Category: Notes

A short week due to it being Christmas week where out of office messages are the only replies to expect.

• I finished tedious admin that was waiting for a quiet day
• Reviewed HMRC employment status stuff
• agreed some branding work for fundraising
• finalised some budgets for the final quarter
• updated some of our website pages

Between now and the new year i’ll be in the office trying to complete small projects that just need a little focus and peace to get done.

After working furiously for several weeks on our Arts Council application this week proved to be just as hardcore but rewarding:

• spent a morning with the Bristol Museums group led by Julie from Museums Development to talk all things audience evaluation
• Tried to squeeze as many team 1:1s in as possible to thank everybody for working so hard this year
• Agreed next steps for our Do Ho Suh installation
• Introduction with Rob Gilmore who I first met back in 2006 when I was in the IT department – time flies. I think there will be lots we can work on together in the coming years
• xmas lunch
• end of year wrap up with our Digital R&D for the Arts project
• agreed with Parks how to improve signage for Blaise Castle House Museum
• interviewed and accepted a new role starting 1st January 2015 as Head of Transformation! in addition to my digital team I will be leading our fundraising, Modern Records Office, retail, catering partner and Bristol & Region Archaeological Services.
• waved goodbye to Katie Harding who I have learnt so much from this year and wish her all the best!

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