Month: March 2015

This week I managed:

• Failed to appoint a new retail manager so we move to plan B
• Collaborating with Sarah Prag on new ways of working and building digital capacity
• First day off since August whoop
• Chopped it up with Kevin O’Malley from the City Futures service about partnering on smart cities projects, sharing our approaches and generally shipping products
• Reviewed our 2015-16 requirements with IT Services which includes large digital storage needs
• Attended the quarterly Modern Record Office and Archives staff meeting – they love stats
• Contributed to the bi-monthly service programming meeting
• Agreed in principle our 2015-16 marketing plan and better ways of working with our reduced design hours allocation – moving to trello and Basecamp to try and make it better
• Called Canada to speak with Katie from Shopify about using their iPad POS (tills to you and me) across the service
• Attended the private view for new M Shed exhibition ‘Open for Business‘
• Reviewed the research direction for the Hidden Museum project starting 1st April
• Blown away by the amazing work that Mark has done to get our digital signage cooking on gas

A week around retail.

 

• Helen did an amazing job of sorting out our annual retail stock take
• Agreed 15/16 evaluation priorities
• Data collection and reviewing our data protection
• 1:1s and agreeing the generic format for all managers
• Introduced the Arts and Events team to Trello
• Quarterly digital meeting taking a look at our roadmap for 2014-2020
• Enjoyed lunch with my kid who came to visit and we tested the new cafe which gets the thumbs up
• Workshop day with Our Museum assessors to look at our views on the project
• Brief chat with Jeremy from Kew about benchmarking each others digital teams
• Talked about using the discovery phase for new projects
• Interviewed for our Retail Manager vacancy
• Got my conflict resolution on – “say it twice you meant it”
• Missed management team for the first time but Trello held up well and i was kept in the loop due to our lists and commenting – such a great tool!

Next week I hope to progress the over arching vision for retail.

As we hit the final month of the year there was quite a lot of flipping from the past to the future in my talks.

• Agreed our retail approach for Hogarth exhibition which includes sending a brief to local artists for bespoke items
• Trained 15 or so people on hte basics of using Trello for task management
• 1:1s with my digital team who are working on breaking down Moved by Conflict, prototyping our digital signage (due April-May), website phase two and more besides
• Researched exhibition charges so that we could agree the charges for Nature, Camera, Action! exhibition
• Met the local arts audience group for a catch up and to meet Ann from Audience Agency who gave us an update on the Audience Finder project. The general vibe is that things have changed and we may need to strike out on our own for the kinds of insights we’ll be needing. Using Audience Finder to meet our finding agreement.
• Explained the new internal room booking system during the all staff meeting which basically uses Outlook calendars
• Reviewed progress with our catering and venue hire partner Levy, going over the finances and issues
• Grabbed a post work drink which is always nice
• Talked Finance and benefits realisation with Kevin from the central service
• Had a progress review of the website phase two project which is coming along nicely
• Partly agreed the budget situation for 2015-16
• Attend the MemoryScapes Tea party at Knowle West Media Centre which was a project to capture memories and objects. The interaction chest was fun.
• Sat in on a meeting with the ops team and Otis to hear about what is needed to get our 1930s good lift back in action. I learned about lifts which is actually a nice mechanical setup
• Attended First Friday meet up hosted by Watershed
• We published two blogs posts about the Hidden museum project – using ibeacons and our first user test

Busy.

• Reviewed what data we collect across the service so that we can implement better performance measurement. Fay did a great job of bringing this together so that we can use a KPI benchmark spreadsheet for staff and our partners Birmingham and Tyne and Wear.
• Hosted Peter Holloway for his second retail diagnostic visit. We still have posters from the 1980 in stock…
• Marketing catch up
• Met my student as producer group to see their visitor counter prototype again which looks slick
• Toured The Bottle Yard Studios to find out what goes on
• Visited Exeter to join the South West creative forum quarterly session. Heard about two projects and the upcoming No Boundaries conference
• Sat with Rosie from Visitor services to see how our teams can better work together
• Workshop session with fffunction and the learning team to plan improves to their web offer, including online booking.
• Chopped it up with Claire from Situations about my role, their work and working together