I’m having a couple of ongoing conversations with professional colleagues who are in the middle of fairly problematic projects – not at my institution I hasten to add. You know that I’m talking about technology projects because technology projects and museums often don’t seem to go well. I think about why this is quite a lot. As a recovering for-profit consultant working in the museum world, I like to think that the projects I did for museums weren’t as problematic as some seem today, but maybe they were. I need to do some navel gazing… Certainly some were successful in that they are still in use, after ten years, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the process and implementation was painless.

Anyway, I have a theory. Its a bit like the Monty Python theory of Dinosaurs in that it may be a tad broad brush, but here it is. Fundamentally, it appears to me that Museums talk to vendors completely on the vendor’s terms. I also think confusion reigns in Museums about the difference between strategy and requirements, but more on that another time. For exhibit A, I humbly submit the project charter, which many museums use as a mechanism for conveying their requirements to a vendor. The project charter comes from the technology world and requires the museum to articulate want it wants, in a language and format it is largely unfamiliar with. I’m not sure this is a great start – its a bit like going to your doctor and explaining your symptoms in complex medical terms instead of just telling him where it hurts.

I took a look at some project charters. They include sections such as Business Need And Feasibility, Constraints, Assumptions, Logical Scope, Project Deliverables, Project Risks. (Risks? You mean there’s a risk that the project may not get delivered?). Are museum folk comfortable with these terms? This may as well be Ancient Greek to many museum folk – actually if it were, maybe they would understand it better… But my point is that Museums use a communication mechanism that they don’t really understand, to communicate what they need to a world that they are not familiar with. How did it happen that the museum is immediately disadvantaged in this process when they are the ones with the money and the initiative?

Anyone out there use something other than a project charter, or at least a much friendlier version to communicate requirements and project scope, or are we just stuck with this mechanism?

I’d wager a large sum of money that the project charter is pretty much the only document a museum has that describes any aspect of its technology, although I would love to be corrected on that. Unfortunately, in the museum’s resource-strapped world, its probably the only time it is forced to document. Even if you’re a museum who’s only technology is a phone, an old desktop and a small website hosted by a friend, do you at least have documentation that describes how to access your website to update it?

So, if anyone has any great ideas or a great mechanism to communicate requirements for technology projects that they’d like to share, then please do. And if anyone has any good ideas on how to encourage museums in the use and benefits of technology documentation, I’m all ears.

Oh, Monty Python’s Dinosaur theory?

“All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much, much thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the far end.”

And now for something completely different…

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