This is a recorded session from the 2024 AAM Annual Meeting & MuseumExpo. Whether you come from a large institution with a project management office (PMO) or you are an individual contributor who plays a role in shepherding projects of all sizes, there is a wide range of project management methods and tools that can be applied in museum contexts, which can have a transformative impact on the health and well-being of your museum and its mission, business, and employees. In this workshop, learn from a panel of professionals from diverse roles and backgrounds who will share essential project management knowledge that can enhance your professional growth and the organizational health of your museum.

Additional resources:

Healthy Museums, Thriving Careers: Mastering Project Management Essentials slides

Transcript

Kalie Sacco: Hey, team. Hi. Welcome. Happy Sunday. Happy last day of conference. Oh, I love it. Thank you for making the choice to start to wind down your conference experience here with us in our session Healthy Museums Thriving Careers, Mastering Project management essentials. While folks are trickling in and getting settled, I want to direct you to the QR code that’s up on the slide that you see here. We’re just doing a little bit of assessment on you as attendees for this session and what your experience is with project management.

All right, so I’m going to move us forward just so you know what we’re going to do for the next hour and a half together. We have a fabulous panel here that We’ll do some introductions of in just a moment. All of us have differing experiences in project management.

We’re gonna go through some project management basics that we’ve found to be essential knowledge from our experience. Then we’ll share some case studies of how we’ve applied those basics and those concepts to our own work.

We’ll go into some breakout discussions themed around those case studies. We’ll come back together to briefly share learnings from those discussions, and then you all will go forth as intro project managers to thrive in your careers and help your museums thrive too.

So, I’ll start us off by introducing myself. Hi, my name is Kalie Sacco. I am the Director of Member Strategy at the Association of Science and Technology Centers, which is the International Professional Association for Science Museums.

In my role at ASTC and in past roles that I’ve held at museums all across the country, I have used project management for all kinds of aspects of my work, particularly around strategy development, event management, and really using project management to foster cross-functional collaborations. So, bringing together groups that are siloed in different areas of my museum or institution and getting them to work together and essentially manage projects that apply across the institution.

I found project management to be extremely useful in both enhancing organizational culture to facilitate that cross-functional collaboration and, of course, to promote accountability, to give a visual physical identity to the work that we’re doing in that a cross -functional collaboration. All right, you’re gonna take it away from here? – Liz is up next.

Liz McDermott: Hi. Hi everybody, I’m Liz McDermott and I’m head of Digital Media and Content Strategy at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. So, I have a super talented team of creative content producers and I have one of my senior strategist team leaders here in the room, hi, Megan. Yeah, and so anything you see online, pretty much about the Getty Research Institute passes through our team. So, we’re involved, it could be podcasts, it could be videos, it could be web pages, tweets, news articles, all sorts of things. So to get all that done, and it moves quickly and we’re on a lot of deadlines, project management is, it’s really essential.

The keywords I have up here, kind of describing my role, it’s just sort of how I spend my days, there’s a lot of leading and facilitating, trying to bring people together or not together depending on the project, a lot of narrative storytelling and strategic engagement, and a lot of change management because we’ve had a lot of changes in post -COVID, a lot of new positions, a lot of people leaving, so it’s been, it’s really interesting time right now. Thank you.

John Shaw: Hi, I’m John Shaw. I’m a principal with Museum EXP. We do museum planning and exhibition development.

And so, I use project management every single day and many facets of my job, primarily with exhibition development, but we also coordinate events. So, through our event management, when we come to conferences like this, in our internal projects where we’re updating our website or doing something and a marketing and a new initiative to promote our company. And we also about Merchandise, so we have a line of merch on our website.

So even for that, like planning, okay, when do we need to have this accomplished? What are the steps to get this completed by the deadline? So we use a lot of these, maybe not of a formal template, as we go through each of these projects, particularly internal ones, but I think it’s important to think about the steps of project management. Still apply, whether it’s a big project, whether it’s a small project, just to make sure that you’re not skipping steps along the way.

Barbara Punt: Hello, I’m Barbara Punt. I am my own company, Punt Consulting Group, and my entire career with the brief exception of having been an exhibit designer is project management is literally all I do.

I deal a lot with places under construction, whether they’re small like municipal visitor centers or large like a, you know, 200 ,000 square foot building. So, you’ll see on my slide it says owner’s representative.

