Three months ago we set up a new team inside BBC Design+Engineering division called Content Production Workflows. We’re here for the Creators of all output across Radio, TV and Online; designing, developing and acquiring the services and systems they need to make exceptional content. We want to make the way they work simpler, more productive, and more informed.

In a changing technology and competitive landscape we’re here to help BBC Creators change the way they work, keep up with new competition, and create new BBC services that will ensure people continue to value what we do.

That means radically changing the way we plan, create and publish content; using technology to automate where appropriate, and using data to help make better decisions about how we focus our resources.

We’re hiring new roles in the team that are going to shape and drive that change — see the links below. Here are a few examples of the projects we’re working on with Creators of content across the BBC.

Planning

The boundaries between what is Radio, TV or Online content are blurring, so we’re investing in systems that allow teams to take a pan-BBC view on planning, increasing collaboration between teams.

We’ve already deployed a new News Gathering and planning tool out to a pilot region that gives greater visibility of how we are covering the news, and much better mobile tools for journalists to collaborate about breaking stories. The change challenge is how to roll this out quickly to 1,000’s of journalists internationally in way that it helps us change the type of news stories we cover for younger audiences.

We’re looking for a change manager to plan and implement the roll out of that system — find out more here.

Metadata and Tagging

The BBC produces 1,000’s of hours of output every week, and has an archive of millions of items of written, spoken and video content. Often that content is often not stored or described in consistent ways that allow it to be surfaced to users in ways that are relevant to them.

One of our top priorities is to establish a rich and consistent approach to describing and categorising our content. A new team are building tools that will allow radio, TV and online content to be tagged in consistent ways either manually or using new automated enrichment techniques. A team of editors and data specialists are also working to establish and maintain a set of common taxonomies that will support the best possible user recommendations for what to watch, or listen to, next.

We are recruiting for a Lead Information Architect and Senior Product Manager to lead this ongoing work.

Data Feedback Loops

Data about how content is performing helps content creators make better decisions about what to make or commission next. We’ve created a set of tools that are being used across the BBC to do just that; our internal Telescope tool was used over 100,000 times last month across News and Sport, and we’re looking to extend and roll out its’ functionality to TV and Radio teams in 2019.

If you are interested in joining the expanding team of Data Scientists and Developers building this set of feedback loops get in touch email magda.piatkowska@bbc.co.uk

Change Management Strategy

An organisation the size of the BBC with over 20,000 people working in dozens of countries means that there is always huge amounts of change. The Content Production Workflows team is involved in a broad portfolio of Change Programmes; some of those are our own technology programmes, and others where we support business change programmes in Radio & Education, the BBC Content Division, BBC News, BBC Studios and BBC Nations and Regions.

We’re looking for a highly experienced change manager to lead the design of our overall change and communications strategies, and implementation plans. We’re looking to develop an approach where creative teams experiment with new technologies to iterate prototypes that then scale the benefits across a large international organisation.

Applications are now open for the Head of Change Management role. If you would like to know more about this position email me robin.pembrooke@bbc.co.uk

With all of the roles mentioned here we are keen to attract a wide and diverse range of candidates; we are happy to discuss flexible working arrangements with candidates.

Just over a year ago I took this photo of Fran Unsworth and Jonathan Chapman standing in in the middle of an empty concrete shell of a office floor in Nairobi where we had just signed a lease for our new bureau in Kenya. It was exciting to think of what could be done with the space, albeit with a daunting level of work needed in Kenya, Nigeria and India to realise the potential of the investment in the World Service through the World 2020 programme.

A YEAR OF BUILDING

A year on, thanks to the hard work of multiple teams across the BBC, we have three brand new bureaus in Delhi, Lagos and Nairobi staffed with hundreds of new journalists broadcasting and publishing in 12 new languages across Africa and Asia. We have also updated or provisioned new facilities in another 50 sites overseas as part of the 2020 expansion programme. It means the BBC is now broadcasting and publishing in over 40 languages ranging from Pidgin to Korean and our new bureau in Lagos will be launched next week.

I’ve been fortunate to visit three of our new sites in the last 12 months and meet some of the incredible people running those new services. These are really diverse teams, as we publish in 3 or 4 different regional languages from each office.

In Delhi I watched a brand new team of journalists make news bulletins in Hindi, Telugu, and Tamil one after another; something they do every night. An amazingly complex task, especially as the teams had only been working together at the BBC for 6 months.

