Use Journey Mapping to Create Change Across Departments, Programs, and Teams

Unknown Speaker 00:00
So thank you all for coming. We're kind of we're excited to talk about this topic today. So what we're going to be sharing is how we use journey mapping to create change across departments, programs and teams. And I'm Liz McDermott, and I'm head of revenue media at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. And these are my colleagues.

Unknown Speaker 00:21
I'm Andrew Darlington, I'm head of Special Collections Management at the Research Institute.

Unknown Speaker 00:26
And I'm Tracy Schuster, head of permissions and photo archive services at the Getty Research Institute.

Unknown Speaker 00:32
So today, we're going to share with you what journey mapping is. And it's a process that's typically used for mapping the customer or visitor journey. But we're going to share about how we used it as a problem solving tool across eight different departments. We've left plenty of time at the end for q&a. So we've just got a kind of mini formal presentation. So feel free to ask any and all questions. We're not going to be tweeting ourselves during the session. I'm not that Agile to do that. But my Twitter handle is on the slide if anybody feels like commenting. So first, just a little bit of background, the Getty Research Institute, where we all work is one of the four programs of the Jay Paul Getty trust. Most of you are probably familiar with the Getty Museum, that's the most well known program. Or maybe you might know of us from the infamous Getty fire last week, which we all survived, we're happy to be here today. The Getty is visited by about 1.8 million people a year. And it's the largest philanthropic organization in the world that's dedicated to the visual arts. So we're located in that building on the far back there. And here's a little better view of where we work. And there's about 250 of us at the Research Institute. So we do have the largest art library in the world. For example, if you laid our Special Collections end to end, they're more than seven miles long. Right now we have millions of objects, rare objects and their date from the 15th century to the present day. And then we host scholars from all over the world to conduct research on our campus, and we put on exhibitions and we publish books. And we also host public events. So our website shares about all of this and also provides free access to 11 research databases, digitize books and rare objects. So we also produce online exhibitions, like our most recent one there on the upper left about the Bauhaus, and then interactive digital projects, such as the one on the upper right, that allows the user to select from costumes and music and choreography to create a 3d customized performance of what was called the triadic ballet. And then in gallery mobile tours, like the one on the lower right, that's in Spanish and English and was created for the metropolis and Latin America exhibition. Okay, so our challenge, so like, most of our organizations these days, especially nonprofits like us, we're really struggling to get caught up with the digital 21st century. So at the Getty Research Institute, we have some departments that still completely operate with paper files, some of us that are 100% in the cloud, and then some of us that are a combination of both. So our deputy director asked us to think about how we might improve all of this and work together to bring our entire institute up to speed. So not an easy task. We wanted to share this with you. This is an example of one of our org charts, we have a lot of departments. It's very complicated. And this one is from FY 2018. And it's expanded and changed since then, and will continue to change with our new director, Mary Miller. So some departments that you see on here, like library Technical Services, they've been in existence for more than 20 years. But then we have other departments like digital humanities that are only a few years old.

Unknown Speaker 04:00
So I was asked to chair a group comprised of heads of departments from the org chart that you just saw. Because in one way or another digital touches, touches on and affects all of us and every department. So we formed the digital working group. The DWG, as we call it is a leadership group with members bringing areas of subject expertise that include digital humanities, research, research services, systems, metadata, digital services, rights and copyright, web and social media, curatorial and collection management. We all have really different skills and we bring different perspectives, which strengthens the group but also presents challenges. The DWG s submits recommendations to a digital steering committee that can authorize funding as needed. It was very much a cross disciplinary group, with as I said, representatives from all All across the organization and all three of us were part of that group. Our first step was to create a mission and vision statement that you see here. And we kept talking and talking and talking some more about how to realize this kind of digital vision. But as we talked and talked and talked, and tried to think about where to start with all of the various challenges, it started to feel like this. Trying to just talk about it and figure out what to do and where to start was a bit like trying to untangle a pile of yarn. Many of us didn't know about the complexities of the various departments, and how some departments had evolved processes based on staff cutbacks, going back to 2008. And then other departments had workflows that evolved out of necessity, or as workarounds that had over time become the standard way of doing things. And a lot of our departments had developed policies and workflows that might work within the department, but we weren't aware of how they were affecting the other departments. So Liz made the suggestion that we tried journey mapping, and I had never heard of journey.

