I would like to use the next 11 posts to discuss the primary and secondary project types an art service industry project manager could find themselves working on and how each facet of our industries variables and their relationship to risk affect how we manage a project.
Other industry projects are projects that fall outside of what we would consider our standard art industry forms and protocols. They are art industry projects that add a unique set of variables to the project management structure. Art-based projects do have more in common then they will have differences and approaching art-based projects as if they have a commonality to them, “the great universal art project”, is one of the things you will hear me preach. The similarities will exist in your primary considerations. As you initially analyze any project you should be looking for those things that are actuals and those things that are variables. Your actuals will be the items that would not change between project types. These could be the number or type of objects or the days allowed. The variables will be the items that change because of context. Variables will usually occur in the secondary or tertiary events of a project. Within the secondary and tertiary events are the specific traits that the different facets of our industry possess and that are important for you to understand in order to be a successful and well-prepared project manager. The core elements or similarities that each project shares will constitute about 70% to 80% of your total quote and budget. The variables will constitute the remaining 20% to 30% of your budget and they will make the difference between a failed and a successful project.
Project managers in all industries have a set of guidelines specific to their field that they consider when analyzing and quoting a project. In some industries the basic guideline is cost per square foot and for others it is cost per minute or GB used, the guideline for quoting art-based projects is time per object. All art industry project labor methods and scheduling are based on object type, scale and volume first, then compounded by all secondary and tertiary events. Your primary consideration is “How do I best handle, pack, and move this object?”. Your secondary consideration is “How do I best handle, pack, and move this object under these conditions?” Your third consideration is “How do I best handle, pack, and move this object under these conditions and based on these circumstances?”
Most art service projects are the relocation of a collection, a set of objects, that requires movement from point “A” to point ”B”. Your job is to devise a plan or a series of organized events to accomplish this movement safely and define the time and cost required to do so. How could the variables alter your approach? Ask yourself if you would plan a house move the same way you would a museum relocation? When considering the two you should be asking yourself, “what is similar, what is different, what changes enough to affect a quote and plan?” Up to a certain point all projects will have a similar plan since most art service projects share similar objectives and use similar methods. It is the variables of each project within the project’s context that will require the project manager to adapt their approach.
The variables I outline below should be a list you personalize based on your own experiences. Each project manager is also a variable within a projects plan. Our personalities, management skills and experiences will differ. In addition, there are variables between like enterprises and there are variables between individuals holding like titles. Variables add complexities to a project. Complexities manifest as time and money. Considering other industry projects will help you understand the secondary and tertiary differences that will affect your quote.
Most industry project managers, regardless of which part of the industry they work, would consider infrastructure or storage relocations or long-term traveling exhibitions as their standard projects. The structure and variables of these major projects are very similar when it comes to quoting and protocol, but a project can involve almost anything that requires coordinated planning within a set time line and with a budget.
Even if you are experienced as a project manager you may still encounter a project with unusual or aggressive secondary or tertiary characteristics that requires managing outside of your standard variables. This can often frustrate and throw even the best project manager off their game. Having experience with project diversity might happen more often when you work for a commercial art service company where flexibility is a requirement, than for a commercial gallery or a museum where project standards may be more rigid, but the lines have blurred between areas of the industry that used to shun each other. Staff throughout the arts have become more educated, skill sets more sophisticated and staff has become more interchangeable between institution types. Museums are looking for project managers experienced in commercially managing projects and commercial service companies are looking for project managers experienced in museum standards and protocols. In both cases the institutions are looking for individuals that understand the variables and can adapt.
What does change when you manage similar projects for different institutions? Your approach to that question should be; “I understand this project under typical circumstances, but how do these circumstances effect the result and how do I adjust the project to compensate?” As a project manager you gain little by identifying an institution in an artificial hierarchy of societal value. Even within similar institutions there are variable changes that affect your project. Success as a project manager depends on your ability to understand that every artwork, every installation, every shipment and every project is the number of objects multiplied by time divided by labor and then multiplied by an accumulation of variables. Your job is to recognize the universal or core variables, or shared similarities, of the project while simultaneously accounting for the variant variables, the unique qualities, that each new situation presents.
