I. Purpose

Qm²'s Museum Improvement Program (MIP) designs, launches, and maintains an ongoing institution-wide program of constructive change at the strategic and tactical levels. Systematic and comprehensive, MIP combines the best of traditional management with cutting-edge tools of demonstrated practicality.

This institution-wide change program can stop and reverse the natural aging process in a museum. It's not a quick fix. It's intended to dramatically improve, to reinvent, or to transform the museum beyond simply changing. The MIP helps you discover what the museum can be on the theory that a butterfly isn't simply an improved caterpillar: it is a new creature.

When you choose to transform your institution, you begin to challenge assumptions, the often invisible premises that guide decisions and behavior. The journey is not as scary and difficult as you imagine, it's worse!

II. The Situation

It is common to go to work and find an unending, urgent set of tasks to do: mail, faxes, express deliveries, Internet requests, project deadlines, requests from staff, director, board on and on. Museums are usually understaffed and overworked. Many museum professionals discover that the harder they work, the behinder they get! Build a collection and then you need a collections management program. Raise funds for field work, then you have to publish. Increase your member base and you have more members to serve. You must attend the urgent and important agenda to do your job and get through the day. We call this the Getting By agenda.

A second agenda, of a very different sort, exists. The Getting Better agenda includes the important, deeper, long range, big picture issues. These issues are not urgent. You may neglect them today and feel no discomfort. However, these issues can make your museum better, given sufficient attention. They will ultimately destroy your museum's effectiveness and efficiency, if not dealt with in a timely and intentional way.

The two agendas don't get along well. The gnawing immediacy of the Getting By agenda invariably overwhelms and undermines the Getting Better agenda. We cannot postpone the Getting By agenda, which we can do to the Getting Better agenda.

Every human experiences the conflict between the two agendas. Almost universally we opt to serve the short term Getting By agenda and neglect the long term Getting Better agenda. Thus, we sow the seeds of our future problems. We've designed MIP specifically to address and resolve this situation in a museum context.

A major focus of the Getting Better agenda is to address the underlying causes of problems. Most organizational and managerial problems have underlying cause which are very difficult to see. On the other hand, the symptoms are easy to spot--lack of money, lack of staff, low attendance, underdeveloped projects and interdepartmental friction.

Symptoms are easy to see so they get attention: symptomatic relief. The pain recedes but the underlying causes remain. These causes recreate the old symptoms again and again. Thus the staff become expert at solving the same old problems, over and over. This cycle causes extraordinary inefficiency and a good deal of frustration. Staff can waste more than 30 percent of their time in repeat and duplicate effort.

III. The Four Elements of the MIP Process

Successful, institution-wide change is not quick or easy. Working on three fronts simultaneously—strategic, operational, and cultural—is necessary. Neglect any area and it will become a drag on the other two. Diagnose the situation before you decide where to start.

1. Diagnosis: A MIP is initiated, energized, and focused by an institutional diagnosis. The function of this step is to bring together the director, key staff, and key stakeholders.

• Systematically scan all aspects of the museum and surface problems, issues and opportunities. We call these clues.

• Acknowledge the long standing concerns of all key people to release energy for constructive purposes.

• Understand how the clues interrelate in a cause/effect sequence so you have the option of solving problems at their root instead of treating the symptoms.

• Explore options; set priorities.

• Design action plans.

• Launch a follow-up system.

• Increase mutual respect, honesty, and teamwork.

2. Strategic Positioning—Strategic Alignment—Strategic Management: Strategic positioning means understanding how to adapt to or reshape external forces, especially the desired audience. This means creating or updating the museum's vision, mission, strategies, and objectives.

Strategic alignment ensures that elements of the museum harmonize with the vision, mission, objectives, and strategies that direct and drive activities. Alignment creates quantum improvements in the efficiency and effectiveness of managing the museum as a whole. The mechanisms of strategic design and control are:

• structure, authority, and responsibility;
• information, coordination, and control systems;
• resource allocation systems (budgeting, personnel, etc.);
• reward and recognition systems.

Strategic management consists of the regular revisiting of planned, versus actual results in the strategic plan, then problem solving to close gaps.

3. Culture Change: Institutional culture sets a tone and reflects how people in your museum treat one another. Culture is the barrier to significant institutional learning and change. The MIP product includes:

• a diagnostic process to analyze the current museum culture, from data gathered broadly from museum constituents and beyond;

• a specification for the desired culture that supports the vision, mission, objectives and strategies;

• an application of the specification as a guide design, select, and manage all improvement efforts.

