Mounir Harchaoui · Video Operations Implementation Lead 1/12
Intrepid Travel · Brand Production

Delivering the video
operations roadmap,
and leaving it running.

An approach to the five accountabilities, mapped against a library system I have already built and handed over once.

Mounir “Moon” Harchaoui  ·  September 2026
Track record

What I built at Quad Lock

Media Assets & AI Automation Coordinator · October 2024 to June 2026 · iconik

500,000

assets organised and tagged by hand before any automation. That pass is what produced the schema

Schema

Classification-first model, so each asset carries only the fields relevant to its type

Review

AI tagging with a human in the loop: per-field accept, edit and bulk approve

Governance

Versioned precision and recall gate deciding when tagging writes back unattended

Adoption

Plain-language asset search inside Slack, where the teams already worked

Handover

Runbooks and troubleshooting guides maintained by non-developers

Who I worked with

The system existed because people used it

Cameron Marshad · Production and AI Adoption Manager
My reporting line and the person who commissioned the work. Progress, options and trade-offs went through a fixed reporting rhythm rather than ad hoc updates.
Marketing, sales, e-commerce and product design
The teams who actually used the library. Requirements came from watching them search, not from asking them what they wanted. The Slack search tool exists because of what that observation showed.
The iconik development team
Regular working sessions on semantic search and AI auto-tagging in my workflow, tracking against their AI integration roadmap.
Why that last one matters to this role

At IBC in September 2026, Backlight announced AI Discovery across iconik: AI-suggested metadata for a human to review and approve, and search in plain everyday language instead of exact tags. That is the direction those sessions were pointing at.

The practical value is simple. Before anything gets built custom here, I can tell you what the platform is about to ship natively.

ACCOUNTABILITY 01

Video Asset Management and Governance

Aim

A library the team searches, instead of a person they ask.

How
  • Audit before design. Volume, duplication, orphaned assets and rights-field coverage, reported as numbers. At Quad Lock the manual pass is what produced the schema, so I would not set a taxonomy before seeing the library
  • Faceted metadata for discovery, folders for ingest and permissions. A clip can belong to a destination, a trip, a range, a year and a campaign at once
  • Governance written as the upload rule, not a separate policy document. Adoption is the benchmark, so the standard has to sit where the work happens
KPI
  • Time to find
  • Duplication rate
  • % assets with complete rights fields
  • Governance adoption
Return

Every asset found is one that does not get commissioned twice. Re-shoots are the most expensive symptom of a library nobody can search, and they are charged to production budgets rather than to the DAM.

ACCOUNTABILITY 02

Business Requirements and Stakeholder Partnership

Aim

Requirements drawn from observed behaviour, validated before anything is built.

How
  • Watch people search rather than survey them. The gap between the documented process and the actual behaviour is where the requirement is
  • Document each requirement and confirm it back with a named owner before building against it
  • A fixed reporting cadence carrying options and trade-offs, not status alone
KPI
  • Requirements validated with named owners
  • Stakeholder pulse
  • Delivered vs documented need
Return

Build once. Reworking a live system costs more than building it, and it spends the credibility you need for the next change.

ACCOUNTABILITY 03

Video Workflow Optimisation

Aim

Fewer manual touchpoints between a shoot wrapping and an asset being usable.

How
  • Standardise the handover as intake: one brief format, required fields, one review link, versioned feedback, a locked approval
  • Separate review proxies from edit proxies. Review proxies serve search and approval; edit proxies must relink to camera originals by clip name and timecode
  • Hold the handover in the project management system as a template with required fields, so the process is the tool rather than an email thread
KPI
  • Manual touchpoints per delivery
  • Rework rate
  • Wrap to usable asset
  • Versions per approval
Return

Editor hours returned to editing. Most rework traces back to an unclear brief or unversioned feedback, and both are fixable with structure rather than effort.

ACCOUNTABILITY 04

Improvement and Innovation

Aim

A documented tool inventory and a costed consolidation case.

How
  • Inventory every tool, seat and subscription against owner, cost, renewal date and actual usage
  • Dormant seats first. Per-user pricing makes inactive accounts the cleanest saving available and the least disruptive to propose
  • Check what the platform already covers natively before adding anything, then assess overlap across review, transfer, transcription and publishing
  • Automate only where accuracy can be measured. At Quad Lock nothing wrote back unattended until it passed a precision and recall threshold
KPI
  • Active vs paid seats
  • Overlapping tools identified
  • Annualised saving proposed
  • Tagging precision / recall
Return

The one accountability with a direct dollar line. Seat recovery and tool overlap are realisable inside a twelve-month contract, which is what makes the rest of the roadmap easier to fund.

ACCOUNTABILITY 05

Documentation and Backup

Aim

Documentation that measurably reduces support requests, and a retention standard that is applied rather than filed.

How
  • Baseline the repeat questions first, so the guides answer real requests and the reduction can be shown rather than asserted
  • Quick Start Guides at one page per task, SOPs for full processes, workflow charts for handovers
  • Written during the work and maintainable by a non-developer. That was the standard at Quad Lock
  • Retention and backup tied to rights and release expiry, so licensed material is flagged before it lapses
KPI
  • Repeat support requests per month
  • Self-service resolution
  • Onboarding to first independent task
Return

A team that stops queueing for one person. Retention tied to expiry also turns a compliance risk into a scheduled task.

Governance context

Any AI I introduce sits inside your own policy

Your Responsible Marketing & PR Policy, published July 2026, added dedicated sections on AI and digital integrity, truthful communications and climate honesty.

AI tagging gets documented against that policy, not alongside it
Which fields are machine-generated, which are human-confirmed, and the accuracy threshold each had to clear. An asset record should be able to show where its metadata came from.
A human approves before anything publishes
The review console I built at Quad Lock existed for exactly this reason. Confidently wrong tags are worse than no tags, and in a brand library they eventually reach a customer.
Rights travel with the asset as fields, not as a PDF
Channels, territory, term, editing rights, ownership and expiry. Whatever is not a field cannot be queried or flagged, which is how licensed material quietly outlives its licence.
Sequence

The first ninety days, in order

The roadmap is already defined. This is how I would get to its first decision with evidence rather than assumptions.

WEEKS 1–3
Read and listen

Understand the existing roadmap and where it has landed. Sit with the people who request footage and record what they actually do.

WEEKS 3–6
Audit

Volume, duplication, orphan rate, rights-field coverage, and which assets actually get used. Numbers, not impressions.

WEEKS 6–10
Pilot one slice

Taxonomy v1 on a single high-demand range rather than the whole library, so there is proof before there is a rollout.

WEEKS 10–13
Measure and propose

Time to find, before and after. Then the rollout plan with the evidence attached.

Running throughout

Documentation written during the work, not after it. Documentation produced at the end of a project is documentation nobody trusts, and on a fixed-term contract it is the deliverable that decides whether the rest survives.

The measure

Twelve months means every decision is designed for handover: a named owner, a written standard, and a review date.

The measure I would hold myself to is that it still works six months after the contract ends. I have handed a system over once already. That is the part most implementations get wrong, and it is the part I would plan for from week one.

Thank you

Happy to go deeper
on any of it.

Every KPI on these slides is a measure I would put in place, baselined in the first ninety days so improvement can be shown rather than claimed.

Mounir “Moon” Harchaoui moon@mounirproductions.com 0479 186 265 moon-work-intrepid.pages.dev