Category: Museums

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?

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