What is creative resource management?
Creative resource management is the allocation of people. A studio has a finite number of editors, designers, producers and directors, each with different skills, and a calendar of projects that all want them at once. Resource management matches the two: this editor on this film for these three weeks, that designer across two smaller jobs, a freelance colorist booked for the week the grade lands. It is the view of the whole studio's capacity against the whole studio's commitments.
The term borrows from manufacturing, where resources are machines and materials. In a creative studio the resource is a person with taste and a limit, which is why the planning has to be more humane than the word suggests.
Why it matters
Why creative resource management matters
Overbooking is the quiet killer of creative studios. Two producers each assume the same editor is free, both projects slip, and the editor works the weekend to save them. Do that for a year and the editor leaves. Resource management makes the load visible, so conflicts are resolved in planning rather than in crisis, and so the studio knows when it can say yes to a new job and when it needs to hire or book freelance support.
It is also how a studio protects quality. The right person on the right job, with enough time, is the whole game.
In practice
How creative resource management works in practice
- 01
The producer or traffic manager keeps a resourcing view, usually a grid of people against weeks, with each project's needs plotted against it. New projects are booked in tentatively at the bid stage and confirmed on award. Each week the view is reviewed: who is over, who is under, what is about to collide. Decisions follow: shift a start date, bring in a freelancer, move a task to someone with capacity.
- 02
Good resource management also plans for the work that is not on the grid: holidays, training, pitches and the buffer a creative person needs between intense jobs. A studio booked at one hundred percent has no room for the rush job it will certainly get.
At RIOT
Creative resource management at RIOT
The SoulCycle instructor documentary series was seventeen films, and the resourcing question was never whether we could make one. It was how to keep a consistent standard across the whole run while the rest of our client work carried on around it, which meant planning the people as carefully as the shoots. Krova, our production software, holds schedules beside bids, budgets and delivery so that the plan for people and the plan for money are read together.
Watch out
What people get wrong about creative resource management
Planning at one hundred percent. People are not machines; a schedule with no slack breaks at the first change, and creative work is nothing but change. The other mistake is resourcing by availability alone. The free designer is not always the right designer, and putting the wrong person on a job to fill a gap costs more in rounds than a freelancer would have.