Consider that a project is a problem that has been handed to you to solve but unlike math where 1+1 always equals 2 regardless of which room you are in or what time of year you are doing the addition. A project changes based on the accumulation of variables. Even within the same institution an identical project is affected by time of year, time of day, staff temperament and department protocol. Time and seasons are easy variables to recognize when quoting or executing a project. There are then the subtler variables like staff size, temperament and protocol that will greatly affect your project and should affect how you approach the problem. Every institution will differ in context from other institutions. Rather than try to get your project to fit a pre-conceived mold It is always better to consider each new project based on its own merits.
Imagine a basic project. Let’s say you have been asked to deinstall, pack and ship five paintings from location “A” to location “B” then unpack and reinstall the same five paintings. The core of the problem is a labor divided by time problem. You need to consider the paintings packing and installation requirements, the transportation method and distance between locations and the two institutions protocols and physical construction. Once you have analyzed the problem you would have a number based on the existing information. Now imagine you have been asked to quote and plan for this to occur in the north east United States in the middle of winter and for the same location in the middle of summer. Ask yourself how the quote and plan change: do you need to include additional drive time, contingency days for last minute cancellations, does the packing need to change, does the staging area at the receiving location need to change? The project itself hasn’t changed but the variables that affect the project have and if the variables affect how the project is approached then they affect the quote and the project plan. Now imagine you have been asked to quote and plan the identical project to happen, but the five paintings are leaving your institution and headed to one of the following ten industry institutions. You would need to ask yourself how the quote would need to change to reflect the different locations? Doing this you would be asking yourself how the ten projects are different which is another way of asking, “what are the variables?”
Throughout this book we primarily discuss and compare museum and commercial gallery projects. They are the two poles of our field, but between these poles are many overlapping areas, each similar yet distinct and each with its own set of variables that alter our project. Let us consider how these parts of our industry are unique and what and how their variables are that affect and alter our approach to a similar project.
First, we need to define what characteristics are shared. What is expected is that your project regardless of who it is with will be a scheduled and budgeted series of events. A scope of work (SOW) is provided identifying the displaced objects and the expected project goal. A signed contract between the institution and the contractor guarantees the SOW and the project cost. You will also be expected to meet industry standards for art-handling and art movement. What is shared is your basic formula for cost which is: (Time x Labor) + materials + transportation = cost. What is variable is the relationship the various institutions have with the art object and the percentage of risk in handling and transportation they are willing to accept.
The qualities that define each new venue for your project either increases or decreases risk. This is of course not a set number. It is a number that is based on experience and familiarity. Ask yourself if scheduling your project on a warm sunny day has more or less risk than on a mid-winter day. There is greater risk just driving to work or walking up the steps to your office mid-winter. That doesn’t mean you are going to slip and fall, it means the odds of it happening are greater, so you have to take precautions. If you can acknowledge there is greater risk, then what in your experience is the percentage of increase? Most will average risk increase in the 10-20% range. If you agree that it is 10% riskier for you to drive to work in mid-winter what do you do? You control the risk by taking additional measures. You drive slower, you use different tires in winter, maybe you put your roadster in storage for the winter and switch to your four-wheel drive SUV. You know how to adjust based on what you perceive as small increases in risk. You know there is an increased risk, but this range indicates it is acceptable to continue. Now imagine you wake up to drive to work and you see there is a full-blown blizzard in progress. How would you rate your increase in risk now? If you said anything over 50% meaning you may make it to work but you expect problems or a 75% increase in risk meaning you know if you drive in the blizzard you will get into an accident or get stuck, then what do you do? If it is a 100% increase which means you’ll never make it, what do you do? If you know you have a greater chance of failing than succeeding, you should not take the risk. Your formula is now: ((Time x Labor) + materials + transportation) x risk = cost. There is always risk involved in any activity but when your chance of