Changing platforms: creating effective digital content

As I've just mentioned in my previous blog where I've pasted my handout, I spoke this morning at the Museums Association conference called Changing platforms: creating effective digital content. 

I think that choosing the right people to work on your project and carrying out effective and thorough planning together at the start of your project are key elements of creating effective digital content.  I was talking, therefore, about the key people to think about including in your project, and the things that you and they need to consider when initiating an online learning project.

I could only stay for the morning unfortunately as I have things I need to get on with in work but there were a couple of things that I took away from this morning which I thought were worth mentioning here.

Vicki Porter from the Welcome Trust was chairing the event and I found her opening address really interesting.  It raised lots of points about how technology in museums has changed over the last 15-20 years.
One of the points that I wanted to raise myself this morning that needs to be considered at the start of an online learning project is 'why are we as an organisation providing this resource?'  It sounds like an obvious question but it prompted some really interesting discussions in a project I was working on recently about what we could bring to this kind of resource as a unique selling point.  Vicki pointed out in her opening talk this morning that the web has really changed museum's outlooks because it's made them be, rather than a single authoritative voice, part of a multiplicity of voices describing and writing about historical events in the public domain. This has made it imperative for museums to think carefully about our 'brand'/our identity and what we can provide that is unique.

Dave Patten from the Science Museum later alluded to a possible future model for museums where we move away from the big museum website and towards a model where museum content is distributed on lots of different websites.  This made me think back to the lecture I gave at Westminster University last week and the discussions we had about Wikipedia as a competitor to museum websites.  As I mentioned then, I think the the British Museum/Wikipedia project is really fascinating and potentially part of this new model that Dave describes.

The other thing that I wanted to mention from this morning came from Kevin Sumption at the National Maritime Museum who mentioned in his talk that the Mass Observation Archive are effectively crowd sourcing material for their archive.  I used some stuff from the Mass Observation Archive for my History MA dissertation on the French soldiers evacuated alongside the British from Dunkirk in 1940 (published in shortened form in History Today) but I had no idea they were still gathering information today.  For anyone who doesn't know, the website says that Mass Observation...

'specialises in material about everyday life in Britain. It contains papers generated by the original Mass Observation social research organisation (1937 to early 1950s), and newer material collected continuously since 1981. The Archive is in the care of the University of Sussex and is housed in the Library in Special Collections.'

Sadly they're currently only recruiting men from regions other than the south east which is a shame as I'd love to contribute! 

So this morning was yet another example of why I enjoy taking a little bit of time out of every day work (even just a morning) to hear other people talk about their work and remind myself why I chose to work in such a fascinating sector - thanks everyone!

Handout for Creating Digital Content event

 This morning I spoke at the Museums Association event Changing platforms: creating effective digital content (more later).  Here is the information from the handout that I intended to be in the delegates' packs.

Things to decide about the resource

1. What are you producing?
2. Who is the resource for?
3. What will it do for them?
4. How and where will they use it?
5. If applicable, what areas of the curriculum/programme of study etc does it relate to?
6. What area of the organisation’s work does it relate to? E.g. is there a taught session that it links to? Or a gallery on the same subject?
7. Why should (or should) your organisation be creating these specific resources?
8. Have any other organisations created similar resources for the same audience?
9. What benefits will come from the project?
10. Will there be any dis-benefits or negative effects of the project?
11. What are the outcomes against which you will evaluate?
12. What limitations are there to what you can achieve?
13. How will the project maintain momentum once it’s over - sustainability
14. Will the project require the use of images from the Museum’s collection? If so, which ones, what restrictions on use are there?

Practical things about how the project will work

1. What role is each individual on the team going to play?
2. What needs to happen in the project and what are realistic timescales for these activities?
3. How are you going to sign things off?
4. Who needs to be kept informed?
5. What risks are there to the project?
6. What different ways of approaching the project are there?
7. How will you evaluate?
8. What will need to be covered in each meeting agenda
9. Will there be any training needed?
10. How will you communicate?
11. When will we meet?
12. What do all of the people in the working group want out of it

Interviewing a museum/archive director

Last Tuesday I took an afternoon out of work and went back to my old work: The British Postal Museum & Archive. I had an appointment with Director Adrian Steel to further some aspects of my AMA.

