Assigning Action Items

After brainstorming is complete, it’s time to assign action items. Depending on the size of your implementation and the status of your existing infrastructure, action items can include research, planning, and ordering or reallocating equipment. This is not the time to assign implementation tasks. Those tasks will be identified later after the plan is complete.

At the Coho Winery, the winery owners are committed to their plan but have to be realistic about the amount of money they can spend and the amount of time they can invest in putting a streaming site into production. They do not want to invest a lot of time or money until they know the benefit is worth the cost. So, once again, they call a meeting to discuss the vision and begin researching the cost of a streaming solution.

The team envisions posting up to three videos on their Web site in the next year. The first, a shorter version of the video shown on the tour will be used as a test case. If usage statistics indicate that the video receives a sufficient number of stream requests, the team will proceed with posting the other two. Otherwise, the team will keep the one video on the site, monitor usage and sales trends, and re-evaluate whether to refresh the site with updated video content.

Because the winery team wants to stream a shorter version of the existing tour video, they decide to go back to the production company that produced the original to request an estimate for creating an edited version. They’ll also request estimates for editing two additional videos: one featuring the wine-making process and one highlighting the Art Series events. The team will provide a description of the work to the production company for estimating purposes. The description includes the quantity of videos requested, the timeline, the purpose, and a brief summary of the content. This summary is provided by the sales and marketing department.

The sales team has specific ideas about what information the first video should contain. They compile a list of talking points for the audio portion and images that should be used in the video portion. The sales team will work closely with the production company to create each video with the appropriate message.

The winery Webmaster agrees to collect usage statistics on the current site in order to estimate the amount of bandwidth needed for streaming. Knowing that Windows Media Player can be embedded in the existing Web page or launched in a separate window, she will investigate the merits of each implementation and experiment with the existing Web page to determine the best approach for the winery site.

The IT specialist will evaluate the current systems against the requirements of Windows Media 9 Series and create a specification, including a network topology, for the system that the winery will integrate into its current network. With usage and bandwidth calculations from the Webmaster, he’ll assess whether the current Internet connection is sufficient for the anticipated load. The IT specialist will use all of the information presented in the specification to make upgrade or hardware purchase recommendations.