What a Chief of Staff Does in a Production Office

A chief of staff is the person whose job is to make one leader (the principal) as effective as possible. In this course the principal is you, or the production lead you support: a producer, director, line producer, AD or post supervisor.

The clearest public description of the role comes from McKinsey. It ran forums with more than 200 chiefs of staff over five years, and in 2024 it published a podcast with senior partner Andrew Goodman. They describe a role that ranges from administrative to strategic, depending on the organization and the relationship.

You already know a version of this job. Think of the production coordinator who knows which draft is current, who's waiting on whom and what's due Friday. That person doesn't direct the film. They make sure the people who do are never surprised.

Over this course you'll build an AI that does the preparation side of that job: briefs, meeting prep, draft follow-ups and logs. You and your colleagues keep every decision. This lesson sets out what the job involves before we hand any of it to software.

McKinsey's picture of the role breaks into standing duties. Each one already has a home in a production office:

• Information flow ("paper flow"). Preparing and filtering what reaches the principal. In production: call sheet inputs and schedule changes. A call sheet is the daily document telling cast and crew when and where to report.
• Air traffic control. Goodman's phrase for managing the flow of actions and activity. In production: department questions. Art asks about props, locations ask about permits, post asks about turnover, and each question has to land with the right person in the right order.
• Meeting prep and the record. Making sure the principal is prepared, and keeping a record of what was agreed. In production: production meeting minutes, and the notes on each cut of the edit.
• Peripheral vision. Being eyes and ears so there are no surprises. Senior people tend to bring the boss only good news. In production: what the departments aren't saying, such as the vendor that has gone quiet or the location contact who stopped replying.

The match exercise below pairs these duties with production work.

Four more duties complete the picture.

Calendar against the business cycle. McKinsey describes aligning the principal's time with the organization's planning cycles, and setting time aside, weekly if not daily, to scan the horizon. A production's cycle is its phases: development, prep, shoot, post, then festival and delivery dates. A festival submission eight weeks out matters little on a shoot day, but it starts to matter as picture lock gets close.

Priorities. One chief of staff in McKinsey's forum held the principal to five or six priorities, split into outward-facing and inward-facing. For a producer, outward might mean the financier, the sales agent and a festival deadline. Inward might mean crew safety, the schedule and keeping post on budget.

Follow-through and handover. This means tracking what was agreed and, when people change, writing a handover that documents key past decisions. On a production, that might be the line producer passing the show to the post supervisor at wrap.

McKinsey also lists adviser and sounding board: giving candid feedback. An AI can offer options, but the judgment stays with people.

Blue pages are revised script pages, named for the colored paper revisions are traditionally printed on. Throughout this course we'll follow one illustrative scene. In scene 42, Nora stands on a farmhouse porch at night and tells her brother she's selling the house.

It's Friday night and blue pages arrive. The rewrite of scene 42 comes in twice. With it comes an older draft carrying a newer date. In the rewrite, Nora now sets the house keys on the porch rail.

A careless assistant picks the version with the latest date and sends it to every department. By Monday, art has dressed for one version and the schedule reflects another.

A good chief of staff does something different. They:

• notice the duplicate and the date mismatch
• say what differs between the versions (the keys)
• send one clear question to the script supervisor, the person who keeps the authoritative script and continuity record
• hold dependent work, such as the breakdown and schedule updates, until the answer comes back

They don't pick a version, because that call belongs to someone else. Surfacing the problem and routing it is the whole job.

One chief of staff in McKinsey's forum kept a three-column list:

• Now: needs the principal today or this week.
• Soon: matters, but not yet.
• Never: came up but won't be done, and is written down so it isn't forgotten.

The never list matters most on a film. Productions fill up with plausible ideas: a porch light someone mentioned, rain that was cut from the budget, an extra insert. If a dropped idea isn't recorded, it can come back three weeks later as "we always planned that." Then it turns into a production requirement nobody signed off. A never entry should say what was raised, who set it aside and when.

Take one week on scene 42. A permit for Wednesday's night exterior isn't confirmed: now. A music clearance for the festival cut is due in five weeks: soon. Practical rain for the wide was raised and cut for budget: never, with the producer's name and date attached.

Flip the cards below and sort each item yourself before you look.

McKinsey is just as clear about the limits of the role, and they apply to an AI even more strictly.

• Doesn't decide for the principal. Scope and decision rights are agreed up front. On a production, creative calls belong to the director, budget calls to the producer, and department calls to department leads.
• Doesn't blur whose voice it is. People answer a chief of staff because of borrowed "halo authority". The chief of staff has to be clear when they're speaking for themselves and when for the boss. "The producer wants the keys added" is a very different message from "I'm checking whether the keys are in."
• Doesn't play politics. It belongs to the leadership team but stays independent of it.
• Doesn't isolate the principal. Guarding someone's time is part of the job. Walling them off from the departments isn't.
• Doesn't make itself the story. As one chief of staff in McKinsey's article put it, the job is to make the principal look good, not yourself.

The next lesson turns these limits into a written line between what the AI prepares and what people decide.

Now apply the map to your own week. Open a document in the shared folder you'll use for this course and fill in the template below. For each recurring task, mark whether an AI could prepare it (a first pass you review) or whether it is a decision that stays with a person.

MY RECURRING TASKS (role: [your role], production: [title], phase: [prep/shoot/post])

Task | Duty it belongs to | How often | Minutes each time | AI could prepare? (yes/no) | Who decides
-----|--------------------|-----------|-------------------|----------------------------|------------
Example: list changes since last call sheet | Information flow | daily | 20 | yes | AD publishes
Example: approve script version for scene 42 | n/a (decision) | as needed | - | no | Script supervisor

Aim for 8 to 12 rows. Rows marked "yes" are candidates for your AI chief of staff. Rows marked "no" will go into its never list later.

Use the explorer to estimate how much first-pass prep time the "yes" rows add up to each week. Keep the number. Later in the course you'll compare against it to judge whether the setup is saving you time, and you still review everything it prepares.