Major projects: sustained glow or brief firework?
Across the sector, internationally, major capital investments promise all manner of visitation, impact, tourism, and educational benefits. But the actual impact often falls far short. Taking one metric, Colleen Dilenschneider’s study of 11 organisations showed that after a few years, visitation was back to pre-investment levels.
Why does the shiny thing tarnish so quickly — even if the new building/wing/exhibition is brilliant? Why does this keep repeating? And what can we do about it? Below are some discussion, then concrete tools and methods.
The red and blue lines are without any project investment. Clearly, avoiding the red is the most important leadership task! But it’s the black and green lines I am focusing on first. The black line is what Colleen shows in her study — and we can all name other examples.
First we must diagnose accurately. There are a few factors we can’t change:
- Capital investment is (hard but) easier to come by than long-term operational investment
- Closures and disruption lose audiences and momentum (both black and green have a dip before the rise)
- A major project will take over the organisation for a period of time, lessening attention on future programming
- Some internal leaders will leave as the project approaches fruition, leaving discontinuity
How do we get the green not the black? How do we make the big investment the beginning of even more growth? There are a few factors here, but the most important is something i have rarely come across in the GLAM / heritage sector and never in Australia: an Impact Plan, also called a Benefits Realisation Plan. In essence it is a method for forcing management activity beyond the project deliverables (‘shiny new wing’) and on to the ensuring actual impact (thousands of additional visitors using the new wing, richer collection displays yield better reflection of the subject…). Here’s a devoted post.
The second and third aspects of achieving long term sustainable change are
- Configuring a program of projects — one of which is the big capital thing — and managing them as an interdependent suite of projects
- Structured leadership attention on organisational change and post-completion operational resourcing
Note that all of the above must be considered when you plan your major project. Your business case, bid for funding, project plan (including internal resource allocation and governance arrangements) must extend beyond the narrow ‘build a new thing’.
More detail on these. What do i mean by a program of projects? A program would be classically defined as an interdependent group of projects that together contribute to a major strategic shift.
Let’s say ‘build the new thing’ is the first, most important project, the one that leverages the capital investment. This would typically include building architecture and construction, fit out, exhibition design and installation etc. Others might include:
- Partnerships and fundraising: Securing partners, donor stewardship
- Digital: databases, CRM, new physical infrastructure etc.
- Community: Consultation, program development
- Launch: Comms, marketing, partner events in the first month
- Readiness: Recruiting, training, familiarisation with new tech
- Disruption: activities maintained eg outreach, collection research during closure.
- Staff engagement: Building enthusiasm and awareness
Defining these, allocating a budget and a senior manager to ‘own’ them and then reporting on them to CEO / Board / Steering Group will do two things. First, encourage a broader perspective and secondly prevent the biggest project from steamrollering over the others. Too often I have seen steering groups be concerned with budget/risk/schedule of the major project, without giving necessary oversight to the other factors involved in successful delivery.
This does not need to be bureaucratic. Or rather, it is a minimal bureaucracy that creates a lot of value. Producing a one-page ‘dashboard’ report for each project then talking about how they all link together once a month is two hours per month of work from each project leader — worth it for communications and problem solving.
Concrete example. This methodology at the Natural History Museum’s Darwin Centre project allowed the complex dependencies between ‘finish exhibition and stores fit out ’ and ‘safely move all the collections’ through shared spaces to be understood long in advance and happen with no delays to either, and no damage or loss to collections.
It’s worth returning to the Governance responsibilities here. I’ve seen many steering groups, risk committees and Boards get over-focused on the core project, particularly the construction costs. These are important, but they aren’t ‘80% of the meeting’ important. The factors above require oversight, as well.
The last item in the trifecta is Structured leadership attention on organisational change and post-completion operational resourcing. The project can suck up so much time and focus from senior leaders. Operational staff are often not included in decision-making, and the true challenge of operations are not understood. A trivial example… doubling the size of a museum [redacted] meant the Front-of-House team had to grow. This was understood and costed as a simple doubling of floor staff. What was missed was the additional team leaders, doubling of locker and break space, uniform costs… The opening year was chaos, staff felt disaffected and demotivated, and the resultant budget hole compromised programming.
How do you do it? As early as you possibly can, appoint an ‘Operational Project Manager’. Not a new person — an insider, ideally from Front of House or Facilities and it’s far from full-time until the project approaches opening. They take ownership of linking all operational teams with the other aspects of the program of work, and ensure that operational needs are taken into account (across building, staff, emergency planning, cleaning, hygiene facilities…), costings are accurate, and decisions taken are matching operational assumptions. Example: in project [redacted], this prevented the floor finish being specified as something that the team’s equipment could not clean (this would have cost tens of thousands of [currency] to be fixed and was very nearly missed because which star architect team ever talks to the housekeepers, right?).
It’s also about the focus at the very top of the org. Again going back to the Natural History Museum’s Darwin Centre, four years before completion a member of the Executive was appointed as the Program Director, leaving behind his ‘day job’ as CFO. This enabled the rest of the Directors to engage with the project at a strategic level but allowed them focus beyond the major project to how the organisation would deliver in the five years following.
I will go into Benefit Realisation Planning in another post, but i want to highlight one thing about those lines above. Compare that black and the blue lines — look at the areas underneath them.
The impact of the major project may not be the panacea it is advocated to be. Steady evolution can deliver very similar levels of value over a long term. As an example, look to what the MAH Santa Cruz has achieved over the past decade, with relatively little (averaged over 10 years) investment in new facilities. You can name your own example of the big bangs that spluttered out.
As a sector (and I’m looking at Boards and Government agencies as much as Executive teams, here) we have to stop treating big bang capital investment as the only way to raise the impact. (*Side note — hardly any boards in the culture sector have program and project management specialists to raise these issues early.) And when capital investment is the best way forward, put in place the mechanisms to ensure long-term success, not a peak followed by a flatline.
