Project On Location at CoSTAR Live Lab

Project launches its On Location video series, where we go behind the scenes of exciting projects to bring them to life for you and share what it takes to manage them.

This summer, we went to CoSTAR Live Lab at Production Park in Yorkshire, where the world’s biggest music stars like Lady Gaga, Beyoncé and Coldplay come to rehearse their world tours. We met Programme Manager Glen Kelly who showed us around the cutting edge of live production technology research and development at this dedicated facility, which is a joint venture with the University of York.

Project visited the arena-sized rehearsal spaces where artists practise and experiment with new technology, and where TV shows like Netflix’s Adolescence and ITV’s The Voice are filmed. We also sneaked a peek at the studios where entrepreneurs, researchers, specialists and students come to test ideas. Follow Kelly as we see how CoSTAR Live Lab works with them to push the boundaries of what can be done in live production, and explain what it takes to project-manage all of this.

Getting it off the ground
We sit down with Kelly to understand how he mobilised the project, for which there was “no playbook”. The project is part of a £75m national research and development network, which he tells us represents the UK’s biggest ever investment in the creative industries. “It was a lot of figuring things out, and a lot of being comfortable with the ambiguity and the uncertainties. Navigating that was challenging in the beginning but really rewarding,” he reflects.

Working as a project professional in the creative industries meant Kelly needed to flex his approach. Two years ago, he moved here from working in the energy sector, which he describes as being very “regimented” and “black and white”. “It’s a completely different world to the creative industry – and we are a university full of academics, and the lab production company is full of technical specialists, all of whom speak their own language, and have their different ways of working and culture and values,” he says.

Speaking the same language
It’s a common challenge for project professionals, where clear communication is a critical skill, and where your ability to engage with stakeholders of any type rests on you speaking the same workplace language they do. One of the key things Kelly said the team did as it moved into the operations phase of the CoSTAR Live Lab project was to spend an away day together, where they talked about how they worked best, what they sought to avoid doing, and what their shared values are.

“We created a shared ‘collaborative ways of working’ document that we now have as a reference point going forward. We know where each other’s skills are and how we like to perform, which is really valuable when you’re building a team with a good culture and a strong foundation,” he explains.

A culture of creative chaos
To be a successful project professional in the creative industries, you need to be “comfortable with the chaos, with having different hats to wear multiple times a day – and going to things from event management and supplier management to even marketing, comms and the PR side of things,” Kelly says. 

He has been on a long journey since those early days, now spending a lot of his time on the future operations strategy of CoSTAR Live Lab and what it takes to lead it into a successful future. It’s a shift towards strategy that he thinks will become ever more important for project and programme management. It’s about “how you can continue to provide value to the wider organisation long term that is more than just delivering to a clean endpoint and moving on,” he says.

If you’d like to find out more about what it takes to project-manage in the creative industries, why it matters more than ever to understand how your project delivers your organisational strategy, and how to be comfortable with uncertainty, then watch the Project On Location video below.