That’s a particular kind of project manager who works between the interface, between the owner and all these other parties, whether they’re the architect, the designer, the people who build it, and also manages the owner’s internal team for content.

So, the kind of project management I do goes from something small like a visitor center to something large like an entire building soup to nuts.

Dean Briere: Hi, I’m Dean Brear. I am the Senior Vice President of Strategic Projects at Arizona Science Center. I have been working on major projects for quite a long time now. In my career, I’ve built two children’s museums, renovated completely a large science center, built a maker space, transforming a history museum into a maker space. So, a lot of project management goes into all of that. I have no formal project management training.

So, this was learn as you go, made some mistakes along the way, and really now, as I’m getting later in my career, realizing the benefits of being able to take the team we have and provide project management opportunities for our team to really make it easier for them to do the work that was really challenging for me learning along the way.

Uma Nair: Hello, can you hear me? Hi everyone, my name is Umar Nair, and I am an organizational strategist and also the founder of the strategic museum my work mainly focuses on internal organizational management and strategy especially with museums.

I focus on Optimizing workload reducing burnout getting tools and processes to work, you know to talk to each other, because I believe that unless we have internal processes and tools that work well, we cannot serve our external visitors very well. And I think that’s something that we are all seeing a lot in our museums. My background, I’ve spent the last 10 years working with large and small museums, and my work ranged from setting up digital projects to creating volunteer management systems.

So, I use project management skills in every single thing I do. Before my career in museums, I was in tech and I worked with a large company, setting up teams and processes across the world. I do have an MBA, but it’s a 20-year-old experience, but I do use a little bit of that, but everything that I do has been learned on the job. So that’s my background. I also conduct PM project management training for arts and culture professionals.

John Shaw: So, getting back to why we’re here, we wanted to know what your experience is with project management. So, if you haven’t had a chance to capture the QR code with your phone, if you didn’t do that when you came in earlier, please take the opportunity to do that now. And then we will reveal the results.

So many of you, which is good, would like to learn more about project management, the vast majority of this. Most of you use project– or about half of you use project management regularly. Half of you have no formal project management training.

And some of you just use a little bit or have some formal project management training. So, I think this is really interesting as we’re sort of formulating our response as our information for you here so that we can understand where each of you is coming from.

We are going to break up into groups, because this is a workshop. Unfortunately, the room setup is not conducive to that. There was a little mix up with the room. So please bear with us as we get further into the session here and divide up into small groups for discussion.

But thanks for participating. And I’m going to hand it over to Barbara to talk about why project management matters.

Barbara Punt: Okay, so I’ve been a project manager, as I said, nearly my entire career, and I did what everybody else does, which is, I don’t know, what, ask Google. So, this is the Google definition of why project management matters. It helps ensures projects reach the necessary quality by balancing budget, time, constraints, and scope. And that’s exactly it. You’re going to see in a couple of slides, It’s essentially a triangle and you have to make sure that all parts of it are going together to feed each other.

Now my personal mantra for project management is a little bit more subjective in that you have to get people to do, to want to do what you need them to do to keep things moving forward.

And project managers frequently have people they work with, they need to influence, but they don’t report to the project manager. So, there’s a lot of people skills that go into this. There’s the objective skills of budgets and schedules and contracts and so on, but there are a lot of subjective skills about how do you get people to do this. There’s also a lot of jargon in particular vocabulary that’s really helpful to learn as you move through project management.

Half of you have not gotten training, so some of this new vocabulary you’ll and other issues, you know, encounter through your career. So, project management’s been around for 5 ,000 years, but it didn’t have a name, like the pyramids. A lot of people working together, they had to get this done. Somebody had to figure out who did what. The Parthenon, you know, that’s a really complicated project.

It’s been around thousands of years. It didn’t have a name. Whoever got this thing built, they still got it built. Notre Dame in Paris, The Empire State Building in New York, Hearst Castle, which was done by a woman, Julia Morgan, the architect, engineer, and project manager. So, the era of specialization came with the Manhattan project, came with World War II in the ’40s.

So, the concept of project management as a discipline, while it’s existed as a practice that people did, it got a name in the ’40s and was starting to be taught in the ’50s. among the things that you see when you do project management is that in the middle, I don’t know how easily you can see the little, well, you can see it bigger than I can, you’re fine. So, the project manager is green, right? That’s the person in the middle. The yellow people, whomever’s on their team, as I mentioned before, may not be working as direct reports to them. Typically, a matrix, the project has a matrix management system. This is what it looks like. Project Manager has people from different departments who report duly to the Project Manager in the middle and to their department head in blue.

