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PART 2 - MANAGING THE VISITOR EXPERIENCE
- Rachel Mackay
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- Delivering the Visitor Experience
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- 17 December 2023
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Summary
In the second part of this book, we will move into examining the real meat of delivering the visitor experience: the day-to-day management of an operation and a team.
In Chapter 6, we examine the procedures we use to manage an operation and the all-important role of the Duty Manager. I’ll suggest some best practice, and a case study from world-class heritage attraction Stonehenge will show how service recovery can turn a situation round even when things go wrong.
Chapter 7 will explore the most important role of the Visitor Experience Manager: managing a team. We’ll look at motivation and performance management, both good and not so good.
In Chapter 8, I’ll use a case study from a previous role at Kew Palace to further explore how we look after our teams. In this instance, I will focus on the emotional wellbeing of our teams, and specifically, what we can do to safeguard this when dealing with exhibitions, collections and programmes that include challenging content.
Chapter 9 deals with that mainstay of museum visitor experience: the guided tour. We’ll look at the pros and cons of guided tours and use a case study from the highly successful Hidden London tours from the London Transport Museum to explore best practice.
Finally, we’ll look at what happens when that day-to-day management goes straight out of the window! Crisis management practice has been heavily impacted by the experience of COVID-19, so Chapter 10 reviews our learnings and suggests new best practice for keeping our crisis management plans and processes ready to go.
Index
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- Delivering the Visitor Experience
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10 - Crisis Management
- Rachel Mackay
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- Delivering the Visitor Experience
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Summary
You can never guarantee who's going to be there on the day or the night of the incident.
(Ann Fiddler, National Trust)One area where Visitor Experience teams are always called to play a leading role is crisis management. In any unexpected incident, you’ll find the knowledge of your team is crucial – as well as their practical experience of visitors, of the site and of what can be relied on to go wrong next! In this chapter, you’ll find out how crisis management practice has developed in museums and heritage sites, how the COVID-19 pandemic has turned that all on its head and, most importantly, what you can do to prepare your teams for the crises of the future.
Crisis management in museums: a history
To understand how to plan for what might happen in the future, we first need to look to the past. This is because all crisis management is based on past experience.
Having grown up in 1990s Scotland, when I took my first London museum job I was fascinated by the stories of my long-established colleagues. In amongst the ghost stories and historic staff scandals were the memories of operating in the years when the Irish Republican Army (IRA) posed a clear and present threat in English cities. My colleagues told me tales of evacuations, bomb scares and coded warnings. These features were the warp and weft of the crises of the time, and we still see their legacy today in museum crisis management plans.
On 11 September 2001 our understanding of terrorism changed. Coded warnings and anonymous phone calls were the luxury of a previous era. Counter-terrorism focused on suicide bombers and mobile phone-detonated devices; and museums did not find themselves exempt from these concerns. On 7 July 2005 bombers carried out an attack on the London transport network. However, at trial, the court heard that before the attack the perpetrators had also carried out hostile reconnaissance at a number of visitor attractions, including the London Eye and the Natural History Museum (Hough, 2008).
4 - Visitor Journey Mapping
- Rachel Mackay
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Summary
To truly understand the visitor's museum experience, it must be seen as a whole.
(Falk and Dierking, 2016, 174)Having recruited and trained up your dream team, it's time to turn our attention to the rest of the visitor experience.
Creating a new experience is unlikely to be a solo effort; in museums we work in collaboration to design and deliver every step of the visitor journey. In these early discussions, it's really important to centre the visitor in all decision making. In this chapter, we’ll explore one of the best tools we have to do this: the visitor journey map.
Why create a visitor journey map?
Most Visitor Experience professionals will be familiar with the concept of a visitor journey map, and for good reason. It's important for all of us, no matter how big or small our organisation, and regardless of our role within the museum, to take a step back and understand the visitor experience from an outside point of view. Of course, this shouldn't be something that happens just at the start of developing a new experience, so even if you’ve done this exercise before, it's worth revisiting. Museums are like eco-systems: the smallest change somewhere in the organisation can have a knock-on impact on the visitor offer, and it's good practice to anticipate this before it negatively affects the visitor.
