Reasonable Doubt

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

Half term this week which meant a VERY busy museum service and quiet offices. Our visitor services did an amazing job.

• Desktop research of image licensing service Bridgeman – they haven’t emailed me back though so not the best start
• 1:1’s with the fundraising team so I can better understand the opportunities and challenges on a personal level
• CMT manager meeting
• Showed World cultures how to use trello
• Attended team meetings
• Agreed to use outlook for room bookings with Fran
• Took the events manager into our ‘transformation’ area
• Agreed with Jim from The Audience Agency how we’d chop up our exit surveys so that we can segment our audience
• Planned the schedule for our retail manager interviews
• Started to collect our “data” together so that we can get better insights into a whole bunch of stuff!

There is only so long you can dodge HR work. This week:

• Agreed a way forward for our ‘project sign-off’ process
• Worked in the BaRAS office all afternoon to see and hear about life at the unit – where i squeezed in some HR work
• 1:1s of various kinds
• Final budget forecasting of the year
• Met Claire Zammit from Tessitura to talk all things CRM
• Talked about our how our digital signage would actually work and agreed to do paper prototypes – our screens are currently on the Arula ship in the Pacific
• Talked about collecting and using audience data which will be a hot topic for 2015
• Looked at how we can implement a performance dashboard
• Showed the fundraising team our audience work and how we can use it together
• Wrote a thank you to our electrician for all his great recent work

Ice or no ice i’m biking to work people so I could:

• Waved farewell to our retail manager Ollie Rees
• Did several staff briefings for our visitor assistants about website phase two
• Enjoyed coffee with Bonnie who works in strategic planning to learn more about both of our areas
• Interviewed and recruited to one of our vacant retail assistant posts – well done Nicky
• Took part in the first of many sessions about our service ‘vision’ and 10 year ambitions – survive and thrive
• Finances, finances and more finances
• Telephone interview with Museums Journal about our use of Tripadvisor for an upcoming edition
• Gave my ‘first thoughts’ to my direct reports in our transformation wing of the service
• Gave Laura the low down on our statistic collection
• 1 to 1 session with marketing
• Sat in on our website phase two session dealing with improving our venue hire
• Literally pulled the doors open for the relaunch of our Gallery four refurbishment
• My copy of The Really useful edtech book arrived through the post – exciting
• Played with our prototype hidden museum game for the first time