Category: Museums

So busy i’m posting this late.

• Admin admin admin writing a series of business cases for spending money in Q4 2014-15
• discussed how we can support the data collection for 2015 harbour festival
• How to improve our onsite signage and way finding… a mountain of a task i’m determined to crack
• Briefings to our front of house staff (absolute stars!) about the projects i’m working on that they can help with
• Management team meeting
• Suggested the next steps for a funding application with geology woot
• Submitted our revised plans for our 2015-18 Arts Council England application..epic amount of work

It was a busy week that had me rolling my sleeves up lots and rubbing my poor little head. I got up to:

• Delivered a briefing of my key areas for our new service manager (boss) Laura Pye
• Completed my final day of a leadership and management course
• Worked on our 2015-18 plan for an Arts Council England deadline next week
• Sprint 7 start up meeting for the Hidden Museum project. We hit 100 ibeacons installed this week.
• Met with Our Museum community partners to discuss how we can work more closely
• Met with Pat Connor who heads up BBC development to talk joint interests
• Reviewed our equalities action plan
• More Arts Council documentation
• Sorted out some finance fun
• Ran a short workshop for one of our volunteers and member of friends group Sue Thurlow who will need be tweeting about our areas of work which is great.
• Ava came for lunch yeeeah!

Exhausting. IF i ever used our flexi form i’d have to add a new page.

• Spoke via skype with David Turner who runs Getinvited, the online event booking tool i’m hoping to move from beta phase for our schools bookings
• Introduced the key performance indicators that I suggest we use across the service
• Met with our central design and marketing teams to agree our next steps for improving our service identity
• Made suggestions for using digital in our Ahead of the Curve exhibition – better late than never
• Attended day four of the leadership and management course
• Spent lots of time in spreadsheets about budgets
• Ran a morning session with the digital team about our strategic direction and processes
• Had a group workshop on tightening up SMART objectives
• Management team meeting
• Took lunch with my mum to celebrate her retirement
• Skype call with Vic H to agree the scope of a digital job i’ll be managing that we hope to advertise ready for April start
• Met with Bristol and Bath tourism group

Next week i’ll focus on our Hidden museum project, meeting community partners and completing our Arts Council december deadline.

Word.

• Ran a full day workshop for the SWFED called ‘An introduction to digital media on the web’
• Reviewed our latest Hidden Museum sprint 6
• Reviewed student project people tracker from team CSPD
• Agreed how to improve our Birds and Mammals gallery on the first floor of Bristol Museum & Art Gallery
• Decided how we’d revise and improve our proposed equalities action plan for 2015-18
• Spoke with Jon Walker from Tyne and Wear Museum about retail and spreadsheets
• Did a handover with Ray to now line manage the documentation team. Now we’re part of the transformation group together which I hope will mean some great cross service collaboration
• Made a plan to go digital by default for schools bookings
• Reviewed the 2015-18 proposals for new exhibitions
• Met with Lucy and Barney to see what opportunities lay ahead for us working together
• Agreed next steps for developing the offer of our historic houses
• Took some time with Ray to agree how to tidy up the much feared and messy shared service drive for information
• Met our in-house build team who I now also manage to hear how they work and how we’ll work together
• Received a bunch of children to help us develop our hidden museum project as part of Museum Takeover day
• Met local arts orgs to see how we can work better together

Looking like a busy run through to the new year. This week I:

• Briefed our front of house staff about what’s new in the service – ibeacons, wifi and training
• Kicked off our Hogarth exhibition digital ideas
• Interviewed for an internal post
• Attended day two of the BCC leadership course
• Took some time to review ideas for digital on-site
• Management team meeting
• Wrote the workshop i’ll be running next week and then hopefully on a regular basis
• Adjusted by calendar so block out the entire afternoon each day for 2015 in an effort to hold meetings to the morning

Boo hiss to the end of work always being dark i say. This week was fun as I blocked whole days for one activity:

• Reviewed sprint 4 of our Hidden Museum project at Aardman office
• Attended day one of Bristol City Council leadership and management course. I STILL don’t like to call people resources
• Service wide meeting in which the network went down
• Management team project sign off meeting. We moved to using my project proposal template as a way to initially document and judge all projects. Nobody likes forms but I don’t like saying no so this is your best shot to avoid that
• Discussed a programme of work called ‘Our museum’
• Reviewed plans for improving the birds and mammals gallery
• Agreed next steps for the learning team’s web resources
• Attended #drinkingaboutmuseums on the river Thames Thursday evening
• Attended UKMW14 at the Natural History Museum

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.