If you haven't been through this process before, it's a simple enough exercise to carry out. Creating a visitor journey map just means sitting down to plan out the touchpoints of your visitor offer, thinking about what you want your visitors to experience at these touchpoints, and then seeing where the gaps in service are. To do this, you’ll need two important tools: a clear vision of how you want your visitor experience to look and feel; and an objective sense of what the current reality is (you can find out more about this in Chapter 12, ‘Measuring the Visitor Experience’).
At the end of this process, you’ll have your visitor journey mapped out. You’ll have some idea where problems might arise, and you might even know how to fix them. This clarity is exactly why it's important to go through this exercise collaboratively.
Contents
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5 - Ticketing, Capacities and Crowd Management
- Rachel Mackay
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Summary
I am not sure how we managed to work before these new systems!
(Steven Jugg, The Stained-Glass Museum)Although there are an increasing number of virtual museums these days, most of the museums we work in remain bricks-and-mortar buildings. There are, of course, lots of advantages to this: for many heritage sites, the bricksand- mortar and what once happened within them is the whole point of the visitor experience! But a physical building brings with it physical limitations. Many heritage sites were never designed, in form nor fabric, to welcome large numbers of visitors per year. Even in the largest, newest sites there is a finite capacity to the volume of people we can host.
These limitations have led to the development of an entire science devoted to how we can best manage capacity in our museums. The world of ticketing systems, pre-booking technology, and crowd management can often feel like a slightly intimidating body of water; deep, unfathomable and often murky. But it's well worth diving into, because applying just a few visitor management techniques could streamline the overall experience and make on-site processes much easier for your teams. In this chapter, we’ll take a look at some of these techniques and how they can make for a smoother, richer and above all safer visitor experience.
Capacity management
The first step to capacity management is knowing what the capacity is. There are a few different factors that might influence this. The first and more important will be the fire capacity. This is the number that the Fire Risk Assessment for your building says you are legally permitted to have in the building at any one time. It should take into account things like the activity undertaken by visitors (will people be standing or sitting, dancing or walking, eating or drinking alcohol?) and the number of fire exits, stairs, internal corridors, etc. Your Fire Risk Assessment is a critical document, so if the museum doesn't have the in-house resource such as a Fire Officer to carry it out, it's important to seek outside assistance from a consultant.
2 - Delivering a Great Induction
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How we welcome new colleagues to the Visitor Experience team is just as important as how we welcome our visitors.
(Emma Hermon, The Ashmolean Museum)Once you have recruited your dream Visitor Experience team, the next step is planning for their induction training. Delivering a thorough and well thought-through induction is crucial; both to welcoming new colleagues to your organisation and to giving them the tools they need to get started in their new job. However, it's important to know that we shouldn't let the learning stop there: training and professional development should be an ongoing part of any job. We’ll discuss that more in Part 3.
The induction period is of the utmost importance when it comes to setting the right tone for the employee experience. For museums that are open all year round, the period right before new staff start work is the longest uninterrupted period of time you will get to work with your team away from the floor, so it's well worth making the most of it. Most critically, in the induction period, you demonstrate the culture in which you expect your team to work, so the negative impact of delivering a rushed, ill-considered induction period can be huge.
Some museum and heritage organisations I have worked with or for spend up to a couple of weeks on new staff induction, and some as little as a couple of hours! Of course, every situation is different, and you will need to consider the amount of information you need to impart to your new team. One new staff member will obviously take less time, but if I am inducting a new cohort of Visitor Experience staff, I will probably set aside a week. In group inductions you are not only imparting the tools and information new staff need, you are facilitating the formation of important relationships: professional connections between you and your team, between them and their new colleagues, but also personal friendships and relationships that may outlast their time at the museum. It's probably the most valuable week they will spend at the organisation.