I wanted to talk to Adrian because, in his role as director, and in his previous senior management roles, I know that he has a lot of experience and is very skilled in various areas of work that I'm interested in. As I've blogged about previously, I'm always looking to continue to improve my project management skills. In addition to this, however, I'm also aware that there are many areas of the work of senior managers which I could do with gaining a better understanding of at this point of my career if I want to continue to move up. These include areas like people management and strategic development.  Adrian seemed like the ideal person to talk to about his role, and what skills he thinks he requires, and what he thinks are the best ways to go about it.

Adrian and I had a long, detailed and productive chat which helped put a lot of things into perspective in a way that sometimes only talking to someone objective can do.  I thought I'd share some of the key advice that I took away with me:

1. Always have a mentor in another organisation, even if you are at a senior level.  Talking to someone objective with experience of your situation can put a different perspective on things and help you clarify your own thoughts on something you're working on.
2. You have a responsibility not only to yourself, but to your organisation to keep yourself sane.  Do this by ensuring that you do some things that you enjoy doing - both at work and in your life outside work.  This will help you to continue to work effectively.
3. Regularly agree priorities with your boss - be it weekly or monthly.  You can't possibly do everything all of the time, and as long as you and your boss have acknowledged this, then you can prioritise sensibly and do your job well whilst still keeping a balance and hopefully mostly going home on time.
4. There are two aspects which are equally important to a planning process, be it for a project, or for a broader strategic plan. One is the more practical ABC approach of considering where you are now, where you want to be, and how to get there.  The second (which is an extension of the first) is to think creatively about this endpoint and draw pictures and diagrams about what it will look like that will help you to get a clearer understanding of your own priorities for this endpoint.
5. There are several strategies to ensuring that you have buy-in to your project and that everyone involved in it is clear about, and has the same understanding and priorities as you as project manager do about it:

• Ensure senior management buy-in, as senior as you think you need to go.  Understand what senior management think the organisation wants and needs from a project/area of work before taking it any further because this will cascade through the organisation if what you are doing is on senior management's radar and is going the way they think is important.
• I've talked already in previous posts about getting buy-in from members of your project team by getting them to help you make all of the important decisions from the start. An alternative  to this, either with a team or with senior managers, is to 'build a straw man' of how you think the endpoint should look or how you think something should happen and ask them to either knock it down or accept it.
• Ensure that you have a good understanding of the people working with you on a project, how they work, and how they perceive you, and work with it.  Different people will respond differently to different information and instructions and, as project manager, it's your job to understand how they will react and act accordingly.

6.      Before asking someone to perform a task, ensure that you have a good understanding of that task, what is involved and how long it will take, and be able to show them your workings.  If the task is one that you have no previous experience of doing, then observe it being done, or do it yourself, and time it rather than guessing how long it should take.  It means that what you are asking for is realistic but also demonstrates that you have an understanding of the process.

7.      Always treat staff time as an asset.  If you were given £40,000 per year to spend, you would spend it wisely and carefully.  An individual on a salary of £30,000 may well cost the organisation in the region of £40,000 per year and their time should therefore be valued accordingly.

Leicester Study Series: Project management module

This morning on the tube I finished reading through the booklet for the Leicester Study Series for professional development on project management so I thought I'd do a quick review. I should note that I haven't read the accompanying book yet, just the booklet.

Just a quick note first on what the Leicester Study Series - it's a series of modules put together by the department of Museum Studies at Leicester University to help people develop their skills in various areas of museum work. There are also modules on e-Learning (which I'll be hopefully going through soon as well) , evaluating learning, social inclusion and oral history. This module cost £57 including postage and packing.

The first good thing about the pack is it's size. For £57 you get a book on project management which I'm still working my way through, and an A5 spiralbound booklet. The booklet is just the right size for reading on the tube which is the only time I really have to do these things so that was ideal.

I thought that the price was a little steep for what you get. The book is only worth £11 ish and so the rest of the money goes towards the booklet. I appreciate that a lot of work went into it but I was a little disappointed by what I got for that price.

Another slight criticism is that the information in the booklet now feels a little dated (it was published in 2006). The case studies are at least 5-6 years old now and, since one featured my work place it was very obvious to me as a reader that the projects were now long past as all the individuals mentioned are in very different roles now. In addition, a section on promotion mentions only 'Putting up-to-date information about the project on the museum's website' and makes no mention of social media, highlighting for me the outdated nature of the module. I think the whole thing would benefit from a quick refresh.

