Open Forum

Hi all, I would love to hear from other exhibition designers on the project management systems and software that they use daily.

Do you manage your own work flow in a program like Asana? Are your milestones and targets set by a specific department? How do you manage your day to day tasks as well as long term projects? Are there multiple project management softwares that you work between, to accommodate others?

Curious to hear how other designers use software to keep track of the details, manage their workflow internally, and manage their vendors externally.

Thanks in advance for sharing!

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Skye Malish-Olson
Exhibition Designer
Dallas Museum of Art
Dallas TX
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Hi Skye,

We use SmartSheet a great deal for our project management. It's proven to be incredibly user friendly and we are able to incorporate vendors when needed. I

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Jennifer Mayo
Registrar
Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex
Orlando FL
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Original Message:
Sent: 09-11-2019 06:26 PM
From: Skye Malish-Olson
Subject: Exhibition Designer Work Flow

Hi all, I would love to hear from other exhibition designers on the project management systems and software that they use daily.

Do you manage your own work flow in a program like Asana? Are your milestones and targets set by a specific department? How do you manage your day to day tasks as well as long term projects? Are there multiple project management softwares that you work between, to accommodate others?

Curious to hear how other designers use software to keep track of the details, manage their workflow internally, and manage their vendors externally.

Thanks in advance for sharing!

------------------------------
Skye Malish-Olson
Exhibition Designer
Dallas Museum of Art
Dallas TX
------------------------------

Hi Skye,

We have been looking for years for a system that works with both very long and very short time frames, and we've just established a small "advance" team to dig into Asana. It seems like it could be a great solution, but I've found that as soon as you start adding more and more projects, (6-7 special exhibitions, programming, communication strategy the sheer amount of information is visually overwhelming. So we're looking at how we can design the project descriptions to have different visibilities, yet hold all of the information we want in the background. It's very rich in terms of features, but we're trying to figure out how to make it do a couple things:

• we want the ability to see every project fully expanded to see the entire work load in every gallery for at least 5 years out; but,
• we also want a toggle to see only certain scheduled dates against other dates to check for potential collisions, i.e. installation and deinstallation of two shows happening the same day. Or any other combination of pertinent dates or tasks.
• we want an "executive summary" view of the master calendar that would serve as the highest-level view of the open and close dates of an exhibition, without all of the auxiliary schedules that would get tacked on. Say that an exhibition has to open a week earlier or later--the administration would want the ability to see the effect of that change on the rest of the schedule, but not necessarily at the finest detail.

We have built out templates for exhibitions, but we're still in the tweaking, testing and learning phase. I'll keep you posted as we dig deeper. I think we will find a way to make it work.

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Michael Lapthorn
Exhibition Designer
Minneapolis Institute of Art
Minneapolis MN
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Original Message:
Sent: 09-11-2019 06:26 PM
From: Skye Malish-Olson
Subject: Exhibition Designer Work Flow

Hi all, I would love to hear from other exhibition designers on the project management systems and software that they use daily.

Do you manage your own work flow in a program like Asana? Are your milestones and targets set by a specific department? How do you manage your day to day tasks as well as long term projects? Are there multiple project management softwares that you work between, to accommodate others?

Curious to hear how other designers use software to keep track of the details, manage their workflow internally, and manage their vendors externally.

Thanks in advance for sharing!

------------------------------
Skye Malish-Olson
Exhibition Designer
Dallas Museum of Art
Dallas TX
------------------------------

Hello Skye

I own a botique independent exhibit design firm in Boulder Colorado - I'm not sure our workflows are exactly as yours are, (I don't have departments per-se) but I'm happy to tell you what I've been building-out for us here in the studio.

We use Trello. Think of it as the hub around which the spokes of most of our other business processes revolve. What makes it most powerful and flexible are its 'Power-Ups': basically a wonderful garden of API hooks to major platforms like DropBox, Google Drive/Apps, Slack, TimeCamp, SalesForce and numerous others. Dozens of smaller utilities (many free) that work right within Trello as well to customize is functionality. It took me a couple days to figure out how its bones work, and I've spent the last 5 years refining the workflows and procedures. Its a work in progress, but its has changed our effectiveness remarkably.

I find it to be an agile project management tool that helps us visualize work from 30,000' view to very granular; limits our work-in-progress; and maximizes our flow and efficacy with even the smallest of parts. The biggest snag in it is adoption. External stakeholders that learn and adopt love it, those who don't, well...Slow adopters are always the fly in the ointment.

You are still likely going to need something separate like a Gannt chart solution, but Trello has several hooks for those. As a 'roll-your-own" solution, it might take awhile to adapt it to your workflow. Incremental adoption has worked best for us.

Its Power-ups fall into these main categories:
Analytics & Reporting
Automation/Scripting
Board Utilities (within the Trello Garden)
Communication & Collaboration
Developer Tools
File & Cloud Drive Management
HR & Operations
IT & Project Management
Marketing & Social Media
Product & Design
Sales & Support

I'd be happy to tell you in more detail if you are interested – reach out in a PM if you need to know more. Meantime, try it out for free (Limit of 2 Power-Ups and limited team/collaborative functionality) A few hours in front of it should tell you fairly quickly how well it might scale for your purposes.

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Mark Talbot
Creative Director/Owner
Crestone CO
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Original Message:
Sent: 09-11-2019 06:26 PM
From: Skye Malish-Olson
Subject: Exhibition Designer Work Flow

Hi all, I would love to hear from other exhibition designers on the project management systems and software that they use daily.

Do you manage your own work flow in a program like Asana? Are your milestones and targets set by a specific department? How do you manage your day to day tasks as well as long term projects? Are there multiple project management softwares that you work between, to accommodate others?

Curious to hear how other designers use software to keep track of the details, manage their workflow internally, and manage their vendors externally.

Thanks in advance for sharing!

------------------------------
Skye Malish-Olson
Exhibition Designer
Dallas Museum of Art
Dallas TX
------------------------------