References and Further Reading
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12 - Measuring the Visitor Experience
- Rachel Mackay
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- Delivering the Visitor Experience
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Summary
What works for visitors? What doesn't work? How could we make it better?
(Emma Morioka)This part of the book is focusing on developing the visitor experience; in other words, assessing current performance, identifying ways of improvement and managing your teams and your resources to get you there. The first step of this undertaking has to be measuring the visitor experience you are delivering now. This chapter discusses some of the methods that might be used to gain such a measurement, and how the data you gather can be used to inform the way forward.
Museum evaluation
Measuring the quality of visitor experience is one part of the much bigger topic of museum evaluation, an area of research that has grown considerably in the last 20 years. In some cases, this has been driven by the requirements of funders such as the National Lottery Heritage Fund as they ensure that key goals are being met, but also by our increasing desire as museum profes - sionals to ensure we are staying relevant to our audiences’ needs. This includes measuring the visitor experience.
If you want to learn about museum evaluation more broadly, the Association of Independent Museums (AIM), Museums Galleries Scotland (MGS) and The Audience Agency (2021a) all have great free online resources. You can find links at the end of the book. For now, because museum evaluation is such a broad topic and we will be focusing on a relatively narrow section of it here, I thought it would be useful to provide a quick description of some of the terms commonly used:
• Primary research: This is direct research, straight from visitors to you.
• Secondary research: This is often desk-based research, using secondary sources such as historic evaluation data.
• Quantitative research: This type of research looks for data that can be expressed in numbers. It is great for measuring how many, or how much, but less good at telling us how or why.
• Qualitative research: Rather than focusing on numbers, this type of research ‘uses broader questions and themes and patterns’ (Parsons, 2020, 4). This data is better at answering the ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions.
• Segmentation: Segmentation seeks to understand visitor behaviour by categorising people into groups based on similar characteristics.
3 - Volunteering and the Visitor Experience
- Rachel Mackay
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It's not just a piece of paper telling visitors the history; it's somebody who lived and breathed it.
(Mel Oakley, Dundee Heritage Trust)Many museums across the world would not be able to offer the experience they do if it wasn't for the support of their volunteers. This support can range from a volunteer offer that adds value to the operation of a full staff team, to an entirely volunteer-run and -managed organisation. Wherever your museum sits on that spectrum, there's no doubt that volunteering is such a huge part of any museum visitor experience that it deserves its own chapter.
In the following pages, we’ll explore the use of volunteers in delivering the visitor experience, and how you can get the best out of your volunteer team. For the purposes of this, I’ll be focusing on how to manage a volunteer team alongside paid staff, although I know there are many small museums that are run entirely on a voluntary basis. Hopefully, some of the advice below will be useful for all concerned.
How to use volunteers
One of the first questions when considering volunteering in museums is how or when to use volunteers.
There are many reasons to bring volunteers into your organisation. They may bring new skills, knowledge and experience that you don't currently have in your employee pool. They widen your reach as an organisation, because if volunteers are socialising, gaining skills or having new experiences through you, it's all part of your engagement. This can then spread further, as the National Council of Volunteering Organisations (NCVO) point out on their website: ‘Volunteers are often part of the communities you work or fundraise in. By giving them a great experience, you can inspire them to become your greatest advocates’ (NCVO, 2021f).
One reason that shouldn't be a factor in using volunteers is the idea of ‘free labour’. This motivation can arise (unsaid or not) in museums in times of financial stress, for example after the lockdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. As the Heritage Volunteering Group (HVG) have stated:
[After COVID-19] there are concerns about job substitution, replacement and displacement and the role volunteers will be asked to play in the face of job cuts.
Introduction
- Rachel Mackay
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- Delivering the Visitor Experience
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Summary
Museums are for everyone. This is one of the most fundamental principles of working in museums today, and it's something that every single person working in the organisation plays a role in delivering.
When it comes to welcoming our audiences on site, and ensuring a great visit for everyone, our front-facing team members are at the coalface of delivering this principle. They are part of a team we have come to call ‘Visitor Experience’.