I felt as well that the booklet focused a lot on grant-funded projects and the kinds of reporting that are needed for these. Evidently this is probably very useful for a lot of people, but since at present a lot of my projects are not grant funded, I personally found that focus slightly distracting.

I also thought, coming from a learning perspective, that there could have been more focus on Inspiring Learning for All, or at the very least, on establishing the learning outcomes for your project from the start, which makes evaluation, which the module covers in detail at the end, easier.

Aside from this I did get something out of the module. I would say it would be particularly useful for people in small museum with no experience of project management (the aims and objectives do state that it is aimed at 'people working in small to medium-sized museums'). For me, someone who is spending quite a lot of time at the moment researching best practice in project management, it served as a good reminder but didn't really teach me anything new.

I would say if you've just taken on a new role and are unfamiliar with one of the topics that the study series covers, and have a spare £60-odd to hand, then it is probably worth investing in one of these modules. They're probably quite a good idea as well for those of us following a CPD programme, simply because you can send off to Leicester for a certificate to prove that you've completed the module and a couple of short activities, thus giving you proof of your CPD activity.

Interviewing an experienced project manager

This afternoon, as part of my AMA, I interviewed one of my colleagues, Isabel Benavides about her experiences of project management. Isabel is the project officer in our department and has also project managed a variety of different projects, large and small, in the past.

Talking to Isabel proved really useful as she talked about what had worked well in projects she has managed in the past and gave me examples of how she uses the tools that I’ve learnt about and am starting to use more and more in my own work. As so many people say, a lot of project management is common sense, but sometimes it’s just useful to take the time out of your everyday life to sit down and think ‘common sensically’ about it. Hearing her describe how she deals with situations that I’m familiar with also gave me the confidence to try and use some of her strategies myself.

The success of one of Isabel’s previous projects was partly due, she believes, to having set up a steering group and a working group at the start and having clearly defined the roles of each person with a job description at the start. The steering group was particularly useful at the start of the project when setting out the strategic vision of the project. She recommends keeping the steering group fairly small and making sure that key people who have a strategic stake in the project are involved. For a smaller project a steering group is probably not necessary, but a working group set up from the start of the project who are very hands-on, problem solving and carrying out the project can still be very useful.

Other factors that made this project successful in Isabel’s view were the freedom and space that she was given to work with the blank canvas at the start of the project, recruiting a good team, having good electronic and filing systems and good training and development.

I asked Isabel whether she deals differently with smaller projects than she would with bigger ones. This was partly because I sometimes feel that using all the tools and mechanism that I was taught to use in project management training feels like overkill on a small project, but, on projects where I have not used them, I’ve inevitably regretted it towards the end. I was cheered to hear that Isabel thinks that these tools are always useful in all projects, but it was interesting to hear the way she phrases her communications with project team members in such a way that it doesn’t need to feel overly formal and contrived. She also feels that even if people respond skeptically at first to tools that may be unfamiliar, an efficient and well-run project will always win them over in the end.

One example that stuck in my mind was establishing the communications plan. I have written communications plans for myself in the past but never found a way of circulating them to a project team without it feeling overly bureaucratic and heavy. But as Isabel explained, this need not be a case of circulating numerous Word document attachments, but simply making sure that all the partners know who is involved in the project, what their involvement is, and how, whether and when to contact each other. So this could be an email dialogue between the project manager here and the project manager at a partner organisation saying:

‘These are the people working on this project full time, their email addresses are… We will also be working with an external consultant called X, the museum project manager will liaise directly with this person and feed back to the project team.’

Isabel had a useful tip for preparing for meetings which was to mentally consider all the worst case scenarios beforehand and all the things that people might take issue with and to think about how to deal with them.

Two more essential tips from Isabel which are, again, common sense, but in reality probably don’t come to mind as easily as they should:

• If you feel frustrated by a project, take a step away from your desk, get a coffee, go for a walk or whatever before responding to whatever has frustrated you
  
• Slow down to speed up – projects will always get done faster in the end if you take the time at the beginning to plan for them

I’ve come away brimming with ideas for how to improve my existing methods. I think I’ve already made some big improvements to my project management in the last few years and I already use a lot of the strategies that people suggest, but with some little tweaks based on Isabel's advice I think I could really continue to improve them.