Unknown Speaker 06:13
So people in the room who might not have tried journey mapping before, this is a pretty good definition that I found. It's a process for creating at its most basic, just a process for creating an infographic that documents and allows the analysis of each step of a complex process. So there's lots of examples that you can find online for how it's been used for the visitor or the customer journey. So I just thought I'd share this one this is from a few years ago, this one was done by the Getty Museum, to get a sense of the various touch points that a visitor might make when they're visiting the Getty Center. So this one that the journey map starts from when a visitor first sees a street banner or social media post or print advertising about an exhibition to then when they decide to plan a visit, then they come to the center, walk around the center and then go back home. So they documented that journey. So rather than a visitor or customer journey, we thought we might conduct what we were calling a collections journey map. So and map a journey, a collection takes through all of the various departments. From the time it's been acquired by a curator to one at a dry arrives just even at the receiving docks at the Getty Center all the way through to when it appears as an image on our website. So we thought if we did this process, it might really help us well, first of all, just learn about what all of the other departments are doing. Help us build understanding between each other about all of our challenges, and then provide visual evidence of gaps and workflows and those dreaded pain points, and then provide a framework for us to develop solutions together.

Unknown Speaker 08:00
We decided to use the Richard a Sims collection as the focus of our journey map. The collection acquired from Mr. Sims consists of about 100 original etchings, woodcuts, lithographs, and drawings by Keita COVID. It's one of the great artists of the modern period. And shameless plug here will be featuring many of these prints in an exhibition we have opened in December 3, called Keita COVID, prints process politics. We chose this collection, because it's relatively small for us. We have archival collections that are the size of a football field. And we also selected this one because it seemed at the time to have fairly uncomplicated copyright situation, although that proved not to be entirely true.

Unknown Speaker 08:48
Yeah. As we discovered in our journey mapping, okay, so initially, we thought we would, our group would meet for an hour and then maybe over a few weeks, we will put together this nice map. But we quickly discovered that the collections journey, just getting it from the docks to inside our building had so many steps. So we decided to block off half a day, and just really roll up our sleeves and get it done. So our goal is to unpack all of the steps and then see if we could come up with the top five to seven things that we might do. So for journey map, you want to capture what's called the entire ecosystem. And so that means every single person who was involved with or touched the Sims collection in some way along the journey, so you want to capture exactly who was involved exactly what they did, what tools they used, and how long it took. So as you can see the tools up here to create a journey map, a really low tech. So the Getty Museum journey map that I showed you, was worked on by a designer to make it look really pretty, but they started with the same tools that I'm showing weaning guys on the slide. All to say there are really no entry barriers to doing it, you don't need a special app or special software program, you just need a lot of paper, colored sticky notes, and a timer to keep things on track. I'll explain about that in a minute. And then just some willing participants. So this is an example of the very beginning of our journey map. On our map, as you can see here, we also drew a line. And so everything above the line is the timeline in the location, and then below the line where all of the activities and the departments and the tools that were taking place at a given location. And I know it's a little bit hard to see all the things on here. So Andrew is going to just walk us through like the first couple of columns, you can see the kinds of things that we captured. So the first column

Unknown Speaker 10:50
if, if it indicates that this process started at the docks where we aren't shippers arrived with the collection, someone from Getty logistics called the registrar's who met the shippers at the dock and escorted them to a GRI vault with the collection. All fairly straightforward. Once the collection was safely in a boat, the registrar notified Mr. Simms from whom we acquired the collection, and the curator via email, the registrar assigned the number to the collection and entered basic information in TMS or collection management system for acquisitions. All of that happened in about one hour. So that's the first column. The second column happened in about over about two weeks, when the curator checked the material in literally going through piece by piece to make sure that we received everything we were supposed to receive, then the registrar finalized the loan agreement. And at this point, the collection is still only on loan to the GRI while the acquisition is being proposed and approved by our board of trustees. I will I could go on and on. But I'll stop there because you don't have half a day for this process.