So that can become complicated. We’re gonna learn some more tools as we go through and more terms.

John Shaw: So just to give you an overview of what we’re gonna talk about today, we want you guys to understand the basics of Project Management. So, we’re gonna talk about roles, process, scope, timelines, and of course, give you guys some project management tools that you can take home and use in your organizations.

So first, roles, if you haven’t had formal project management training, the idea of someone, a title of project sponsor may seem a little foreign to you, but this is an important role in actually any project management training. So, the project sponsor is not someone who necessarily financially supports the project. They’re actually just the champion. So, this may be an internal leader of your organization who has the ability to push this project forward when maybe the project manager doesn’t have a lot of sort of status or a formal leadership role within an organization.

You really need this project champion. They’re the one that’s gonna make sure you get the resources you need, whether it’s people resources, budget resources and in the end they’re the ones that sort of like have a gun their face if it fails along with the project manager they’re the one that have that shared accountability so it’s really important that the project sponsor and the project manager work really closely together so the project manager is the one that’s going to oversee those day-to-day efforts and then report back to the project sponsor they’re going to manage the team and the task and they’re going to track the project progress both with schedule budget and scope.

Of course, you have the project team members, which is going to include everyone who actually does all the work. Project managers get a sort of bad rap for being the ones that just sort of shuffle papers around and just sort of do the check-ins all the time, but it is really important to have a good relationship, as Barbara mentioned, with those project team members who you might not oversee directly. You might not have any formal accountability to the project manager, but you need that important communication because they’re the ones that are doing the job. They’re the ones that have the skills and expertise to execute the project.

Stakeholders are super important also, as we consider project management. And there are many, many different stakeholders for every project. So consider– these are just some examples of, if you’re doing, like for me, an exhibit development project where you’re creating a new exhibition, you’re going to think about the staff, the visitors, the exhibit techs who do the marketing folks who have to like communicate that exhibit, so all of these are going to be folks roles you would consider and want to somehow communicate with and involve in your project process.

The project management office is another term that maybe you might not be familiar with. It’s basically the group within an organization, as Dean was talking about, that establishes the rules within that organization for how projects are managed and often coordinates across multiple projects to make sure that priorities are set and that there’s coordination to make sure there’s no overlap or conflict among projects.

And I will hand it off to Kalie to talk about process.

Kalie Sacco: Yeah, so we’ve gone over some of the roles and the terminology that you might encounter when you’re starting to define who’s doing what within the project and where you define that is in this document called a project charter.

So, project charter is a formal document that’s not super long in length, it’s usually between one to three pages and it lays out the overall purpose of the project, what you’re trying to accomplish and who’s doing what within the project.

So, who is the project sponsor? Who is the project manager? Who are the key team members and who are those stakeholders. It’s a good document to put together to sort of market the project internally and really get buy-in.

So, when we start thinking about the purpose of project management and how it can support accountability, your project charter is the key document that is going to lay out all of those roles, responsibilities, and circulate so that folks can see and get that buy -in onto who is doing what, and what the whole purpose of the project is. Because projects take resources, resources. There’s sometimes a feeling of scarcity within our institutions. And so, this helps to really define why we’re doing this to get that buy -in. And then it is a really important document, not only for the beginning of the project, but really throughout the life cycle of the project. It acts as this sort of continuous touchstone to wait, why are we doing this? Who’s supposed to do what?

It’s a key document in preventing scope and stakeholder creep, which we’ll hear a little bit more about later. It’s very creepy, right? Very scary. And it also lays out the broad schedule of the project.

So as new projects come up, as new initiatives are starting to get buy-in across an organization, you could go back to the project charter to really say, you know, how is this going to conflict or complement the goals, roles, responsibilities that we’ve laid out.

Uma Nair: Thank you, Kalie. I’m gonna talk about another term, stakeholder analysis. I am sure all of us do this in our work every single day. It basically means asking the stakeholders what they want.

And as John mentioned earlier, stakeholders are anyone who have a vested interest in your project. The stakeholders could be internal, they could be external. But it’s important to get the perspective of your stakeholders in order to ensure that your project is going to be effective.

It is also important to get information from your stakeholders to ensure support throughout the project. And this sometimes is specific to internal stakeholders, especially if you’re a project manager who doesn’t have an official authority over the people that you’re managing on your team, it’s important to have like John was mentioning, this project sponsor. But it’s important to understand what is it that they can contribute? What does the head of the department want? What does the director want?