4. Operational Improvements: This activity focuses on improvements in and between various departments and functions in your museum.

Three distinct improvement strategies can be used:

• reengineering: fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical areas such as cost, quality, service and speed;

• problem solving: bringing the right people together to solve problems;

• process improvement: incremental improvements made to organizational processes.

The Improvement Cycle applies to the above strategies and requires:

• identifying areas of improvement that have high opportunity value;
• definition and clear understanding of the current situation;
• selection of the right people to identify the problem, create a solution, and ensure successful implementation.
• All teams operate with the desired culture: for example:- eliminate fear;- build mutual respect and trust.- communicate openly, honestly, and proactively.
• All teams are trained to use an effective and efficient team process covering the goals, roles, rules and tools for successful learning, problem solving, and decision making.

IV. The MIP Structure

Crises launch most improvement efforts. Even when the effort to change begins with commitment, change energy's half-life is only a matter of months. When the pain of crises recedes, before you know it, people return to their old ways.

This occurs for three main reasons:

• the director and/or board fear changing the institution;

• the change effort fails to address strategic, cultural, and institutional issues simultaneously;

• the Getting By agenda erodes the Getting Better agenda.

Elements of the MIP Getting Better Structure

Steering Committee: This consists of the director, people who report to the director, and additional leaders, as needed. This committee may include key board members, especially at the start. If the committee isn't too large, you may wish to add staff, often with a charge to rotate off after a specific time.

The ideal size is five to seven. If larger, you may create a core council of three to seven people and a larger group—called the Strategic Thinking Committee—which meets at least quarterly.

Meeting monthly, the permanent steering committee redesigns the institution by orchestrating the improvement effort. These efforts fall into two broad categories: maintenance and development. In institutions with both a steering and a strategic thinking committee, the smaller group handles the maintenance and the larger, development.

Maintenance Agenda:

1. Select priority issues and design appropriate teams: Monitor operational improvement teams; Reward and recognize team success; Remove obstacles to the team success.

2. Monitor and exemplify the desired culture.

3. Spread improvements to all parts of the museum.

4. Constantly support and re-energize the Museum Improvement Program.

5. Evaluate MIP changes initiated and implemented.

6. Cascade the committee structure to departments, when they are ready.

7. Communicate change issues, agenda, successes, and failures to all parts of the institution.

8. Control rumors.

Development Agenda:

1. Conduct a diagnosis. Decide the focus of the improvement process.

2. Design and define a strong strategic position.

3. Create and maintain strategic alignment.

4. Educate yourself and others on how to GET BETTER.

5. Become organizationally literate.

6. Re-diagnosis

MIP Operational Teams address the priority issues for improvement within and between departments and functions. The Steering Committee launches, coordinates, monitors, and supports operational teams according to the following guidelines:

1. The Steering Committee charges operational teams to address specific processes and problems.

2. Operational teams are temporary, designed by the Steering Committee with the right people to address the issue.

3. Tasks can usually be completed in less than ninety days.

4. Teams are trained in team-based decision-making techniques to enable them to use the most effective structure, process, and guidelines.

5. Teams exemplify the museum's desired culture in all they do.

6. Teams clarify the assigned task(s), design a schedule to achieve the desired results, and lead the implementation of the solution.

Once the solution is implemented and evaluated, the team disbands.

Comparison of Improvement and Hierarchical Structures:

The MIP creates a structure parallel to the museum's normal, hierarchical structure. Responsible for entirely different results, each structure uses significantly different methods. The table below illustrates these differences.

	Hierarchical Qualities	MIP Qualities
Time Focus:	Short	Long
Decisions by:	Authority	Influence
Activity Focus:	Doing to Get By	Designing to Get Better
Speed:	Fast	Slow
Orientation:	Tactical	Strategic
Improvement by:	Fixing	Reinventing
Structure:	Hierarchy	Network
Communication:	Top Down	Multi-directional

If you confuse structures, the hierarchy will always undermine the MIP structure and the improvement effort will disappear.

V. Training

Most MIP efforts require training in:

• understanding the MIP;

• leading meetings, solving problems, and facilitating change;

• process redesign and improvement;

• institutional literacy.