The need to improve how staff at UMMA managed and tracked their work was identified several years ago by the Museum Technology team as a pain point that was impacting efficiency, staff culture, and transparency. Though several attempts to prioritize solving for these challenges were proposed, other more pressing goals were always prioritized.

This perceived negative actually allowed the vendors providing SaaS work management solutions time to improve their product offerings as, at the time, there were no readily identifiable solutions. Three years ago, momentum gained speed and after evaluating over 30 products, UMMA settled on piloting Trello and Asana for a handful of self-contained projects and processes with smaller teams to evaluate each for feasibility. Though these pilots proved successful and Asana was proving itself to be the product that would best solve for our museum's need coupled with its staff's technical abilities, high-level staffing changes delayed the furtherance of this project for 20 months.

Reinvigorated by hires for two additional leadership positions, this project once again gained traction. Then COVID hit and progress was delayed another 7 months while staff pivoted to providing remote engagement opportunities for visitors. During these two interruptions, the staff that were exposed to project/process management principles and software continued making progress and their use of Asana/Google continued in a variety of areas and use cases. Other staff began to see the potential, and what we had planned to be a formal rollout became a grassroots adoption effort.

This complicated matters as there were equal parts staff FOMO and staff trepidation. Many early adopters became frustrated that this new way of working wasn't more widely adopted, encouraged, and enforced by management. This in many ways became an advantage as museum leadership by this time could not avoid formalizing the effort. At this point our Chief Curator partnered with the Senior Manager of Museum Technology to force the prioritization of this effort at the leadership level. A plan to formally evaluate the approaches and product was created and shared.

Due to competing priorities, the plan could not be executed as proposed and has since had to slow down its rollout, though tacitly management has agreed that Asana has become the de facto tool earlier than proposed in the timeline. Staff are now actively using Asana to plan and manage a wide variety of processes and projects across the museum and are actively working to codify best practices in anticipation of integrating Asana with our other infrastructure using its API.

The effort's ability to improve transparency and trust has been immeasurable. The adoption rate was much higher and the level of anxiety was much lower than anticipated.

Staff culture is improving as a result of the use of this tool. The replication of staff effort to both track work progress and communicate work status has been reduced significantly.

Surprisingly, the slow burn (almost a whisper campaign) of staff "hearing about" Asana and wanting to learn more—coupled with having an advocate at the right level in the museum's hierarchy—were crucial to this project's success.

When changing the way a museum staff manages, tracks, and shares status updates about its work, the professional development of your staff should be taken as seriously—both in terms of time and resource allocation—as a major exhibition. It pains me to look back at how much time and effort we could have saved if this project had been prioritized 2–3 years ago.

Yes. For the entire length of this project, we have emphasized that this effort has not been about learning how to use a specific set of tools or software, but rather about evolving the way the museum's staff approaches its work to best serve its visitors. Software vendors will come and go, but the thinking behind how to organize and approach our work has forever been changed for the better.