Unknown Speaker 12:06
So so as the facilitator, when I was helping to conduct this whole journey mapping process, and working with the group, it was just basically my job to keep asking questions. So where's the collection now? At the dock? Okay, so then you fill out the sticky note and you place it above the line because that was its location. All right, well, how long was it there? As you can see, there was a point on here, you can see that where it spent months with curatorial. So some of these steps, like she was saying was an hour, some a week and some many, many months. So what was really great about the process is that everyone participated. And then we all learned a lot about what's happening in our respective departments. I mean, I know for me personally, in my department, I see everyone's really busy, but I'm not exactly entirely sure what everybody's doing. I mean, I had no idea that the curators spend literally months in one of our vaults, just with a single collection, for example, that was new for me. Alright, so the other key part of this journey mapping process is you really also want to document how everyone felt about every single aspect of the journey. So that means how we felt about the departments that we work with, the tools that we're using, and the actual steps that we're taking. So as you can see by these little colored dots here, green, green, meant we're happy with this, we're happy with it yellow, we were neutral and red is we really hated it. So our next step as a group was to place a colored.on every single process of the journey map. I don't know if you can see from there, but as you can see, we had a lot of red dots. And there's one sticky note in which the work process was really so unpleasant for us. And that's filling out a paper form to get the digitization process going. So we're still kind of there, we put two red dots on that one for emphasis. So with our journey map, we got our collection, from the docks, to the point of getting a digitized image up and on the web and to the press. That's great. But this journey map actually didn't get close to documenting how this collection would pass through the research projects department, or to getting an exhibition up and in the galleries, or one of our books published. But the map was already so long, just getting it to that stage. And we had so many processes that we were able to document on this kind of handmade infographic and we had so many red dots. That that's we thought, okay, let's just stop. So then let's do a little analysis for totally overwhelmed paths. So we broke up into teams of three, three people on each team. And then each group was assigned to one specific section of the journey map. And their job was to kind of look at all of those red dots and conduct done analysis, basically looking at all those pain points and then write a high level summary of the problem. These are a few examples here, for example, collections that bypass normal workflow, that was definitely a pain point for us. So each group was given 10 minutes to complete the exercise. And that's where that timer I showed you early comes in really handy. So the idea behind setting a really limited amount of time is it doesn't give people too much time to stop and word parse everything, it's just enough time to get to the point and really capture the big ideas. Okay, so then each team took their findings, and they map them to a high low grid. and a high low grid is where you look at things that are high prior, are there anything that's maybe high priority, but maybe a low level of efforts, you put it in that square, or were there any that were high priority and difficult, but maybe they're so important, that they're really worth pursuing now. So that's when you bring out the timer again, and each team had 10 minutes to sort those findings onto a grid. And then the purpose of this exercise was to get a very quick visual of where we might want to put all of our efforts. Okay, so the first thing you might notice, as you can see from this is pretty much everything was deemed high priority, and almost everything was deemed really difficult. And then for that team in the middle there, you can see there, the line, they moved it down, because they had so many difficult things to capture it. So yeah, so what was really illuminating actually, for all of us working together to do this, is that we could look at it together and go, Okay, we're not crazy. All of this is really difficult, and really complicated to try to solve. We could then make sure that we're really not operating under any kind of false assumptions about anything about how easy any of this is we have the visual evidence that we've all put together.

Unknown Speaker 17:04
And then each t okay, that's so after we did that each team then presented their high low grid or our larger group. And then the group kind of voted on and we selected the top three issues from each of those grids. And so what was really useful about doing that exercise is it really gave us that big picture overview. And we could just drill it down into here's quantifiable, quantifiable projects. And here's things we can do right now, to create and make some, you know, positive change. So here they are, zanamivir hand, we wrote them out by hand, and here they are typed up neatly. So then what we did is for each of these issues that we drill down to we created subgroups, with each of them having a chair. And so the people in our working group that we already had, who could lend helpful expertise would join one of these subgroups. And then in some instances, we bought brought in people that were from outside of our working group who could help us out. For some of these, the chairs thought it would be pretty straightforward to figure out, but it hasn't always actually been the case, we're going to talk about that a little bit. But in other instances, a chair who's actually in the room here, was moved to another division at the trust. So we she no longer works at the Research Institute, so we had to regroup a little bit. But for many of these, we're still chipping away. And so for example, I'm going to turn it over to Tracy, who was chairing one of these and she's going to share a little bit about the work they did.

Unknown Speaker 18:35
So I cheered the image rights subgroup. And based on the journey map for our section, we identified a number of copyright issues that blocked the GRI is ability to quickly produce digital files from newly acquired special collections materials. Often these files are needed for time critical uses, such as press releases, and other promotional and internal purposes. So once we prioritize the issues in our group, we discussed possible solutions that we then brought back to the full digital working group for further conversation and recommendations. These meetings resulted in several proposals that would require a bit more investigation by our subgroup, such as obtaining feedback from staff outside the working group, and the approval from the steering committee. Firstly, we recommended creating a position for a rights analyst who would be the central person for gathering rights and licensing information related to new acquisitions. We also decided that the rights analyst would be responsible for creating a rights Assessment Checklist to assist staff with conducting preliminary copyright research on special collections materials, provide basic copyright training for relevant staff and assist with trust wide internal projects as necessary. Another challenge we identified the law lack of an institutional policy for applying fair use for digital reproductions of copyrighted materials in our collection made it much more difficult or impossible to use digital images prior to receiving fully executed acquisition documents. Through the work of our subgroup, and with the approval of our IP counsel, we were able to increase the size of thumbnails for internal purposes. In addition, no further fair use analysis is required for us to use the larger thumbnails in the Research Libraries catalog. And lastly, we addressed the issue of unreliable rights information found in various pre registration documents, by adding boilerplate language to our non exclusive license agreements that enable the rights holders to grant us permission to digitize a few images immediately, for those time, critical, institutional and promotional purposes.

