Product Development Project – Overview
In 2002, I moved to Athens, Greece as the Manager of Data & Timing for Olympic Broadcast Services (OBS), which is a division of the International Olympic Committee. OBS is the Host Broadcaster of the Olympic Games and provides unbiased coverage of every athlete and every team. The downstream clients of OBS are the rights-holding broadcasters, who are responsible for broadcasting the Olympic Games in their country.
Our project was to develop, test, and launch a new tv graphic interface, operator interface and graphic package that would include graphics updated in real-time for all of the sports of the Olympic Games for the first time in history.
The entire process was new and we needed to establish policy and procedures for all facets of the project from discovery, documentation, and testing to training and operations.
The databases that collected and sorted the information from the field of play for each of the sports were programmed and managed by an outside partner/sponsor, Swiss Timing. Additionally, we all worked with a technology integration company called Atos, who provided the network systems and many of the other downstream outputs of the sports databases.
Product Development Project – Steps
My first step was to work with the production team of each sport to determine what graphics each producer wanted as a part of the broadcast package for that sport and help to create the Graphics Requirement Documents.
Once we had a framework for what we wanted to broadcast, I designed and developed each of the Interface Requirement Documents that Swiss Timing would use to program the real-time data feeds that our character generators (CG’s) would access through Atos’ games network.
Once the Swiss Timing programmers had programmed the data feeds, I led the team to test those feeds, as well as the integration of the CG into the games network, and the programming of the individual graphics themselves to capture the real-time data. While managing the testing process, I used best practice tools like test plans, scenarios, scripts, testing methodology, and contingency/risk planning to help achieve the integration of the systems more efficiently.
By managing an error log, I communicated with our partners to ensure that all bugs were accurately prioritized and described so that they could be fixed and participated in a weekly meeting between all partners to ensure that project deliverables and timelines were on track for completion.
To prepare our production truck engineers to integrate the new CG’s into their trucks during the Olympic Games, I produced comprehensive installation and integration guides.
The user interface for the graphics operators was also new. There are only a few CG types in the world, and most operators are not used to using new technology. I helped to develop a quick, but comprehensive training package to assist the graphic operators not only understand what graphics were available to them in their package, but also how to use the system to put them on-air.
Product Development Project – Results and Metrics
The time of the Olympic competitions themselves can’t be moved and the start of the competitions is a very hard deadline, therefore we were working in the high-pressure environment of developing a system to be broadcast all over the world in real-time with no ability to shift the timelines.
We successfully launched the new system with real-time graphics for all 38 of the summer Olympic Broadcast for the first time in history. Some of the metrics we used to determine success was the number of high, medium, and low errors existed in the interface at the start of games time, as well as number of errors detected and fixed during the games, the number of graphic operator problems and errors, and finally the overall satisfaction of both the production teams and the downstream rights-holding broadcasters after the games were complete. As a follow-up, we surveyed the graphic operators to solicit their review of the new UI and what we could improve for the next games in Turin, Italy.