Production Workflow Audits: In-House Review or an Outside Written Audit?

Most teams reach a point where the same faults keep returning: a feed that drops during rehearsal, a graphics handover that always runs late, a camera that never quite matches its neighbours. The question then is how to examine the chain properly. In practice there are two routes. One is an internal review, where your own technical director and engineers walk the chain and write down what they find. The other is an outside written audit, where someone unconnected to the daily routine does the same and reports in writing.

I come to this from lighting and camera work rather than from signal flow, and that is useful here, because many faults I am called about turn out not to be lighting faults at all. A flat picture can come from a conversion step nobody remembers adding. Both routes can find that kind of thing. They differ in what they are good at, what they cost and how likely the findings are to change anything. The rest of this note sets them side by side.

An internal review starts with the great advantage of knowledge. Your crew knows why a patch was made, which cable has a poor connector and which presenter needs extra time before going live. Nobody has to be briefed, and the review can be done in short sessions between productions. It also costs nothing beyond the hours spent, which matters when budgets are fixed for the year.

There is a further benefit that is easy to overlook: the people who will carry out the changes are the people who found the problems. That builds agreement quickly. When a vision mixer operator has personally traced a delay to a particular converter, the case for replacing it needs little argument. For a small fault with a clear cause, an internal review is often all that is required, and I would not suggest paying for more.

• Full knowledge of past decisions and local habits
• No fee beyond staff time
• Findings owned by the people who must act on them

The weakness is familiarity. A workaround that has been in place for three years stops looking like a workaround and becomes simply how things are done. Crews also hesitate to record faults that trace back to a colleague's decision or to a habit of the senior engineer. The result is a list that is accurate but quietly selective, and the items left off are often the ones costing the most time.

Time is the second problem. An internal review is squeezed into gaps, so it is started in good faith, interrupted by a live schedule and finished weeks later, if at all. The notes then sit in a shared folder. I have seen well-written internal reviews that produced no change simply because nobody had the hours or the authority to turn paragraphs into a plan with an order of work and a person responsible.

An outside audit, such as our Production Workflow Audits, brings fresh eyes and a fixed deliverable. Hannah Whitlock, who runs these reviews, follows the signal from source to output, speaks to the people at each stage and sets out the findings in a written report. Because she has no history with the equipment, she asks the plain questions your crew stopped asking: why does this feed pass through two converters, and who decided the talkback route?

The written report matters as much as the observation. It lists the faults, the time lost to each, and practical changes in a sensible order, so a producer can read it and make a decision. It also gives the technical director something to hold up when asking for budget. The cost is a fee and a few days of access to your crew, which is a real commitment for a busy facility.

• Unfamiliar eyes that question long-standing habits
• A written report with changes put in order
• Access needed to crew, rooms and documentation

On candour, the outside audit wins, since nobody has a stake in protecting an old decision. On cost, the internal review wins, provided the hours are actually protected. On speed of follow-through, the outside audit usually does better, because it ends with a document and a date rather than a folder of notes. On depth of local knowledge, the internal review is stronger, and a good outside auditor will lean on your crew to fill that gap.

One practical point separates them more than any other: scope. An internal review tends to stay within a department, so the camera team reviews cameras and the audio team reviews audio. Faults that sit between departments, such as a sync problem that appears only when graphics and replay are both running, belong to nobody and are rarely found. An outside audit follows the whole chain by design, and that is where it earns its fee.

With the autumn schedule filling up, my advice is to use both, in order. Begin with a short internal pass of a week or two, where each department lists the faults and delays it already knows about. That costs little and gives an outside auditor a useful starting map. Then, if the list shows problems that cross departments, or the same fault has survived two or three attempts at fixing it, commission the written audit.

If the internal list is short and every item has an obvious owner, stop there and save the fee. If it is long, contradictory or full of phrases like we have always done it that way, an outside review will pay for itself in recovered rehearsal time. Either way, agree beforehand who will act on the findings and by when, because a review without an owner is only reading matter.

• Start with a short internal pass of one to two weeks
• Commission an outside audit when faults cross departments
• Name an owner and a date for every change