PLANNING – Failure of Outsourcing

One of the main reasons why I chose to develop Guardian Angel over Shards of Tranquility was the concept of manpower. Guardian Angel was substantially smaller in scale, and the project was initially designed to be finished alone; in spite of the delay, given the recent downsize, I was reasonably confident that I would have no trouble pulling it off.

The schedule was still pretty tight, but it wasn't a stretch of the imagination. Even with the poor efficiency rating during test footage production (it took three weeks to trace a 10-second clip), on paper there still was enough time to get things done and still have a bit of a safety margin.

Things changed in January when several friends liked my idea and enthusiastically offered me their support. While an extra sets of hands were definitely welcome, it was something that I had not been prepared to deal with, so in February, when I should have started on rotoscoping work, I instead began to organize the files in a way that could be easily understood and accessed. This management aspect ranged from deliberating on job allocation (who to give what jobs to), to wholesale renaming and reorganization of the file structure. Ultimately, this reshuffling of hats took me nearly the entire month of February, but it was an investment that I deemed possible—namely because the time savings of getting more people on board were overwhelming.

At its peak, more than 15 people offered to help with my FYP. Going by what I considered at the time to be “reasonable” (four rotoscoping shots per helper), I estimated that I could have saved up to between 50% - 90% of the grunt work necessary.

However, I was in for a nasty surprise. One by one, my “friends” stopped responding to my emails. Some of them never even bothered to access the Google Drive system that I had so painstakingly set up. Others kept promising to help, but kept on dithering well after the deadlines I had imposed.

By early March (most of the helper agreements had been inked in late January), less than three people remained. None of them bothered to inform me of their decision to back out. For the ones who were truly trustworthy and kept their promises to help, their contributions were highly appreciated, but in many times too little to help in the grand scheme of things. I made a gamble, didn't realize it, and had lost heavily. The three weeks spent organizing the files for systemic outsourcing proved to be the final nail in my coffin. From that point on, I realized that I could not even finish Plan B.