Or, at least, some of us have come to call it that.
One of the hardest things about writing this book has been the definition of Visitor Experience. The team that looks after visitors, front-facing staff and the day-to-day operation of the museum has different names in different places. Visitor Services, Visitor Engagement, Operations, Front of House? Those are just the most common names; there are many more. Staff working on the frontline also have different names: Visitor Assistants, Warders, Hosts, Explainers, Front of House?
Not only that, but to add further confusion, the teams that make up this department might be different too. Sometimes these departments might include Security, or Retail, or Facilities Management. Sometimes they won’t. Sometimes, in smaller museums, these are all the same people anyway.
We all have different preferences for what Visitor Experience means, but for the purposes of writing this book, I have had to come up with a couple of standard definitions.
For me, Visitor Experience is the name given to the people in the museum who look after the overall on-site visitor journey, ensuring that people who come to visit our museums have a safe, easy and enjoyable visit. I have come to split this responsibility into what I call the ‘hard’ Visitor Experience: the operational procedures, wayfinding, ticketing, and those twin banes of every Visitor Experience Manager's life, toilets and lifts. Then, we have the ‘soft’ Visitor Experience: our engagement with and delivery to our visitors; how we make our visitors feel welcome and personalise their experience through our interactions with them.
So, whilst sorting out definitions and names has been the tricky part of this book, the joyful, inspiring, life-affirming part has been writing about how we take on these responsibilities to look after the Visitor Experience.
13 - Creating a Visitor Experience Strategy
- Rachel Mackay
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Make your plan like bamboo… flexible to bend but not break in the wind.
(Brilliant Idea Studio)This section of the book is all about setting the vision and taking responsibility for developing the visitor experience at your organisation. However, this doesn't mean it's something you can do alone. Museums are always a collaboration. Different parties hold a stake in that vision, including staff, volunteers, trustees, audiences who visit all the time and audiences who haven't yet set foot in your museum. So, when it comes to developing the visitor experience, it's important to bring in different voices all the way through.
A really useful way of doing this is to develop and deliver a plan that sets out the organisational approach to Visitor Experience, brings in feedback and other views to articulate the current reality and sets the future direction.
Developing a plan like this helps you:
• bring in different voices and opinions
• develop a clear picture of where you are and where you want to go
• agree on what success looks like and how you will measure it
• plan and commit the resources you need to get there
• get buy-in from different stakeholders within the museum
• demonstrate the value of the visitor experience to the organisation and other stakeholders
• demonstrate how delivering on your visitor experience objectives can help realise the wider organisational vision.
Some museums will call this plan a ‘Visitor Experience Strategy’. It might be a lengthy stand-alone document, or for others it may be a smaller part of an overall business plan. Some museums have a whole suite of ‘strategy’ documents, some won't have any. It really doesn't matter what format your Visitor Experience Strategy takes. Although in this chapter we’ll look at some examples of how different museums and heritage organisations have articulated their strategies, what I’m really hoping to do is inspire you to have a deep think about where your visitor experience is going, and give you some tools to bring others along on the journey.
What is a Visitor Experience Strategy?
A good definition of a Visitor Experience Strategy comes from the introduction of the National Museum of Wales's own Strategy:
This document outlines our ambitions for Visitor Experience between 2018 and 2021. It defines our responsibilities to our visitors, through a Customer Service Charter.
1 - Recruiting Your Visitor Experience Team
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They had all the things I needed, because they could do customer service and they were passionate.
(Kayleigh McMahon, Margate Caves)Given that the most important element of delivering the visitor experience is the visitor-facing staff, it follows that the recruitment of that team will need to be considered with the utmost thought and care. In this chapter, we’ll look at how you can attract great candidates, run a fair and inclusive recruitment process and consider different ideas for selecting your team.
Types of hiring
The first thing to think about is how you will be hiring your team; in other words, the contract they will be on.
