Museum Metamorphosis : Day 4
One of the reasons for going into a full start-up mode rather than trying to build on the existing governance was that the existing governance simply wasn’t fit for purpose.
In the UK, there is a museum accreditation scheme that is run by the Arts Council. It’s like ISO 9000, but exclusively for museums, and is a standard against which museums can benchmark themselves and drive improvements. We had previously been accredited against an earlier version of the standard but once we’d got the badge, the job was considered done and the good things stopped being practiced, the documentation wasn’t maintained, and people from the top downwards, largely ignored the policies and processes.
I’ve been helping organisations design, build and use first class management systems for most of my career, and some key principles should underline any new system. There should be an architecture. The documentation should reflect the context of the business and its users and the whole system should be easy to use and maintain.
The documents we inherited were long and difficult to read. There was no underlying architecture and large amounts of duplicate, redundant, and out of date material. There was little scope for reuse. In haste I started to churn out the most critical business policy documents, but I fell into the trap of overcomplicating things — after all I wasn’t working in a regulated, global corporation any more!
Back to the KISS principle; small, easy to read and digest documents and very easy to modify. Each week I send out an email to the volunteers highlighting one item, explaining its how, what and why and inviting comment. It’s the simplest review mechanism I could think of. And so far, it has proved effective.
I am a semi-retired independent management consultant specialising in organisational change management and better Ways of Working and the chairman of the board of trustees at my local Heritage Centre. I’m from the UK but based in Prague in the Czech Republic. I mainly write about developing better ways of working, working in the Apple ecosystem, and my adopted home in Prague. If you’ve enjoyed this, please check out some of my other articles or even follow me if you’d like to be notified when I publish new material.