It’s also critical to understand how they could potentially pose challenges to you along the life cycle of your project. I personally like to schedule one-on-one individual interviews with stakeholders and ask questions that really get to the bottom of their perspective.

So, I’m a big believer in asking why five times, because at the end of the fifth time, you will get, why do you need to attract more visitors? Why, why? So, when we keep asking those types of questions, we get to the real perspective and what is really important to them. You could also, there are some cases where you could also use brainstorming to get information.

What do you do after you collect all of this information? You have to analyze the data and you have to pull out specific strategies and communicate them to the stakeholders.

Communication is critical. Yeah.

Liz McDermott: Okay, yeah, so next up on this process is, I don’t know, have any of you heard of RACI? Like that frame? I see a few nods, okay. So, RACI is used by corporations, construction companies, creative agencies.

It’s basically the global gold standard. And it’s coming into the museum world more and more. And I think it’s been kind of a game changer. So, it’s just a way of identifying roles on a project. So, R in the acronym is the person who actually does the work, executes the task. A is the approver. So that’s the person that signs off at key milestone points. It’s the final approving authority. You want to try to have one, not like 20 people, like I’ve had sometimes before on my project, so you really want to hone in on the one person. C is consulted, you might have any number of people that you’re going to ask for their feedback, and it’s kind of a two -way communication back and forth.

And then the informed role is somebody that’s– it’s a one -way communication. You’re going to give them updates, maybe a presentation, a key milestones along the way. So why is that important?

I mean, it seems like kind of straightforward, right? What are the benefits about really being formal and specific about that? Well, it provides a shared understanding. There’s clarity of roles and requirements. I know I’ve been at a lot of projects where people just are super unclear and they’re weighing in on different things and it gets very confusing really fast.

Also, by being really clear, you empower staff and yourself is the project manager and the subject matter experts. And yet also enables leadership to own their role, and you’re bringing them in to get their expertise at the right phase of the project. So, this brings me to get leadership on board with all of this, because this is very simple, this explanation, but I found it was a little bit abstract for people, like how do you actually put this into practice? What does that look like? So, before you go to the slide, I want to give a shout out to Jackie Huang.

She’s not here. But she’s on my team, and she came up with this slide that I just love, and it was a real hit. So next slide up about how Racy in action. So she did a RACI for baking a birthday cake for me.

And so, she kind of did on the left, like, all right, what’s the project deliverable, and what’s the scope? So, first was just she’s going to select a recipe. So, she put herself as her job.

She’s responsible for it. Nobody else. Oh, before I talk about this too, what was so cool about it? Everybody knows you can’t have a bunch of cooks in the kitchen. It’s going to kind of ruin the recipe. So, it’s really important to get crystal clear about roles in the kitchen.

So for selecting the recipe, then she had me approving it. She wanted to make sure I like what she’s going to bake. She had had Megan, who’s a creative person on our team, she wanted to consult with her on what the recipe might be comprised of.

And then she was going to inform my supervisor as a courtesy and then my boss’s boss, right, made up story. Then the actual baking of the cake. She’s responsible for it, not too many other people. She’s actually going to approve it, because she’s the one that’s going to see if, wow, did it come out OK? And she’s just going to keep me informed. She also was going to pull Megan into the kitchen, do some chopping and stirring and do some things like that. And then she had these other two roles that they’re just going to be informed like, hey, the cake is being baked. That’s all you guys need to know. And then for sending the invitation, she’s responsible for it. She’s going to ask me to approve it so I can see what kind of font and designs being used. She might consult again with Megan who’s going to have some good creative input, she wanted to consult with my supervisor to see if he had anything he wants to add and then we’re just going to keep the people at the very top informed on the right.

So, when we shared this with staff and especially leadership, they’re like, oh my gosh, okay, I see how this could work. It was like a real aha moment for them and I’ve brought this out multiple times and we even shared about it at a town hall and it got a lot of departments excited because you could kind of literally see how you might apply it.

So, yeah.

John Shaw: So, budget. This is always a bit of a, well, it’s either a challenge or you have no choice.

It’s usually what I found. Either you’re told this is the budget or someone comes to you and says, “What should the budget be for this?” And you’re like, “I don’t know, “I’ve never done this before.” Or, “I’m not the expert on this.” So, what I found is there’s a couple of different ways to get to that answer of budget.

