Market Core · Content · Module
Production
What each piece costs to make, including the research, review and approval that dominate the total — and how much the organisation can actually get out of the door.
The idea
How it works
Production estimates cover the making and omit the rest. Research, internal review and approval usually cost more than the writing or the filming, and none of it appears in the number anybody plans against.
Capacity is the binding constraint and is rarely modelled. A plan built from what would be good to publish, and never checked against what can be approved in a month, will be met by reducing quality rather than volume.
Working with it
In practice
- 01
Cost the whole path, not the making
From first research to published. The making is often the smallest segment and the only one estimated.
- 02
Find where things actually wait
Measure the queue at each step. It is almost always approval, and almost always attributed to the writers.
- 03
Model capacity before planning volume
How many pieces can genuinely be produced and approved in a normal month, with someone away. That number is the plan’s ceiling.
- 04
Keep buffer, and defend it
A plan with no slack breaks the first time someone is ill, and it breaks where the audience can see it.
One level in
The components of production
A component is something that exists afterwards which did not exist before — a deliverable or a mechanism, not an intention.
The capacity
What can be produced and approved in a normal month, with the buffer that lets it survive one.
Learn
Measure the queue at each step. It is nearly always approval, and it is nearly always blamed on the people making the work.
The other modules in content
Pillars
The few subjects the organisation keeps returning to and wants to be known for — chosen so that a body of work accumulates into a position rather than into a stream of unrelated pieces.
LearnFormats
What the organisation actually produces, and what job each format is doing — which audience, which stage, and what it is meant to change.
LearnThe calendar
The publishing rhythm, what is scheduled against it, and the fixed points in the year worth planning around — set at what can be held through a difficult quarter.
LearnReuse and lifespan
How long each piece stays useful, and how much of it can become something else — because the cheapest content is almost always something that already exists.
Learn