Javier Reyes

Imagine you're working for a firm that needs to deliver the final cut of a promotional video by next Friday. Suddenly, on Wednesday night, your computer crashes or gets stolen. What do you do? When you work remotely, all materials should be accessible to every staff member. Since we're not in the same office and unexpected circumstances can occur, it's essential to ensure a backup of all our work is available for the entire team. The cloud is the perfect solution for this. Consider services like Google Drive or my personal favorite, Dropbox, for these tasks. Having a cloud backup makes projects accessible to everyone, everywhere, all at the same time *yeah, like the movie.

From my experience, the calendar keeps everyone on track. It's a document that should be included in the onboarding process for every stakeholder and staff member involved in the project. This ensures everyone understands and agrees with the commitment it represents. Accountability is essential for any team's success, whether remote or in-house. A calendar is a helpful tool in keeping everyone, including clients, on the same page.

Having what some people call "BackChannels" communications is indispensable for day-to-day work. There are many subjects that can be solved with direct messages or group messages, which help a lot to avoid long email chains and never-ending video call meetings. This is a must-have for any remote working team. There are amazing platforms out there that can help with this, my suggestions: Slack and Discord.

To react properly to these situations, as a video project manager, it's imperative to know what it takes to accomplish what we suggest as a solution in every aspect (people, money, and any other resources). Calming down the clients doesn't have to cost everyone's weekends without payment.

If you have to choose between overcommunicating or undercommunicating, always choose overcommunicating. It could save a lot of time to send an extra message in the Project Slack Channel just to double confirm that the video needs to be done in 4k 30fps, and not full HD 24fps.

Writing down this process has helped me a lot to gain clarity of the workflow, but more importantly, to communicate with every member of the team and keep them accountable. All steps, protocols, and processes need to be given in the onboarding sessions when you work with new collaborators. This way, they feel more comfortable starting their work, and it makes them feel comfortable knowing that they are working with people that have the project under control. Believe me, the anxiety that appears when even your direct manager doesn't know where to save or send the review files, is real.