There are many types of contracts that you might want to consider, depending on the seasonality of your operation. For example, if staff are only needed over the summer, it would make sense to have a fixed-term contract. However, if needs are more likely to flex throughout the year, it would be worth looking into a mix of permanent and casual contracts. For full-time employees who work shorter hours in the winter for operational reasons, think about annualised hours. This means that not only would they get paid the same all throughout the year, your costs stay even too.
Whatever type of contract is chosen, the important thing is that it works for the business and that it works for the employee. Zero-hour contracts are an example of where, historically, this has not happened. The abuse of zerohour contracts is well documented. An interview published in The Guardian in 2017 reported that zero-hours workers can feel ‘disposable’ and even ‘bullied’ (Williams, 2017). It's true that if used properly these contracts can work for both parties; however, more often than not they can be seen as exploitative, especially if workers are expected to maintain availability without the promise of hours. Museums and visitor attractions have tended to move away from this kind of contract, and instead you should aim for an arrangement that benefits both the employer and the employee.
In the past few years, I’ve seen a lot of museums use agency staff for visitorfacing teams, and even been aware of organisations contracting out the whole department.
7 - Performance Management
- Rachel Mackay
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It's important that the customer is having fun, without a doubt. But it's really important that the staff have fun too, because that impacts the customer experience.
(Susan Morrison, Scotch Whisky Experience)Whilst people may be drawn to visit a museum by the exhibitions and collections, we know that the single biggest factor in delivering an exceptional experience and driving repeat visitation is the performance and behaviour of frontline teams. To quote the much-used maxim of Bernard Donoghue, CEO of the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, it's about ‘staff, not stuff’ (Donoghue, 2019).
It follows, therefore, that the most important part of managing the visitor experience is managing people and performance.
Performance management is sometimes understood as an HR process that often deals with the negative aspects of managing people; disciplinary procedures and managing people ‘out’. However, like most topics I’m exploring in this book, performance management is much broader than this. It covers the managing of positive performance as well as negative, and takes in motivating teams (especially important during the quiet months of a museum operation) as well as ensuring that we as managers are developing the skills we need to support others.
Performance management should not be seen in isolation, but in the wider context of museum life. There is a clear connection between organisational culture and how staff are performance-managed. An organisation that has to deal with lots of negative performance challenges will very often find the root of the issue in the wider culture and, likewise, an organisation that generally treats its employees well will find itself with fewer disciplinary issues to contend with.
It's also important to see performance management as one part of the whole employee journey. In this book, we cover recruitment and induction in Part 1, performance management here in Part 2 and continuing professional development in Part 3. But it's really important to remember that these activities all fit together into the life cycle of one employee, and that one section can and does impact on another (Figure 7.1).
Acknowledgements
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Frontmatter
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15 - Innovation and Visitor Experience Teams
- Rachel Mackay
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Innovation is not for geniuses working alone. It is a group activity.
(Theodore Henderson, Forbes)One of the most effective things that can be done to make sure your visitor experience is constantly evolving and improving is to foster a culture of innovation within your teams.
When we talk about innovation, the tech sector is probably the first thing that jumps to mind. Even when people talk about innovation in the museum sector, they often focus on technological advancement. For example, when describing the use of innovation by recipients of Art Fund money, an article in The Guardian in February 2022 talked about development of apps to make collections remotely accessible, interactive exhibits and the launch of virtual field trips (Bakare, 2022).
However, innovation doesn't necessarily have to mean high-tech and highbudget. Merriam-Webster simply defines innovation as ‘introduction of something new’, whether that be a device, method or idea (Merriam-Webster, 2022). So, you don't need to be Apple or Google to be an innovative organisation. You just need to be open to trialling new ideas.
The benefits of innovation
Innovation isn't something that should only happen in the board room. Great ideas can come from anywhere, and if you are looking to solve problems in your visitor operation, what better think tank than the people who work on the frontline of that operation every day? If you are open to innovation from all levels in your museum, you’ll gain access to the wide range of knowledge and experience in all your employees.
