The production portal that put hundreds of shows' worth of resources in one place

The challenge

When Carlton and Granada merged to form the modern ITV Network, the newly combined business faced a specific problem: an enormous amount of institutional knowledge, locations, talent, facilities, contacts, resources, was scattered across two previously separate organisations, with no central place to find any of it.

Before production teams could be reorganised, that knowledge needed to be captured, structured and made accessible to a large number of staff, with a way to keep it updated as things changed.

What we built

We designed and built Show Starter, a SharePoint-based production portal giving ITV staff, internal and external, a single place to find everything they need to get a production off the ground.

The portal covers eight core areas:

• Locations: costs, availability, size and images
• Facilities: studios to Winnebagos, with shared calendars
• Talent: actors, directors, camera operators, stunt doubles and more
• Media library: still shots, digital footage and music
• Contacts: every internal ITV department
• Internal applications: with additional security where required
• Tools of the trade: external resources from commissioning guides to health and safety
• Research: direct link to the research department

Beyond the directory, Show Starter includes a chat forum visible to all users (customisable per production unit), a news feed for senior staff to broadcast opportunities and upcoming events, and a live dashboard showing which programmes are currently in production and at what stage.

The outcome

Show Starter has been used on hundreds of ITV productions since launch and is now the organisation's primary production portal. Following adoption, ITV requested that the system be automatically linked to a number of in-house applications through workflow automation, simplifying the process once a programme receives financial approval to proceed.