Unknown Speaker 20:56
Okay, thanks, Tracy. All right, she just gave you a whole dense summary. As you can see, that was one subgroup. And they're very complicated issues, dealing with legal and fair, fair use, and just very, very, super complicated issues. So anyway, all in all, we wanted to share a little bit about the lessons learned. I mean, there were some very positive outcomes from doing this process together. But there were also some challenges we wanted to share about a little bit. So first of all, if you if you guys decide to do a journey mapping process with a big group of people, for me as a facilitator, and I think for some of the team members, it was a little bit hard to stay on the analysis and not jump to ideas and solutions. Because you start, we start to see the gaps right away. And it's really easy to dive in and do that. I mean, that was a really nice problem to have. But it's really, it's because but it's easy to get lost in the details. And it's really important to just stay on that analysis piece. Another challenge that we've had is that some of the people that we've pulled into the subgroups after our journey mapping process, the people that we pulled in outside to help tackle the issues weren't part of the original journey mapping. And they're coming into it a bit cold, and they lacked the context that we had. So we kind of wonder if maybe there's more, we should have done about that. We haven't quite figured that one out yet. Because by the end of the journey, mapping, were all very kind of Kumbaya and friendly, and we've kind of understood each other, we were ready to work together, and then we bring in outside people, and they were sort of like, Wait, I don't, I don't get it. So that's taken us a little bit of time. And then to time, the time to actually do the journey mapping process. It is a commitment. I mean, on the one hand to spend five hours at a retreat to unpack and quantify problems that have existed in some cases for decades. Okay, that's a short amount of time investment. But on the other hand, I mean, all of us kind of had to admit that none of us really have like, ooh, five hours to spare. And then it's been really challenging to have the time afterwards to really follow up properly in these subgroups. I mean, I mean, the irony of all of this is that some of our time problem is because we have these broken workflows, and we are trying to fix them. And that's what kind of does monopolize our time. So we do need to do the work to sort it out. But it is a little bit of a chicken and egg situation. So. But on the positive side, I mean, we can really say that the journey mapping gave us a really good process for working with a lot of people coming from a lot of different perspectives, to just untangle all that yarn, so to speak. And it allowed us to clearly see documented a visual roadmap, and it was became obvious to everybody what all the gaps are, and the frustrations. And it gave us something tangible to point to and to work with. And then from there, we could just take it and really break it down into quantifiable issues, and then create the subgroups. So kind of funny, following up a little bit on the keynote speaker this morning. I mean, I think for all of us, we talked about it, maybe the most important thing that came out of all of this is empathy. I mean, it just gave us a deeper understanding of everyone's woes, and the processes that we all try to deal with every day. And, you know, I mean, the empathy is really the glue for the problem solving, right? I mean, you can't have too much empathy. So. So that's, that's our main presentation. So we're wide open for any questions you guys might have about, about what we did. So thank you. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 24:45
So check this with this one collection, and how what how scalable was this to other workloads? Like what you learned here, how were you able to apply for brown already? Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 25:01
So that's a great question. So I don't know if everyone could hear he asked how could we were we able to take what we came up with in this one collection and apply it more broadly? And and you guys can answer to but the short answer is yes. Because the reason we chose this one collection is, we figured the problems that are kind of embedded in that collection are kind of endemic to everything we have. And so a lot of the solutions we're working on are applicable for everything that we're working on.

Unknown Speaker 25:32
For instance, the deciding or proposing to hire a right to analyst which came out of the image rights subgroup, we actually did that. So we have the rights analyst and the rights analyst then spins off into projects that go well beyond the Sims collection. And in fact, we use the journey mapping process, just she and I working together. On a smaller journey map I'm having to do with handling access requests for an reformatted audiovisual material. So we already just the two of us, the new the new staff person coming in myself used the journey mapping for a much smaller workflow that needed a lot of help. So

Unknown Speaker 26:13
yeah, the idea was very much that these solutions would be applicable to all physicians or most.

