KPI targets

”Better stories, together.”

This is still the vision for Artmann Studio after the split where we separated film production and film distribution into two separate legal entities.

We updated our businesses plan in December last year with targets for revenue, profit margin, cash-flow, equity ratio and FTE. KPI targets from a business perspective and part of the annual report.

What is better stories? One answer could be, "In the eye of the beholder", but that is hard to measure.

Technical quality is easy to measure and should be part of the QA-process. Artistic quality is harder to evaluate.

Then there is a financial perspective about artistic quality. In the end, is the film profitable? If film critics love the film, but no paying audience, then we have a financial problem.

Today, we are lacking Quality KPI for film production projects, but the process are described in our film production handbooks, and partly implemented. E.g. not all productions in a consistent way.

Next, easy to measure or where we need to improve?

The biggest constraint we have is time, time is money, but also a limited resource. We must therefore assure that we are doing the right thing, as fast as possible.

Question is what to messure, and what is relevant from a business perspective.

Film production is based on projects. The classic love triangle is cost, time and quality, and you seldom get all three.

First one. cost is easy to measure as we follow up cost per project. Quality is more difficult as discussed before.

Then we have time. When we do activities on set, how long time do they take? Bottlenecks? Can we improve? Avoid doing them?

Data quality, does it matter? When shooting documentaries, the ratio of actual shots time compared to edited film time is a factor of 1:50 to 1:100 and good KPI in it self. Less footage, less time to find and select.

If we have better metadata about each clip, the editing will be faster and as a bonus, we have improved artistic quality.

Another KPI could be % of clips with meta data. If the coverage is low, then we probably need more time to find the correct clip for editing.

A third KPI could be % of technically correct clips. If too low, we have an equipment and/or skill issue to resolve.

Finally, sustainability. If you have production grants in Sweden, you must follow up on a number of sustainability targets, otherwise you have to pay back. Examples are CO2 emissions or percentage of vegetarian meals.

How does this relate to Enterprise Architecture?

Business goals, busuness. capabilities, value streams, processes, activities, information and data are all part of what we describe in our EA models. Without this, you can't measure or follow up.

The logical conclusion is that we have different types of KPIs depending on what we want to measure; business goals, processes or data quality.

What's important? Can we set targets and can we messure? Is it sometimes enough to be aware of the target, and have it as a guide?

The discussion can in it self be more valuable than an individual KPI that is easy to measure, like % number of remote employees.