And of course, the top line number and how do you divide that up and split it out? History, so when we do exhibit development projects, we’re looking back at projects we’ve done before.

What are similar projects, and how are the needs of this project and that past project aligned? What’s different about it? So, using that history, either within the organization or consulting experts in their history and their knowledge of projects.

So, we will often go out to other firms and say, “Hey, you’ve done something like this before. “Here’s our idea. “What do you think this is gonna cost? “How should we set this budget? “How should that be divided up “and what should we be considering “when setting the budget?” And sometimes funding, like I said, sometimes you’re just said, “Here’s a grant. “This is how much the grant is for.” And then You’re basically working backwards from that top line number of how to divide that up. But even so, you’re going to have to reference some experts or some historical data in order to set the breakout from that budget.

Within the process, it’s not just important to set that number and to have realistic expectations, but also tracking that. So, one of the things that we do with our budget templates is once we’ve set the budget,

things change. So, this quote might, for one, consultant or component, may come back higher or lower than you expected. You also want to have a contingency in any budget planning so that you can make adjustments as you go through the project.

So, we track that as through. So, I like to have several columns in my budget template for what is spent already, so what has already hit the books, what’s been paid out, and what’s been committed. So, what do we have assigned a contract for, but we haven’t paid of the payments of that contract yet, so that we can project. What is our total gonna be? Are we gonna be over budget? Are we gonna be under budget? And how are we able to make decisions for the project based on those projections?

And scope is next.

Barbara Punt: So, scope is a word that a lot of people are familiar with, I’m sure you’ve heard it around. And as John pointed out, all of this affects the quality. The budget is the budget, but a bigger budget can sometimes be better quality. Sometimes it just means more of something. So, on the right, you’re going to see small letters, which I guess you can see, it’s a little light. The schedule, the scope, and the budget are three parts of this pyramid or triangle. And NASA kind of came up with this early on saying you can have it fast, you can have it done well, or you can have it done cheap. Like, you know, pick two, you can’t easily three. If you short your cell phone all three parts of that triangle that it implodes and the quality in the middle is not so good.

So scope you might say to a builder I need you to build something on this plot of land you know make it nice I’ve got a few things I want to put in there and sit outside and have a porch and they might do this or they might do that and sometimes you hear scope creep which is when you suddenly have a scope that’s way beyond your budget or somebody who’s already spent or over committed funds that were not intentional, and that’s not good. That puts you in trouble. And eventually you have to get back to this Goldilocks moment, and that often is termed either budget cuts or more sort of the nicer term has become value engineering.

Now value engineering typically doesn’t have anything to do with an actual engineer. It’s terminology. It’s referring to an organized approach to bringing something in at the better cost. And the idea and the reason why it came as a technical term of engineering is you’re supposed to be able to look at different components of the project and have it done better. It doesn’t necessarily mean worse. It doesn’t necessarily mean cheaply and badly. Sometimes you just come up with the better mousetrap. So don’t be afraid of that term, but it is often a challenge, but it’s to bring that triangle from the previous slide back into balance.

Uma Nair: Thank you, Barbara. We’re moving on to timelines now, and schedules are part of a timeline for a project. So, a schedule is the project manager’s GPS for navigating the project.

It will tell you, it’ll show you where you’re going, how fast you’re going, whether you’re going to get there or not. And it allows you to adapt smoothly to any changes that may come up, which they will. So, it’s very important to have a pretty detailed schedule for your project.

What should a schedule have? It should have tasks, like what needs to happen. You need to have people assigned to each task. You need milestones, which is certain spots in the timeline that need to be completed in order to move forward.

You need deliverables at each milestone. So, at each milestone, you will have a deliverable. For example, the design proof, the first comp of your designs, maybe a deliverable. And a milestone could be getting approval on that design comp, so that is a milestone. And then you also want duration for each task.

So how do you make an effective schedule? In traditional project management, you use something called a work breakdown structure, which is a very long, boring, complicated thing, but You don’t need to do that. You just need to follow a few pointers here. So, once you have all your tasks and break your tasks down to– it doesn’t need to be extremely detailed to move this document from one place to the other.

It doesn’t need to be that bad. But at least have tasks that really constitute a change in a deliverable. sequence the tasks and deliverables.

So first you list out your tasks, then you put them in order. Then you identify dependencies and concurrent tasks. So there will be things that can happen simultaneously.

