Author: Zak Mensah

Our staff and my team are distributed across 7 sites so I think of us as being remote workers rather than co-located. Yet our tools are very much configured for co-location. As with most of the world, email is our primary tool yet it’s very poor for communication on projects, or working with multiple people as unless you CC everyone it’s impossible to stay in the loop.

In order to address the shortcomings of email there are hundreds of tools, often badged as “productivity” tools to carry on where email stops being helpful. At our service i’ve been introducing several tools that allow for groups to post messages, review other messages and make informed decisions by being in the loop with ALL key people.  I have been receiving less out of context email, picked up mistakes or potential issues much earlier and after holiday and paternity leave I’m able to jump straight back in to the mix.

I got started by reading the excellent guides on 43 Folders and Getting Things Done by David Allen

We all know email is only one tool in our toolkit, is it time you explored additional ways and means for yourself and longer term to foster a better working culture?

Due to paternity leave I was only in Friday. I caught up with some of team, email and reviewed all our Basecamp projects – the progress feature makes this super easy.

I have been off on paternity leave for the last two weeks so work has been on hold.. be right back

A significant reduction in emails and meetings means it truly is summer holiday time. Allowing me to:

• Put out a call for a Marketing and Communication Officer maternity cover post [I’d call it part Content strategist]
• Finally went on our staff induction tour which was fantastic and led by Ray Barnett.
• Agreed on our White City exhibition which will run at Bristol Record Office from 7th October
• Got very close to completing a secret project [better to ask for forgiveness right!]
• Spent a lot of my work planning activities for the rest of the year. We have finally moved to some better project planning processes and this took up a bunch of the week
• Agreed our next batch of digitisation work
• Remembered we’re playing chess not checkers

Things I got up to this week:

• Reviewed our current  media licensing activity with collections and documentation
• Decided how we’d carry out our 400 exit surveys starting next week. This information is critical for accurately understanding our audience
• Met with Prof John Cook from UWE ‘Arts and creative’ to see where we can work together on ubiquitous computing, people and sensors
• Kicked the tires on our online shop which we hope to launch in August
• Finally got the green light on online tickets (may of promised this before!)
• Agreed how to reduce our digital and audio visual budget by 20% for Moved by Conflict
• Chopped it up with MA student Heather Hammer about ‘why and how’ for all things image, video and audio
• Enjoyed a post work social drinks session with some of the service on a boat!
• Had a demo of Bristol City Council’s new open data platform which is pretty impressive
• Reviewed current activity for our online collections tool with Mark doing an amazing job
• Planned and kicked off new ways we resource and running projects across the organisation

 

A week of blue skies and hot weather made a welcome change. I got up to:

• Started full steam ahead with using Basecamp for our projects and it has already highlighted little details with big impacts that could easily with slipped by. I’m already noticing a reduction in meetings which is great
• Had our quarterly meeting with our major funder Arts Council England. Lots of hard work last week in preparing for this meeting paid off.
• Paul and I discussed how we can get cracking with using an iPad as a way to record and edit audio instead of pocket recorders
• Ran a half day kick-off meeting Aardman and University of Bristol for a new project
• Chopped it up with the education team about why we blog and how they can get started. I was pleased to hear others are also interested in blogging so I hope to run a series of mini workshops soon
• Met with Stephen Gray to see what plans he has for using an oculus rift headset in our Moved by Conflict exhibition.
• Enjoyed my regular meeting with our IT Services account manager. I fed back about our Arts Council plans for 2015-18 and discussed how we could best have a voice in any IT strategy seeing as we are the customer after all
• Contributed to our monthly senior management team session
• Had a sudden lightbulb moment about the direction for the website ‘phase 2’ and got to planning it
• Spent some time reflecting on how difficult change is in an organisational culture
• Enjoyed an end of week drink with a fair few colleagues as we said farewell to a few members of staff

 

I’ve been thinking about customer service a lot recently and this recent exchange made me want to weep. A typical call with any centralised service who are setup to deal with the common 80% of enquiries ALWAYS seems to go like this:
ME: “Hello [in a chipper voice] I’m Zak and I’m calling because I have a [known] problem and you’re the service who can help”.
THEM: [Shuffling of script to react to non-threatening caller] “Good afternoon I’m ‘x’ how can I help today?”.
ME: “I have problem that I couldn’t find an answer to on your help and intranet pages. I know the search facility isn’t great and so the answer may be there but it’s easier to call than waste more time downloading and searching yet more word documents or pdfs [which is probably why that poor search engine largely gets a poor reputation] so i’m coming direct”.
THEM: “Shoot”.
ME: Lots of my clients [internal staff or public] have complained about one of our services that you manage and we need to resolve it as effectively and efficiency as possible. Can we have a non-standard thingy-doodle? as this is known to work elsewhere and there is little harm in experimenting as what we currently use is clearly failing to meet user expectations.
THEM: [Reading standard script] “No. The standard offering has been deemed the only solution”.
ME: “But failure to deviate from our current path is eroding our reputation”.
THEM: “Can I help you with anything else today?”  [Run infinite loop of unhelpful responses]

I often harp on about addressing the 80% of common issues first but this is a reminder that you still need a plan for the other 20%. If you aren’t aware of the Pareto principle check it out.

A hard slog of a week in which I managed to:

• Had a panic when I discovered how much a project “under-estimated” the time it will take to produce some videos
• Saw the M Shed biomass boiler up close (we need to get the computer remote access) massive piece of kit!
• Did a telephone interview with Nick Poole from the Collections Trust about my view on free vs paid digital services which morphed into a big rant on my part ha. In summary making things ‘open’ is a new and ‘uniquely digital’ opportunity we must embrace NOW
• Reviewed our schools booking procedure as it’s in line for becoming a ‘digital service’
• Talked more about a digital HLF bid proposal…
• Got the low down on the interpretation plans for our Moved by Conflict exhibition
• Held our first ‘future of interpretation’ meeting which will be chunked into bite-sized pieces
• Made a plan to deal with this years audience exit surveys which we use to help inform our service
• Dealt with lots of complaints from staff about lack of access to email and calendars remotely. Bristol City Council had to turn off remote access without using a PSN token and of course not everybody receives a token. Major headache.
• Discovered lots of small holes in our working practices around communicating project milestones. Found a way to fix much of this I hope.
• Met with key team members to discuss our long road to documenting and agreeing service wide interpretation
•  Agreed with a comment in a video by Seth Godin that I need to say NO to lots of ad hoc pieces of work and get back to projects that matter
• Produced our quarterly report for major funder Arts Council England in preparation for next week’s meeting. Great to see the breadth of work we’ve been up to.
• Met with the Library service to see where we can work together on systems, storage and skills exchange.
• Finally delivered my workshop outline for a November workshop i’ll be running on “Using digital media as a museum” for SW Fed
• Attended the best named meeting ever “Meeting with Death” about a forth coming exhibition on the subject of death