A regional news desk that stopped overrunning: Morag's rundown

Morag runs the evening programme for a small regional news operation. When she first rang us, her complaint was not about equipment. The cameras worked, the gallery worked, and the presenters were capable. The trouble was that the half-hour programme finished anything from forty seconds to three minutes over, and the final item was cut short almost every night.

She described it plainly: the team felt busy all evening and still ended up improvising at the close. Nobody could say where the time went. That was the part we could help with, because live production workflow support is mostly about making the loss of time visible so that it can be dealt with one piece at a time.

We agreed to spend two evenings in her gallery before suggesting anything, watching the programme go out and keeping our own stopwatch notes beside her producer's.

The overrun was not one large problem. It was a handful of small ones stacking up. The rundown listed each item with a planned duration, but those durations were written once, months earlier, and had never been adjusted to what the items actually took. Packages were timed at their edit length, yet the presenter's lead-in and the hand-back were not counted at all.

Two further habits added seconds. The weather segment was routinely given a figure of ninety seconds and ran to a hundred and twenty, because the presenter reasonably wanted to explain a changing forecast. And the commercial break was entered as fixed, while the return from it depended on a handover call that took a variable time to complete.

None of this reflected carelessness. The team was working from a document that described an ideal programme rather than the one they actually broadcast.

• Lead-ins and hand-backs were missing from the timings
• Segment lengths had not been revised since the rundown was first written
• The return from the break depended on an unscripted call

We rebuilt the rundown around measured times. For a fortnight, Morag's producer logged the real duration of every element, including the spoken links, and we averaged them. The new document showed each item with its package length and its talk time separately, so the total was honest from the start.

We also introduced a back-timing column. Instead of adding up from the top, the producer counted back from the fixed closing time, which made it obvious at any moment whether the programme was ahead or behind. A single running figure, shown on a gallery monitor, replaced the guesswork.

Finally, we marked two items as flexible, with a stated minimum and maximum. When the programme ran late, the producer already knew which item could give up thirty seconds without anyone arguing about it in the middle of a broadcast.

Morag was wary of rehearsal. Her team finished work late, and a full run-through was out of the question. So we proposed something smaller: a ten-minute walk through the first and last items, plus the first minute after the break, done before each programme.

The point was not to polish delivery. It was to confirm the cues, the camera positions for the opening shot, and the exact words used to hand control back from the break. Those three moments were where most of the drift began, so they were where the effort was best spent.

Amy Robertson, our lighting and camera lead, joined one session to check that the presenter's marks matched the framing the operators expected. A small mismatch there had been causing a late camera cut, worth a couple of seconds each night.

The last piece was a fault-finding sheet. When a package failed to roll or an audio source dropped, the old response was a scramble of questions across the gallery. We wrote a single page that named who calls what, in what order, and what the fallback is for each common failure.

The sheet was deliberately short. It listed the likely faults, the first check for each, and the decision point at which the producer moves on to the fallback rather than continuing to diagnose. Having that decision written down removed the hesitation that usually costs the most time.

We pinned it beside the vision mixer and walked the team through it once. In the following weeks they used it twice, and in both cases the programme stayed on its schedule.

After a few weeks the evening programme finished within about ten seconds of its slot on most nights, and the final item was no longer shortened. Morag told us the change she noticed most was the calmer atmosphere: people stopped glancing at the clock because the running figure was doing that for them.

We would be careful not to claim more than that. Some nights still drift, particularly when a story breaks late, and the rundown needs revising whenever the format changes. It is a working document, not a finished one.

What we took from the work is how ordinary the fixes were. Honest timings, a count-back from the close, a short rehearsal of the risky moments and one page of fault steps. None of it required new equipment, and all of it can be kept up by the team itself.