Case study: Recovering wasted assets

The following is a case study derived from working with a client. To preserve confidentiality, I am only describing the problem and not the client.

PROBLEM: A client approached me with a problem. Their organization had invested thousands of dollars to hire a company to create 3 five minute training videos for their new product. Unfortunately, the result (after pre-paying for the work) was extremely poor quality and insufficient for their needs. They had potentially lost thousands of dollars for worthless videos.

SOLUTION: We talked about what their needs were for these videos (ultimately to train their sales people) and I analyzed the content in each video and redeveloped a storyboard that salvaged significant elements of the videos. I also developed a script that was read by a professional voice artist. Collaborating with other professionals, we recrafted the video by chopping up and repurposing the videos, and then adding a new voiceover. For a small additional investment, the client was able to salvage what was once lost.

RELEVANCE TO THE BUSINESS DIAMOND FRAMEWORKâ„¢: I’ve done this kind of work (in various media) with other clients, too, and I’ve found that the most frequently wasted assets are in the Support Diamond — typically training material intended to help different areas of the organization. A lot of investment is put into the content and then it goes unused.