The Hollywood Model in Software Engineering

2008/07/14

One of the downsides of working at a large corporation is low work efficiency and inter-project idle-times. From my own experience, I estimate that the corporate programmer could be 2x - 3x more productive, in other words, he is performing at 33% - 50% capacity. The interesting question is, is there another way? I've always known how Hollywood movies are produced, but I've never made the connection to software project management pointed out by Sue Bushell in her piece entitled Replicating the Hollywood Model.

McElroy believes the IT industry has much to learn from Hollywood's eventual transformation into an industry in which largely outsourced production companies primarily make films on a project-by-project basis.

What follows is my interpretation of the model.

In the Hollywood Model there is no continuous employment, instead, participants are handpicked and assembled on a project-by-project basis. This has some obvious benefits and drawbacks:

Bootstraping overhead. The producer has to re-assemble a team for each project. Depending on the size of the product, this might take several weeks or months. The model seems to be ill-suited when a quick response (e.g. to competition) is required.

Competition (participants). The producer can hire the best for each project. Participants who have proven themselves previously are re-hired. Poor performers are not.

Competition (projects). Participants may choose between different projects. High-performers will choose more interesting tasks.

Wages. Proven high-performers can demand higher wages. When compared to the Corporate Model, different wages introduce less friction.

Dynamics. There is constant change and rearrangement of projects and groups. Thus, high-performing combinations are more likely to form.

No job safety. Participants are likely to be left without projects for differing amounts of time. For people with families, this might be unacceptable.

Alternative management. In her article, Sue Bushell quotes others:

"I don't have to ramp up, I don't have to ramp down, I don't need a huge management layer to oversee the resources. And I don't have the cashflow crunches that you go through when you have a big staff, the work is over, and you must come up with something for everybody to do ... or let them go," says Seropian.

Her claim is that the Hollywood Model requires less management. This is something that must be proven by hard numbers, it certainly is not obvious to me. You could argue that a more disconnected, ad-hoc group requires more oversight.

The bootstraping overhead alone is enough to warrant a Corporate Hollywood Model, which is used by some large corporations such as game developers (and Google?). Participants are employees assigned to a project within the "corporate matrix". This in effect voids most of the benefits (such as wages based on merit) for employees.

In other corporate sectors this model is counter-productive. In desktop software publishing, the corporation's revenue stream is tied to delivering and selling new versions of the software every 12-24 months. It doesn't make sense to constantly re-assemble and disband the teams.

The Hollywood Model is probably well-suited for Internet startups, which are characterized by an initial surge of creativity / development followed by periods of maintenance. Only if the site is successful will there be a second surge, making continuous employment impractical.

Smaller web development outfits naturally use the model and refer to it as contract-based work. In this case, projects are small so the bootstrapping overhead is negligible. In my experience, these types of projects usually do not involve cutting-edge development, so top talent avoids it.

Others on this topic:

- Marton Trencseni