Category: Museums

Lots of bouncing around our sites this week:

• Supported the filming by University of Bristol on their MOOC course in our Moved by Conflict exhibition
• Reviewed the potential to take on 80by18 with Keri Facer
• Agreed how we would run the evaluation for Ahead of the Curve exhibition for ourselves and partners
• Met with the film office who will fall within my management remit by the end of the month
• Agreed with our catering and venue hire partner Compass to retire their sites and move to running through our website
• Welcomed Lauren who is our maternity cover Marketing and Comms Officer
• Kick off workshop for Death exhibition in 2015
• Trained Zahid about using our new CMS for the website – due to its ease this was quick
• Outlined the next steps for our BECC film archive
• Attend the opening for our Ming Vase exhibition and chopped it up with Maria Bojanowska from the British Museum
• Welcomed President Tan of Singapore to M Shed
• Reviewed active service requests with Phil from public programming
• Did lots of paperwork

Next week i’ll be speaking in Exeter at Working Smarter not harder about websites, reviewing our Hidden Museum progress, being in the crowd for 300 seconds and hoping getting some digital stuff actually done

Bit late but:

• Talk with the Arts, events and film team as part of their planning meeting
• Workshop with local arts partners and the Audience agency about the new audience fidner tools and gathering audience data.
• Agreed to use M Shed for a University of Bristol MOOC
• Tour of CRT exit survey kiosks
• Reviewed the planned work for the Bristol Birds and Mammals gallery
• Catch up with head of learning
• Management team
• Reviewed team progress on their 6 month intervals
• Reviewed plans for our Death exhibition

Although I only worked on a few thing this week it was a LONG week:

• Finished the required draft of our Audience Development Strategy
• Met with our Service Director to give an overview of our digital roadmap for 2015-18 and define our next steps
• Spoke at the Museum Association 2014 conference about ‘The perfect museum website’. We had space for 40 people and ended up with the walls lined and folks on the floor!
• Attend a learning workshop for our Digital R&D for the Arts project in Manchester

Next week i’m looking at our budget, open badges and preparing for running workshops later this year.

This was a week when I really noticed the lost of staff through voluntary severance. More is more and less is less.

• workshop all day about enterprise and resilience with Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery and Tyne and Wear Archives and museum
• meeting in London (Imperial War Museum) on behalf of my director at the National Museum Directors’ Council about the European Union legislation on reuse of Public Sector Information
• announced our £125,000 Digital R&D fund for the Arts project called ‘The Hidden Museum’ with partners Aardman and the University of Bristol – ibeacons, sensors and new ways to engage audiences.
• interviewed internally for a temp post with the South West Museum Development team
• audience development strategy writing
• agreed to step in at next weeks Museum Association conference to talk in a panel type session about our website with Martin Bazley
• found out we’ll have a new director in Jan 2015 – my third in less than 18 months!

A heads down kind of week:

• this week was 95% dedicated to planning and fleshing out our audience development plan and service projects according to our Arts Council bid
• Took our first online payment for a one day workshop about rocks
• Heard plans from each manager for 2015-18
• Worked out at Blaise Castle House Museum for a day

This week I managed to:

• Agreed our marketing strategy for the remainder of 2014-15
• Conducted a walk around of Bristol Museum & Art Gallery with Kerrie from Marketing to see what needs improving
• Reviewed our 2015-2016 public programme which included a looong gantt chart!
• Interviewed a number of people for our Marketing and Comms Officer maternity cover and made an offer
• Developed our audience development plan ahead of our 10th October deadline
• Talking with Suzanna from Westonbirt Arboretum to give advice on an upcoming app project
• Worked on sprint 2 for our still unannounced project
• Setup a new email rule to reduce my email distractions

With everybody back from holiday it was a tough week to just focus on a few important strands of work:

• Most of the team and I spent a quality Tuesday at the National Museum Wales. We were hosted by John Williams and Co to see how they run their IT, Digital and social media. We left feeling very inspired.
• Planning hat was donned for our 2015-2018 activity
• Ran our second secret project meeting which was cool to see how others run projects in an agile manner
• sat with Isla from Natural Sciences to talk about future projects, social media, 3D scanning and printing, open data and all things positive
• Had a productive management meeting..
• Attended a local ‘arts’ audience group meeting to see how we can best work together and show our value

My first full week back since paternity leave and I managed to:

• Took stock of products for our online shop… two steps forward and one backwards
• Got invited to speak in November at Going Digital by The Collections Trust
• Spent time just wandering the galleries to see how people move around our spaces
• Hit Inbox zero after two weeks off
• Reviewed applications for a maternity post to fill our Marketing Officer role – writing an application really is a skill many lack
• Finally got a lesson from Mark about how to use our collection tool called emu which powers all of our records management and includes a front-end to search the online collection
• Sadly waved goodbye to our Marketing Office Claire Royall who gave nine years to the service
• held our kick-off for a 12 month project which we’ll be announcing very soon

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?