failure is greater than your chance of success you should not attempt the activity. There is one other consideration to your decision on risk. Risk is not the last word on whether we proceed. Risk in our industry is often balanced by reward. You may not drive to work in a blizzard knowing the risk is great but if you are offered a bonus to do so you now have to weigh the bonus against the risk. You are now faced with risk versus reward. What reward negates or balances the risk for you? Is an extra $100 worth the risk? If not $100 then $1000, $5000, a promotion. The reward for risk within a project is not usually monetary but there are rewards implied. The rewards may balance but they do not negate the risk. Cost is part of your formula and cancelations can increase cost to a project in the thousands of dollars and a project manager’s ability to successfully navigating around these losses often leads to bonuses and promotions. What I tell my students and trainees is that reward only balances risk if it is real. If there is no reward, there is only risk and bad decisions. By this I mean that project managers will take great risks that are invisible to their upper management. If the project manager succeeds no one will know that a risk was taken. If they fail everyone will know. That means the project manager took risk with no chance of reward but great chance of failure. There is no upside to this. Even if there is reward the reward is only achieved if there is success. If the risk is so great you don’t anticipate success, then there is no reward, there is only failure. If the options in front of you are that your risks are so great that your potential for failure is greater than that of success, then you don’t take the risk. Project managers are expected to communicate any risk to a collection and to offer the options required to navigate projects around small risks. They are expected to know enough not to accept risks 50/50 or greater, to communicate these great risks and to again offer options unless there is no other option and that needs to be stated. You are expected to know when to stop the project when the action that is being taken has little chance of success and is dangerous. In other words, it is your responsibility to stop an activity and proceed cautiously when an action has any risk potential and stop the activity completely when there is great risk and little percentage of success. It is also your responsibility to communicate these actions to your stake holders and to give them all the information and options available to weigh the risk and to make an informed decision. What constitutes risk is also variable and is contingent on the institution and the circumstances. Running with a baby in your arms is risky and something you normally shouldn’t do but if your building is on fire and collapsing around you running is the option with the least risk. Circumstances and location affect risk. You need to be aware of the entirety of a situation to be an effective project manager.
Risk and an institutions relationship with risk is the primary variable that differentiates the various entities of our industry and you need to understand this in order to manage their projects properly.
You will encounter ten distinct industry types that are unique in their personality, mission statement, protocols and relationship to risk. Each of these industry types have varying acceptances of risk. This does not mean that any one is riskier than another. It means that what might be considered great risk for one institution may not be considered risk for another based on other institutional variables like cost or time. In an industry where risk is not an issue preparing for that risk does not make you more cautious, it makes you slower and more expensive. An artist run non-profit gallery does not require or want the same protections that a museum does and as you approach the quote and planning for diverse institutions you need to understand this. What may be high risk methods for packing a museum’s china and crystal would be no risk using the same methods for a house move. In fact, it may be over-kill and not cost effective.
You should already understand your two primary project sources, 1. museums and 2. commercial galleries, but just in case we will discuss them below. There are then eight other project types that generate industry projects:
- Art fairs.
- Corporations,
- Government agencies,
- Auction houses,
- Private collections(collectors),
- Personal collections (house moves),
- Non-profits (foundations and universities),
- Artist studios (or estates).
In upcoming posts I will discuss each of the ten institutions. Some require more discussion than others. This isn’t a pro or con or versus list, that would not be helpful to you. Knowing how different industry projects differ will give you background for approaching a bid or quote and it’s important to understand that some require more managerial control than others but there isn’t one that is necessarily preferred over another. Understanding your job and having the flexibility to manage throughout the industry and at differing levels will be of tremendous benefit to you. I will discuss each of the ten based on their anticipated characteristics, their variables and what your expectations should be.
Next Blog post: Considering museums.
Chuck Agro - Project Management For The Arts 