Opening your big new museum thing? Hints and tips for a ‘Readiness Project’

How do you get your brand-spanking-new exhibition/gallery/museum to open successfully? You tweak the lighting one last time, toss the keys vaguely towards a front of house team member and head to the party, right? I mean, you can do that, but there are better ways.

I’ve always advocated for a ‘Readiness Project’ — a specific project team dedicated to taking a sparkling new thing through its first months. Why?

• Project teams are exhausted, and are focused on opening day as the ‘end’ — this is the psychology of a big project. Don’t fight it.
• Makers of things and operators of things are different types of people — aptitudes, working rhythms, needs — and a bridge is really helpful
• Making something successful in operation is different from designing and building it. Architects are usually terrible building managers, and vice versa.

Here’s how to do it.

When you start your project

Kick off
Hold a workshop with Front of House, maintenance, programming, etc (all those who will need to be involved in running it, or whose indifference could ruin it) to focus on what will need to be in place. A good place to start is a lessons-learned workshop on a recent opening. Obvious stuff will emerge (give us time to get familiar with it!) and so will the unexpected. Log it all, make it part of the design brief. And then take it seriously. Those who’ve suffered from inadequate storage are the people who know best what storage they need.

Project Plan
This is the moment to plan your interactions with these individuals as you go through development. You want to be really clear. For example, “we will…

• Consult the Front of House Manager at these stages of work _____
• Set ___ days for familiarisation between finishing and opening, and ___ days for press and VIP, etc”

Budget
Get clarity on what the operating budget assumptions are and have this signed off ‘in principle’ by the senior management team. There is no point designing a space that needs, say, daily restocking of art materials if there won’t be a budget to buy the materials. How many sad two-year-old galleries have you been in where a whizzy idea is now just empty pen-pots, dead screens and tumbleweed? That’s bad project scope-setting.

This goes for staff too. If the space is going to be, say, one of three galleries sharing one guard, then you can’t put the fragile ceramics on a low table!

As you go along…

Check in. Review designs, check that it’s operable within the budgets. Provide what the teams said they need in the design, or talk to them about alternatives (sometimes, there just isn’t 100m3 of storage space!). You know. Obvious project management-y stuff.

For advanced players: use your front of house and programming teams in your prototyping. Train them up and they can talk visitors through draft text, object selections, and so on. You will likely get better feedback from them than if the curators/interpreters do it — because front of house have no real skin in the game, and won’t be crestfallen if the object featured in someone’s PhD is not adored by audiences, or people find the text difficult to understand.

Six months before opening

Set up your ‘Readiness’ project. You’ll want an ‘Operational Team Leader’ and the team should include front of house and building management at a minimum. The idea is that they will be the people that will shepherd to project across the launch date — taking charge of the site a week or two before, and having authority over the space during operational hours for the first three months or so.

Why? The core project team are making, installing, frantically finishing. Someone has to be in charge of catching all that and pivoting it into daily business. It is impossible for the project team to have that focus. Also, the authority has to shift. As the launch date approaches, the views, skills and activities of an installation team matter less and less. It’s up to the operational teams to make it shine. The composer is not the performer.

Launch minus 6 months up to about Launch minus 2 months
Begin drafting the manual. How do light bulbs get changed? What happens when a screen goes down? Where are the out-of-order signs? Who’s linking back to digital channels? What if it’s raining? What if it’s busy? Lost child procedure? Where do people queue? Who sets up in the morning? Who cleans? What objects are changed over every ___ months? How is content updated? What happens for VIP evening events? AND SO ON. This is huge. The Readiness Team are pulling from everywhere else, they are active; they aren’t waiting to be told and they aren’t taking ‘it isn’t ready yet’ for an answer.

Also, things will come up that the project team have missed. (It just happens. I don’t care how good a team is, they never get everything right.) Do not try to redesign now. If the core team can do it, fine, make the change. If not — add it to the ‘fix after we’re open’ list. No-one will notice on opening day.

