development and Production
Generally most institutions interviewed believed that they were relatively competent at understanding the development and production issues of multimedia and CD-ROM. The institutions, together with multimedia partners, have well-developed competencies in this area. Museums emphasized the following issues:
- the importance of defining clear project objectives
- developing the business case and the business plan
- the costs associated with obtaining the right to use certain material
- the need for an effective project manager
- the need to choose a technology platform and design that corresponds to the speed and limitations of your target audience's system capabilities.
Defining Clear Project Objectives
Several institutions interviewed emphasized the importance of being very clear in defining project objectives from the outset. There are several reasons for this:
- Museological and commercial objectives may not always be the same. While this can result in a healthy creative tension, it may also lead to outright conflict.
- The more partners involved, the more important it is to be clear on project objectives and the role which all partners will play in developing the product.
- It is necessary to establish clear goals which are matched both to the needs of the target market as well as to the resources available.
• Generally, museums market to a somewhat ill defined audience. The museum must clearly define its target audience, position its product and communicate effectively with the audience. While this point more properly belongs in a marketing section, it does have development implications. A lack of clear objectives will make the project more complicated, which in turn will add an enormous amount of time to complete the work.
Developing the Business Case or Business Plan
It will be important for the museum to develop a clear business case and, ideally, a business plan for the project. Business plans can be written in many different formats. A business plan describes:
- the opportunity
- the CD-ROM product concept
- the market
- the financial projections and investment requirements
The advantages of the business plan document are as follows:
- it clearly communicates the business case, including the opportunity and the risks
- it becomes the basis for business planning and budgeting activities
- it serves as an informal level of understanding between the various parties
- it serves as a planning and control document
Most of the museums contacted had developed a budget, but had not developed a very detailed business plan.
Obtaining the Rights to Use Material
One respondent noted that "museums are content rich, but rights poor." The museum may have large collections, but no rights to use them for multimedia purposes.
The costs of obtaining the rights to use digital images of material can involve substantial time and fees for its use. Museums are now beginning to pay an additional fee for the use of material that they acquire. If a museum wishes to use a paper or digitized photograph, it must pay the artist, photographer or their heirs a royalty as long as these works are protected by copyright. Similarly, if the institution wishes to use an artifact, it must clear rights with the creator, unless the material is in the public domain. While museums are well aware of copyright issues, it is important to note that the time involved in researching, writing, contacting the creators or their heirs is substantial. What is a fair price to pay for the rights to material is not well established and prices can vary considerably.
In many of our case studies, the material used was in the public domain and therefore the museum did not have to pay for most of the rights for the CD-ROMs that they developed.
Since issues surround the right to use material contained in the museum, it will be important for the museum to determine who owns the rights to the CD-ROM and any derivative products associated with it. In the case of AGB, which assumed a passive role, the rights to use photographs developed for the CD-ROM were never clarified. Usually, the rights remain with the museum or belong to all the development partners.
The Need to Develop Effective Management Systems
The museum is often the lead or executive developer on a project. It will be critical for the museum to develop effective project management systems. This is particularly necessary when the museum is in a subcontractor role, or when the museum is not completely supportive of the project from an institutional perspective, and there is a risk of project overruns. Remember that the total cost of CD-ROM development is at least 80% time value, and one or more of the partners must contribute the time. Remember also that there can be only one project manager. Many items can greatly affect the time committed to the project. Lack of in-house multimedia expertise and resources, unclear objectives or design strategy, complex subject matter, unfamiliarity with software or multimedia technology, inadequate documentation, unfamiliarity with the target audience or an inexperienced project team are some examples. While it is impossible to anticipate all the problems in advance, effective project management can help to reduce project risk.
The lessons of good project management apply to CD-ROM production. These include the importance of having a clear work plan with well-defined objectives and responsibilities of key players, and a budget assigned to the individual tasks. A timetable is also essential, so that any given time you can assess the progress of the project and the state of budget.
In our study, several institutions noted that it is easy to expand the scope on multimedia projects and the time committed to the project. The project lends itself easily to creative ideas introduced by the partners. Furthermore, digital add-ons of more complex elements such as videos, simulations, linkages to web sites, etc., can appear relatively easy to do. However, experienced developers maintain that the production of digital add-ons is usually more difficult to achieve than originally thought, and additional time is likely to be incurred to achieve the desired level of quality.
Choosing a Technology Platform and Creating a Design for the Audience's System Capabilities
It is likely that the product will be designed for both PC and Mac applications. It is tempting to design and develop CD-ROMs that are compatible with the current advanced technological capabilities. One museum respondent pointed out that her computer, which is a two-year-old Pentium computer, already cannot handling some currently released CD-ROMs. There are limits to the speed at which computers run, to the amount of memory and space that is required, as well as to the speed of the CD-ROM drive. Remember that your target audience, particularly if it is the school sector, may be using older computers. It is necessary to create a design that considers the speed and limitations of the equipment your target audience is, or will be, using.
Critical Success Factors for Project Conception, Development and Production
- Be as clear as possible in defining the objectives of the project at the outset.
- Be aware that the level of complexity and the costs increase considerably with the addition of multimedia elements such as video and sound clips.
- Develop a clear business case and convert it to a brief (6- to 12-page) business plan.
- Share your business plan with the other partners and revise it as necessary.
- Design a mechanism to retain the rights to any new material developed.
- Review the literature on the current costs of developing interactive multimedia (see Bibliography).
- Ensure that the product is appropriate to the technology platform most commonly used in the market.
- Consider purchasing high quality production equipment if resources allow it, since the equipment can reduce the development time significantly.
- Develop a project management plan that includes a Gantt chart and use it to monitor your progress over time and against your budget.
- Consider the use of a more detailed project plan on longer projects. This type of plan includes:
- a statement of project requirements
- a work breakdown structure
- a schedule of key milestones and activity duration for each work element
- time-phased resource loaded cost estimates for each element
- descriptions of all outputs and deliverables
