The captain of a ship caught in a storm would naturally want his best hands on deck, so people management is crucial here.

 

The opportunity here is twofold –

A fresh, tightly knit and competent team will smoothen the ride and possibly even make a success story out of it.

 

As a manager ensure that your broadcast tech spend should ideally be divided into essential and desirable, for e.g careful analysis could reveal that the playout server purchase you initially projected as an essential spend could, with a few spares or stepped up preventive maintenance or a new codec pack, be converted into a desirable purchase, deferred or even cancelled, saving thousands of dollars.

 

Consider carefully the financial impact of adding redundancy to a system. Its nice to want a 100% redundant system with no SPOF, however my own experience with fully redundant setups tells me that in a lot of cases the extra cost and complexity are probably just not worth it no matter what the sales guy tells you – fall back on experience, exercise your judgement carefully and convert this into a pure business decision – you’d be surprised at some of the answers you get.

 

 

Your primary objective is to make yourself recession-proof. Blasphemous though it may sound, arm yourself with a very clear and basic understanding of finance, economics and trends within your industry – it will help you think and act strategically besides helping add something to the ‘nuts and bolts guy’ tag we technology guys sometimes carry.

 

Ensure that you add value to your organisation and ask yourself if you’re ‘just doing what I’m told’ – people that think out of the box, provide solutions and thought leadership will always be considered valuable. It is critical to educate yourself further, increase the depth or the breadth of your knowledge and skills but do it now. Should the hammer fall, the least skilled would be the first to go. For e.g a programmer working on VizRT graphics at a broadcaster would be quite valuable if he also gained knowledge of baseband systems like the vision mixer, digital glue etc, the ‘video guy’ would greatly benefit by a Linux/Cisco or SQL certification, similarly the creative graphic artist should learn some programming. Besides allowing management to leverage each individual’s skills better, which in turn means you add more value, it also forces you to generate an additional career path upwards.

 

Tough environments tend to naturally induce resourcefulness and ingenuity amongst the inhabitants, so bring out this natural resilience within your people. Economic conditions are cyclical in nature and it’s but a matter of time before this downturn will give way to a boom, however till such time as we’re in it, we have to take the best stride to minimize its impact.