So, research can be happening along with the beginnings of design exploration. So those could be happening concurrently. Then you identify milestones. This is also where stakeholder analysis comes in, because you wanna make sure that you’re involving required people at each milestone, make sure that they don’t pose a problem later, ask, they could ask you, why didn’t you show me this? Why, I didn’t approve this. So, all of these work together. And then you assign people based on skill sets. So, ideally, we should be assigning people based on skill sets and not randomly because that’s what they’re available, but we do not have that luxury most of the time. So upskilling is another thing that we need to keep in mind.

And then estimate the duration for each task. So, work does not equal duration. The amount of work that you think needs to be done add at least 15 % to 20 % of a buffer and assign that as a duration because like Barbara said, there will be scope creep, there will be problematic stakeholders, there may be a pandemic, you know, so make sure that you’re including enough buffer time.

Kalie Sacco:  So we’ve talked about some process points, talked about the timeline and I want to share just one tool that’s really useful for actually visually describing the work breakdown structure in particular and that’s a Gantt chart.

So, you’ve probably seen or used one of these before but it’s basically a graphic representation of a project timeline that shows particular deliverables, particular work streams that lead to those deliverables and then higher level work streams that encompass more like phases of a particular project. And it has a lot of advantages using a Gantt chart as a visual timeline.

So one is that it’s a way to actively monitor progress. The Gantt chart will have dates on one part of it, and you can see, are we hitting those dates?

Did this deliverable get delivered on this date? Do we need to make adjustments? And If you do need to make adjustments, another advantage is that the Gantt chart shows linkages. So, you can see one deliverable leads to another deliverable.

If this one hasn’t been completed, then it’s going to create this cascade effect. And as a project manager, then you can see what sorts of adjustments need to be made over time. And it really helps you control that scope creep aspect.

And it provides accountability, Again, showing those linkages and showing the ways that the different parts of the project connect also enables you to see who’s responsible for what and enable you as a project manager to see if one particular team or person is not on track for completing their deliverable. How is that going to affect the rest of the team’s ability to deliver on what they’re supposed to be working on?

So, It’s a really powerful tool. And you may be wondering, how do I make such a powerful, amazing tool? And all of these process points that we’ve been talking about. So I wanted to just share a few particular tools in terms of software that I’ve found especially useful.

There are a million different project management software packages out there. I’m just going to highlight a few that I’ve, again, found to be particularly useful. There are free versions of all of these as well as paid versions that give you a little bit more power and oomph for bigger team sizes.

One that I especially love and I’m actually currently using in my workplace and with my team is Asana. It’s highly collaborative. It’s ideal for small and mid-sized teams.

It works well both as a sort of personal to -do list and as an a system for large project management, showing who is responsible for what.

You can switch back and forth when viewing a project between a Kanban style, that’s with cards that you move around, a Gantt chart, a simple list. So, it’s a really, really powerful system that’s also affordable for small to mid -sized teams. Another good one is Trello. If But more of a visual learner, Trello is a Kanban style board that has cards that make up the components of a project that you move across as a project progresses.

So again, if you’re a visual learner or you’re developing a product, that’s where that method of project management is particularly used and useful.

And then another one to throw out there is Monday or Monday .com. Monday is, again, a super powerful tool that’s particularly great for larger teams, just in the way that it’s organized and the affordances that it has for managing both a sort of personal to -do list and a broader team to-do list.

If you were in my colleague Uma’s amazing session yesterday on AI, you might have heard that some of these tools have AI components that are integrated. So, I wanted to throw out a plug for that functionality as well.

Asana in particular I’ve used has like a beta AI where if you put in some information, you can then spit out what the system thinks the next steps are going to be.

So that’s like the new frontier of project management. But again, as you’re thinking about these tools, as you’re thinking about producing the systems and what you actually need as a project manager, it’s something to keep in the back of your head when it comes to working smarter and working with what’s available to you.

So, we wanted to go over now a little bit of like, how did we find out about all of these amazing process points and tools and you heard a little bit about our journeys and our introductions, the sort of self-taught on the job and formal training mixes that we all come with.

So I wanted to give a little bit of a deeper dive into that, starting with Barbara’s experience.

Barbara Punt: Okay, so, sorry, I’m with Dean.

So, we represent the half of you that perhaps don’t have formal project management training. So go back to what I said before. There’s an aspect And how do you get people to want to do?