There are very few organisations anywhere in the world capable of mobilising this level of broadcast and digital infrastructure, let alone the scale of quality journalism in so many different languages. It is one of the things that makes working in technology in the BBC uniquely interesting and rewarding.

Whilst we’re proud of what we’ve achieved this year, we’re only just getting started.

Although we’ve launched the 12 new websites, created countless programmes in 3 new major bureaus, and hired of hundreds of journalists, we’ve only just begun to transform how the World Service works. The bulk of our audience remains on TV and Radio; to be sustainable we have to deliver engaging digital services that local audiences find relevant and valuable to their lives.

ADJUSTING OUR APPROACH

We have a big goal to achieve: the BBC as a whole is aim to reach 500M weekly users by 2022, and World Service expansion is one of the drivers of growth that we hope will drive an additional 80M users. To get there we’re changing our approach to building digital products and ways of working.

In the last year, we had to constantly manage risk to achieve the deadlines we’ve hit. To meet tight delivery schedules for the new websites and building fit out, we often had to reign in the scope of our ambition for our digital products at initial launch. Similarly, we had to be 100% sure that the studios and production systems would work from day one, and so we deployed existing combinations of production tools, albeit now virtualised and IP capable, rather than experimenting with completely new technologies.

We’re now turning our focus to a more agile, data and performance driven phase of delivery.

In the near term that will focus on speed of digital performance and user engagement:

• our content doesn’t load quick enough on mobile; we want to ensure all our sites load as quickly as possible in all our WS markets, even on slower mobile connections.
• we also have a lot of users who come to us via search and social, read one article and then leave again. We’re experimenting with machine learning driven recommendations to increase the number of users who click on one more thing to read or watch.

In parallel with the core delivery our News Labs team have been able to experiment with new tools that leverage the latest in languages technology. One of those tools, called “Stitch”, started as a rapid prototype created in a weekend by a tech savvy journalist. The News Labs team scaled it rapidly to a point where it is used to create over a 1,000 videos a week. It’s helped us publish 4 times as much digital video a week as we did before the World 2020 programme started.

With our journalists, we’ll continue rolling out improvements to the tools and dashboards they use; letting them to connect better with each other, so they can better connect with audiences.

We’ll start blogging soon about some of the new prototypes of technology we’re using to transform how we plan, gather, edit and publish the news across the World Service and the rest of BBC News.

If you are interested to join the work we are doing to expand and tranform the World Service do get in touch. We are looking for fantastic front end and frameworks developers and data scientists to join the team.

If you’re looking for a new challenge in 2017, then we have a number of fantastic new opportunities to join the team working to digitally transform the BBC World Service.

The World Service is an extraordinary and unique organisation; it is the world’s largest international broadcaster, reaching over 320 million people every week on Radio, TV and Online in 29 different languages.

In November we announced the biggest expansion of the World Service since the 1940s — which presents a huge, yet complex, technical challenge to launch new broadcast and digital services in a further 11 languages. The programme is called World 2020; we will be establishing new broadcast infrastructure, and updating our news gathering and production processes as more journalists are hired in Africa, Asia, Russia and the Middle East.

As the service expands we are looking to digitally transform how we operate and deliver content to users. There is a massive shift in consumption of news to mobile phones, and this means we need to create and publish our content in new ways, both on BBC websites and apps, as well as social media platforms that are being used by audiences in the countries in which we are expanding.

We already have a fantastic team of designers, developers, product managers and testers who have expertise in deploying digital products responsively in 27 languages, but we are looking to expand the team to allow us to meet the new challenges of the World 2020 programme.

New projects will include scaling our publishing solutions for messenger based platforms, and taking some of the recent innovations prototyped by BBC News Labs into full production.

If you have a passion for news, for languages technology and digital innovation, and a belief in the impact we can have together through the World Service, we would love to hear from you. We have vacancies in the following roles:

- Principal Software Engineers (web / apps)

- Senior Software Engineer (data systems)

- Software Engineer (Frameworks & Tools)

- Testers

- UX Designers

- Business Analysts

The roles are based mainly in London in New Broadcasting House, co-located with many of the journalists creating content and driving the editorial innovations that are part of the World 2020 programme.

We will be running a first round of interviews in January, so over the New Year break do get in touch with your CV if you would like to be considered for one of the roles. Send emails to Laura.Rowley@bbc.co.uk.

This is a great opportunity to join a team that is embarked on a unique global programme of change. We look forward to hearing from you.