Not only that, but fostering a culture of innovation has great benefits for employee engagement. By encouraging new ideas, you can demonstrate that you place value on the thoughts and suggestions of your team, and that you are willing to try things out to solve the problems that are important to them. People need to feel that they have agency in their work. For frontline teams, whose work is often restricted to specific locations and times, it's really important to find authentic opportunities to give them that. Being able to see an idea through from beginning to delivery is a great development opportunity for your employees, and we already know that if you can give your staff opportunities for genuine engagement, they are likely to stay engaged longer, and ultimately stay with you longer.
PART 1 - CREATING THE VISITOR EXPERIENCE
- Rachel Mackay
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Although many of us work at museums and heritage sites that have been around a lot longer than we have, sometimes we will come across the opportunity to create a visitor experience from scratch. This might be in the form of a new exhibition or offer within an existing site, or when opening a brand-new attraction for the first time.
Creating a visitor experience from the beginning is an amazing opportunity. It allows you to set the tone of your offer and the culture of your workforce. It allows you to get all the processes and procedures in place exactly as you like them, without having to battle with pre-existing ways of doing things.
However, setting up everything from the beginning is also a lot of work. And, because many Visitor Experience professionals have been in this position as well, there's no need to reinvent the wheel in every area. This first part of the book allows you to learn from best practice when it comes to creating your visitor experience, using case studies from organisations such as the Postal Museum and the Ashmolean to help inform your work.
But this part isn't just for those starting from scratch. Going back to basics is a great way to audit a visitor experience you are already managing. So, whether you are an experienced Visitor Experience Manager or brand-new to the sector, there will be something you will find useful in this section.
Visitor Experience is all about people. Therefore, the first three chapters of this book explore the most important factor in delivering amazing visitor experiences: getting your Visitor Experience team in place. Using case studies from Margate Caves and Verdant Works: Scotland's Jute Museum, we’ll explore how to recruit and induct staff and volunteers, using processes that build diverse and enthusiastic teams.
Then, we’ll start to look at the experiences, beginning with a detailed look at visitor journey mapping. This tool can help us ensure we are considering our new experience (or our current ones) from the visitor point of view.
Finally, we’ll take a look at setting up those nuts and bolts of the visitor experience: ticketing, capacities and queues, using a case study from the Stained-Glass Museum to show that great technological solutions don't have to break the bank.
16 - Change Management
- Rachel Mackay
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Summary
Being armed with an understanding of the context means that you’re much more likely to develop a plan of action that will land successfully.
(Claire Lane, The Ashmolean Museum)In Part 3 of this book, we’ve talked a lot about developing the visitor experience. An unavoidable part of this development is organisational change, and taking your visitor offer or your visitor-facing teams from where they are now to where you want them to be. Change management is a huge topic, and one that many books have focused on in detail. But as change is such a crucial part of making visitor experiences better, I think it's important to talk about it here. In this chapter, you won't find an in-depth discussion of change management or an exhaustive list of change models. You will find, however, an overview of what change management is, and an exploration of how some of the most popular models and techniques can be utilised when managing change around the visitor experience.
What is change management?
‘Change’ in the Visitor Experience setting can mean many things, including:
• opening a new exhibition or experience
• closing a space temporarily or permanently
• internal team restructures
• changes in working conditions, such as hours, uniform or benefits
• stopping a programme, such as tours, or starting a new one.
However, it can also include any type of change; big or small. The Association for Project Management (APM) defines change management as ‘a structured approach to moving an organisation from the current state to the desired future state’ (APM, 2017, 5). The reason the APM advocates a ‘structured approach’ to the bit in between the current state and the desired future state is that it's by far the most complex part. If you lead a Visitor Experience team, you might think that you should be able to drive change just by articulating it. Unfortunately, most of us know that is almost never the case. Or, you might think that your background of operating in the ever-changing, unpredictable world of Visitor Experience gives you all the skills you need to manage change without the help of a formal model.
Figures, Tables and Case Studies
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