Telefilm moving in new directions

At the Banff Television Festival earlier this month, Richard Stursberg, the executive director of Telefilm Canada, announced a series of measures to improve the corporation’s decision-making, processes and overall performance. He told producers that the changes centre on a modified management structure, simplified processes, and the development of a statement of values. Below is an excerpt from Stursberg’s speech, in which he outlines his ideas for a simplified funding application process. …In approaching how best to move forward, we thought it would be wise to consult our clients…they heard and what they told us was a mixed bag. The good news is that you thought that Telefilm’s employees were competent, intelligent and hard working. The bad news is that you thought we were doing a poor job. In your eyes, we are good people with bad processes. Overall you said you were moderately to somewhat satisfied with us as an organization. While this may sound acceptable, it really is not. If we were a commercial organization, you would be abandoning us to our competitors in droves, according to the formulas that our researchers have applied in many other studies. …The key issue now is what we are going to do to respond to the changing responsibilities of Telefilm Canada and your concerns about our processes. Our response focuses on three key elements. They are: First, we need to modify the structure and organization of Telefilm Canada; second, we must clarify and simplify our processes; and third, we want to develop a statement of values, a sort of customer charter… Process Reform The next strategic element focuses on reform to our processes. We have identified five broad areas of work: simplification, due diligence, drawdown schedules, recoupment and Extranet. We are committed to making our processes much simpler and lighter. This should reduce your cost and workload, as well as ours. It will allow you to focus more on what matters – the television programs – and it will allow us to cope better with the workload increases that have come with Telefilm’s new responsibilities. The first initiative is about simplification. The Omnia/Pollara study shows you think our forms are too numerous and too complicated. We also realize that we ask you for the same things over and over again…Clearly it would be very desirable to reduce the number of documents you have to file, and eliminate the duplication. We have already started to discuss how the LFP (Licence Fee Program) and the EIP (Equity Investment Program) can share information to reduce the costs and workload for you. The second issue revolves around the level of due diligence required by us in assessing your applications…We can expend considerable effort on examining all the claims associated with a project before putting in a dime, or we can instead focus our diligence on the size of the financial risk we are assuming. This involves being much lighter handed with small projects, since the risk of loss is so much smaller. As well, we are exploring other methods of reducing diligence by relying more on track records of companies and tougher sanctions for misleading us… We are also working hard on improving drawdown schedules, by reducing the number of draws and trying to front-end as much of the money as possible. Again this would reduce costs by reducing the number of documents to submit. But it would also have the advantage of increasing the amount of working capital within your firms. We are also struggling to simplify recoupment, so that we could – for the vast majority of projects – move to a standardized recoupment structure. This would significantly reduce the complexity of the current negotiating processes and allow us to rely more on market forces… And finally, we thought it would be wise to attack the problem of paper burden by eliminating paper altogether. We have begun an initiative to allow you to file electronically through an Extranet extension of Telefilm’s Intranet.

Telefilm moving in new directions

Broadcast | June 21, 2002

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