Begin recruitment and training. (Pro tip — have an HR pro on the Readiness Team.) Do you need more staff, and if so, how are you going to get them, train them? Training may be just ‘here’s the on switch’ — or it may be complex visitor and technical visitor interactions. Existing and new staff may need different training.

Pro tip: do visitor journey mapping. Workshop how different visitors will arrive, use and depart the space. What will their needs be (you’ll get this 80% right — that’s good enough for now!) and how does the design and operational plan intersect to make this work? For example, if it’s a space you’re supposed to feel discombobulated and overwhelmed in, how will staff support visitor who find it too much?

Another pro tip — bring in different users to workshop this with you. People with a visual impairment, for example. Listen and learn, and build ways to respond.

Launch minus 2 months
Day by day site plan of exactly what is happening when. Be ruthless and accommodating at the same time; agree the hierarchy of needs wisely and widely. This is the stage at which it can become chaos and everyone starts to hate everyone else. Pragmatism and kindness must leaven the diary rigidity just a little. I’d suggest:

1. finishing build
2. familiarisation and training
3. VIPs and advance press
4. Board members
5. Members
6. A chill day. Let staff hang out there, all staff, any staff. Let everyone fall in love with it.

Lock in days for staff familiarisation, and a day for press, VIPs, whatever. Make sure there’s a named person responsible for these days. Now, your Readiness team leader has to be empowered to defend this schedule. They’ll make sure they’re as flexible as possible, of course. But you can’t have a final sound system check disturbing a training event, for example.

There’ll be compliance activities such as evacuation drills. Don’t forget these or someone will say you can’t open the doors…!

Plan learning from visitors. You’ll have a bench in the wrong place, you won’t have enough bins; whatever. Plan to overstaff a little, have a printed templated ‘what i saw happen today’ and debrief daily. You will triage these daily into categories — see below.

Launch minus a week
Your first visitors matter. They’re your word of mouth. To give them the best possible experience, at 10.01 on opening day, the staff have to be on point. They won’t be if it’s been a hellrush with no time to train and prepare. No-one, but no-one, will care about the mispelt caption the VIP noticed two days ago. Leave that until next week. Priritise the big stuff, and that includes chilled staff.

First day
Relax. You’ve prepared for this. Leave the operations team to do what they do best. The curators, designers and so on should watch, document any observations on the same templates as everyone else. When the doors close, have some cake. You did it. Brief preen.

First week
Those templates everyone’s been filling in? The Readiness team and the core team meet daily and triage them, like this:

Start with the first row. When that’s clear, start on the second. If a new issue pops up in the first row, drop everything and go back to that. Communicate widely that this is going on — a public document online or even better on the wall somewhere nearby back of house, will be best.

The separation into two columns is really important. Often the latter column has an external contractor culpable. They need to be managed to get in, after hours, to fix things. This may be part of contractual wrangling.

‘Doesn’t work’ is a debatable point, of course. That’s why the team discussing it has different perspectives. What isn’t working from an educator’s point of view may not be the most important from the conservator’s point of view. But – it doesn’t matter at this point whether it’s what the core team imagined years ago. The only thing that matters is whether it is delivering the visitor outcomes or not.

Pro-tip — get your user journey people back in to track visitors. Focus on basic needs first, not educational or artistic outcomes. Once the space is operating well from a flow and comfort point of view, that’s the next phase of work.

Longer term

So now it’s been open a few months. It’s looking good, all the stuff on your lists has been sorted out, it’s time to look and see if the project is actually meeting its goals. The project isn’t over until it’s realising benefits and delivering the mission. So, evaluate, adapt, plan redesign where you need to. But that’s another post ;)

Pro Pro tips

• Allocate budget to the above phases of work. Don’t make the Readiness team beg for scraps
• Patience. Nothing’s perfect on opening day. And you see far more flaws than any non-professional will.
• Allow time to celebrate. The teams cannot move onto the next thing instantly.
• Give kudos. Spot the small things. Celebrate them.
• Don’t say “Pro Pro” out loud.
• Lessons-learned workshops. How should Readiness on the next project be handled?

Finally: Your front of house team know more than many project development and design teams suspect. Trust them. And pay them properly!