What you need them to do? That’s subjective. And a lot of that is what motivates them. Now, whether you’re negotiating a contract and you have to understand what somebody’s agenda is and what they feel good about putting in writing, or you’re just simply in a meeting and you need to make somebody volunteer to bake the cake, you have to be able to read the room. And there’s kind of an art and a science to project management.

The science is kind of the objective part, which is you need people to understand if they’re late, it affects other people. You know, all of these tools will show, oh, if you’re late, this is what happens to the next one down the line in the schedule.

If you’re over budget, these other people don’t have money and you can show them the various budgets for different parts of the project. Projects are interlinked pieces. And so, we’re all here to show you different ways to manage that, but that’s kind of the basic, is it’s all interlinked.

So, I’m talking about subjective techniques. One of the ways I started out was because I started on a lot of construction sites, like I said, and so I’m a petite woman, and years ago I looked very young for my age, and I would see other people would really have gravitas in the room that I could just never summon ever, and I would start to look at the people and how they spoke and what their posture was.

And by reading other people in the room, by attending a meeting where maybe you don’t even have a lot to do, you can learn a lot. You can see what other people are effective. Who in the room was able to get people to understand their point of view even if it was challenging or unpopular?

You know, who in the room was a good motivator to get other people to join their side? Who could bring up a dissent but not be negative and diminishing to others So there’s a lot if you come to the table and you want to improve your subjective techniques Look at other people Now if you’re great on subjective, you’re the most touchy -feely person on the planet work on your objective techniques learn how to do a budget learn how to do a Gantt chart make sure your Excel skills are good And I’ve read a lot of contracts.

Some of these we’re talking about internal agreements between parties. I do a ton with external parties. Contracts have to be clear. They have to be well-written. And most of all, both parties have to understand the language, so they think they’re agreeing to the same thing. And to negotiate a contract, take skills. But these are three things. If you don’t have the chops to do budget schedules, contracts, It’s going to be very hard no matter what a great touchy -feely person you are. Kalie, on the other hand, has formal project management training, and she’ll go into what that entails.

Kalie Sacco: Yeah, so similar to my panelists, a lot of what I’ve learned has been on the job. But if you’re like me and you thrive in an academic environment or you enjoy the process of taking a course or really want to solidify your skills. There are a number of different resources for project management formal training out there.

Personally, I’ve taken courses through UC Berkeley’s Extension School. And if you look at a lot of universities, a lot of them have these extension programs that have online or in-person courses that lead to some kind of certification, but are generally for just sort of advancing your professional knowledge.

So that’s a wonderful resource to look at the university in your local area or look at something online. Take an intro to project management course and that will really provide a deeper dive onto the overview that we’ve done.

You can also look at a MOOC or a massive open online course. LinkedIn has a fabulous set of learning tools. Google also offers some related to specific tools for project management through the Google suite and so those again many of them have free or paid options are good things to potentially add into your professional development plan as you’re looking to sort of build your own skills more formally.

The gold standard for all of the jargon that we’ve shared with you today and that you’ll learn through these formal courses is the project management book of knowledge or the PMBOK, it does have that kind of funny biblical name, but it is a quite a technical document that again goes into the definitions of some of these process points that we’ve shared and even just getting a copy of that for your own reference is a really powerful tool for when you are assigned a project management role and you’re really struggling with how do I start, what structures do I need, it’s a great sort of encyclopedic reference for pulling those templates and those resources that you might use.

And then if you find out that you’re super passionate about project management, you can also obtain your project management professional or PMP certification through the industry standard that you If you’re an expert on the project management book of knowledge, you will take coursework and you will do continuing education to enhance your project management skills, and that’s a whole career path that you can certainly go down and apply not only in the museum field but more broadly.

But if you even don’t go that far, just really dipping your toes into some formal training if this is something that you’re passionate about and that you find useful for your work, I think is a really powerful way to solidify and enhance that on -the -job skills training that many of us do have.

Dean Briere: So if you haven’t figured it out by now, there are many benefits of project management. And one of them is the enhanced teamwork and the ability to accomplish many things at once.

So, this is a project that I was working on, still am working on, in fact, and is installing a new planetarium within the Science Center. And many different things had to happen for this. There were building changes that need to be made the Planetarium folks, COSM, they’re building the dome and the technology. We have a partnership that we’re developing with Arizona State University and their new mixed center there, and there’s content development.