Things I will try and do from now on:

1. Establish a working group at the very start of a project
2. Get the working group involved in all of the decisions establishing the aims, objectives and outcomes of the project, thus ensuring that everyone is on board from the start.
3. Establish timescales at the start together with the team and then set them in stone and have the confidence to stick to them. This way I’ll hopefully decrease the likelihood of things not being delivered on time, but also hopefully reduce the risk of people coming back with changes after a sign off phase has passed.
4. Extend the usual planning I do before meetings to consider all the worst case scenarios and all the things that people might respond to my points and how I will deal with them

AMA support group meeting - Project management

Starting as I mean to go on, this is a very quick post (because I'm running out of lunch break) on an AMA support group meeting that I attended last week which fits in rather well with my plan because it was about project management.

We had a lovely tour of the new Medieval galleries at the V&A to start us off which was great - definitely need to go back and look at that. Then we moved to one of the learning rooms and had some great talks from project managers from the Natural History Museum and the V&A. I've had project management training in the past which I found really useful, but what I want to concentrate on in my AMA is practical application of those skills in the real world. The theory is great, but in my experience so far, it's sometimes hard to relate it to what you're actually doing when you're pushed for time.

Wanda Sheridan did a great talk about her work on the After Darwin: Contemporary Expression exhibition at the Natural History Museum. One of her points confirmed what I was already beginning to realise: that, despite it sometimes feeling like a superfluous waste of time, it's really important to establish the business case for a project and define its scope at the start, and make sure that everyone is on board. Sometimes this feels overly bureaucratic but I've certainly regretted not doing it in the past.

She also stressed the importance of sitting down with each person on the project team face-to-face to make sure that they understand their role on the team and what they need to do by what point. I find this difficult, partly because I'm someone who likes communicating by email, and email is so much faster than face-to-face to each individual, but also because for the kinds of projects that I manage (i.e. not large scale exhibitions, but small-ish projects to develop e-learning resources, it feels like overkill) it feels overly formal. I asked a question at the end of Wanda's session about how she manages to get people to stick to the timescales that she's established etc, and she stressed again the importance of this face-to-face initial meeting in doing this. So it's something I'm going to have to try. It certainly sounds promising.

She also emphasised the importance of not dismissing a project as soon as it's completed but making sure that it's fully evaluated. This is a trap I could very easily fall into. Especially at times of the year like this when I'm finishing a number of projects before the end of the financial year and it would be so easy to just breathe a sigh of relief at the end of the month and forget the projects forever. Wanda also evaluates not only the final product but the project is evaluated internally as well. This is something I'd like to do more of because it'll help me improve my project management skills if I can get people's feed back on how I have managed a project (although I might have to toughen up to criticism a little!)

She suggested a useful tool for this post-project evaluation: Red, Amber and Green - Red - for what should we stop doing in future projects, Amber for 'what do we need to consider continuing or perhaps stopping?' and Green for 'what did we do well that should be imparted to others?'

She identified things to be aware of in a project:

• Scope creep - make sure you stick to the objectives you originally defined
• Lack of role definition for team members - clearly define who does what at the start
• Dependency on one person
• Unclear objectives
• Incomplete plan

Wanda's talk was followed by Anna DeJean from the V&A who came in towards the end of the development of the Renaissance and Medieval galleries - sounds like she really had her work cut out but I admired the way she sounds like she stayed so positive!

Anna emphasised a lot of the points that Wanda had mentioned but some of the key messages she talked about were:

• Don't underestimate logistics
• Make sure you have clear communications channels
• Be prepared to escalate issues
• Carry a mobile phone charger!
• Trust your team
• Have a contingency plan

Lastly, we had a talk from Ella Ravilious, Curator of Documentation & Digistisation in the Word and Image department of the V&A. This was a really interesting insight into a completely different kind of project - the digitisation of prints and drawings - which has no defined endpoint and is managed in many ways very differently from those described above.

We ended the day with a tour around the V&A's Theatre and Performance galleries which I DEFINITELY want to go back and take a better look around on my own, along with the Flower Fairies exhibition.

Overall it was a really interesting day despite the fact that I wasn't feeling very well, and as ever it was brilliant to do something different for the afternoon, chat to other AMA-ers, and just open up my head to new ideas for a bit. Many thanks to Carmen and Kristian who coordinate the London AMA support group for organising it!