And so, before we actually even put this together as a project, people started submitting timelines, It was great, we’re getting people thinking about timelines. So, we have a contractor timeline that was ending in July. We have the COSM folks timeline, which was ending in May. We had the content timeline, which was ending in May. And we had the opening, which was scheduled for April.

And so putting all of those together and creating one single timeline and seeing where things were starting to fall apart was really important. And we could actually make some changes to bring all of those in together.

The other benefits of the project management is the improved communication. Ensuring that everyone is hearing the same thing in the same way at the same time, knowing what’s going on is really important. So again, I want to give a little bit of an example here where we did an event regarding the solar eclipse last month. Phoenix, Arizona was going to have 60 to 65 percent coverage. We were projecting 2 ,000 people to show up in the park where the science center is located. Our team thought of everything.

Our guest experience seemed just an incredible job, you know, glasses, activities, viewing stations, everything. But there wasn’t project management on this, which meant our guest sales and services team didn’t really know what was happening. So, when 2 ,000 people are out there at 11 o ‘clock in Phoenix, Arizona, where it’s dry, you get thirsty, you drink, you end up having to go to the restroom, all of a sudden, thousands of people are coming into the building, which no one was prepared for, and we should have been, right? It was just a miss on our part, but one we won’t miss again, because as we’re developing these new project management strategies, we will make sure it’s in place for all of these type programs.

And it improves accountability. How many of you have asked someone for something that you needed to do something and you send the email and then it’s crickets.

You don’t hear anything, right? And then you just kind of let it drop off, right? Well, I didn’t get what I needed, so I can’t do anything.

Well, Project Management ensures there’s accountability, right? There’s dashboards that are created. The Project Manager is looking at all of those requests that are out there to ensure that the people who are responsible for getting them done are being held accountable to get them in so that the next person can do their job.

There’s the timelines that we talked about. The timelines are really important, but it’s the deliverables that come out of those timelines that are critically important because that’s what people need to progress to the next step to get the ultimate deliverable, which is the project completion.

So, do you use an internal PM or do you go external? And there are benefits to using an internal project manager. First and foremost, if you’re gonna use an internal project manager, it means you have someone whose job it is to be project manager, not, hey Joe, you’re taking on project management today, right? That’s a whole different thing, which seldom works, if ever. But if you have someone internally dedicated to be a project manager, benefits are, they know your organization, they know your goals, the history, the culture of the organization. They know the processes that you have. So, they can hit the ground running on a project. You can move quickly and start up as easy.

Downside is, do you have enough projects to have a full-time project manager? Do you have enough work for this person? If not, the cost of having an internal project manager is going to be higher than an outside consultant would be.

From an external perspective, oops, sorry, I was supposed to progress here, not that one. From an external perspective, the positives can be, an external project manager can look at your organization more objectively. They can avoid the politics in your organization.

And we all have them. And that makes them more agile. They can make more difficult decisions because they’re not a part of the organization. They’re less likely to worry about rocking the boat and you can select talent that’s more closely aligned to the project. That’s not necessary but it is helpful at times.

Drawbacks start-up time is the biggest one, right? They have to get to understand what it is you’re trying to do, understand your organization, understand the players And then, of course, there’s the cost of bringing in an external consultant if you have enough work that you could do it internally and then organizational understanding down there on the bottom right.

Really when we look at implementing a project management mindset within the organization.

We laid out a ten year plan for this and I’ll tell you I thought my boss was going to kill me right ten years no we don’t have that kind of time and it’s like but it really is what it takes we were an ad hoc project management organization right which meant hey everyone’s doing their own thing we’re getting work done maybe not the most effective or efficient way but it’s happening.

We wanted to move into standardized delivery. Developing those processes, the purpose, the roles, the responsibilities, all of that takes time to understand how to do that, and that’s a one-to two-year process. Once you do that, then you have to get everyone to buy into using it, right? It’s one thing to develop it, everyone has to use it.

It takes time and repetitiveness to do that. And that’s what takes the three to five years that you’ll see in part three there. And it’s just because projects don’t happen overnight, so you have to do them over and over again. Once you get past that, you’re really in a good spot. You’re starting to make decisions based on your ability to project management.

And that’s really that sweet spot where everyone wants to be. And if you do that really, really well, then you’re gonna start creating new opportunities based solely on your excellence in project management.

And that’s where it truly starts to generate value. Not that it’s not doing it from the very beginning, but that’s where project management in and of itself is an end roll.

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This recording is generously supported by The Wallace Foundation.