Unknown Speaker 26:20
Yeah, is there like a centralized way that you like, once you identified a problem, and then had a plan for how you wanted it to change? Was there a centralized place that you like documented that process change so that it could be referenced by other, like people throughout organizations and

Unknown Speaker 26:39
the chair of each subgroup produced documentation that's all maintained in Confluence, where we have a space for the group? And then we reported on each one to the steering committee as well?

Unknown Speaker 26:58
Yeah, we're from Chicago. In Chicago, we're doing kind of a little bit of similar concepts like to fix what bugs you program just said, Anyone that's good all over the aquarium just send in like what is getting on your nerves filtered out. And of course, it's things like registration process, contracts, purchasing these big buckets. And so now there are the teams that are going through and there are addressing them, one of my concerns, is a little bit like I'm on the team that's re imagining how we might do event planning. And I'm, when we're talking through it thinking about processes that exist in other places, and working around those processes. Or, you know, in thinking about how, if you have all of those different issues that you're trying to solve, how making a change in one area might make the change, you've figured out in another area no longer makes sense. So I'm just curious about how you were I mean, really able to incorporate just the the breadth of processes that were probably impacting teams that were impacted by even small changes?

Unknown Speaker 27:58
Well, it's a good, it's a great question. And that's actually one of the reasons why we decided to do the journey mapping between with our working group. So this working group that Andrew is chairing it's, it's one of us from every department at the Getty Research Institute, it's a lot of different departments, in exactly to your point, I mean, I'm off doing one whole thing, and we don't, I'm not realizing Whoa, it might be having a terrible impact on these guys for a variety of different reasons. So that's a good reason to actually instead, it's instead of just sending in one off, like you're talking about the bug complaints, it was good to just kind of all sit together, so you can actually document it as a group. And then it becomes really clear where things are impacting other departments. And then

Unknown Speaker 28:43
once we formed the subgroups, a lot of them had overlapping membership for that reason. So you could, there would be someone on in one group who would be able to say, you know, that kind of conflicts with what we're doing, or let's put this on hold until they figure that thing out. And then we can move forward at that point. So there's actually there's one subgroup for instance, that Liz chairs, that kind of depends on us getting a rush imaging workflow in place, which sounds straightforward, but has not proved to be as simple as it sounds. My

Unknown Speaker 29:18
subgroup has been the biggest fail I think. We're still struggling along I it's been so complicated,

Unknown Speaker 29:25
but it's because of the dependencies exactly like you were saying,

Unknown Speaker 29:29
the dependencies and I think also to when I was talking about when the challenges we have a few people that came to the group that weren't part of the journey mapping process. And I think maybe that's been some there's been a little bit of resistance just because of the lack of the empathy and really understanding at a deep level. How all of these decisions you're making really impact like 2030 people down the road so

Unknown Speaker 29:50
and like Liz's group was what was what Liz does actually relies on this time critical need for digital images from thing Things that we may not even fully own yet. So that was one of the issues we identified in the image subgroup was to figure out a way to be able to get her digital images much more quickly, maybe even before all lot of formal paperwork was done. And that's what so we came up with some ideas, almost specifically to help her and her staff do what they need to do.

Unknown Speaker 30:24
Yeah, yeah. How often?

Unknown Speaker 30:25
Did you sort of present your train of thought to the different stakeholders? Or do you feel that it sounds like all the different departments were represented in one way or another? But if there was ever a subgroup who was working on a process that impacted a team that didn't have representation, how often? or to what extent did you try to get there by plan?

Unknown Speaker 30:48
When we first got the subgroups up and running? We did pretty much quarterly updates of the different subgroups, the digital working group that the subgroups are part of meets weekly. Except this week, because we're here all here. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 31:09
The digital working group, I thought you said that was sort of its genesis came from an executive of museum that said, let's come together and try to work through some of these things. Do you have any advice for if you are not an executive in your museum, but you see a need for such collaboration?

Unknown Speaker 31:32
Well, okay, yeah. So this was our Deputy Director at the Research Institute. Yeah. So it was very helpful that he saw that. You know, the challenging part, even for someone like him, who's who's fairly sympathetic to what we're trying to do. It's not the exciting stuff, right? It's not like this, that shiny new object thing. It's the stuff that's the day to day grind, that makes our jobs really difficult to do. Having that journey map, though, I found is very compelling to show even to executives that maybe don't, if you try to get buy in, if you can show look, you want to get here. But look at all these areas that are broken, we've, I found that really useful, because it's kind of providing like a visual and empirical data from their, our own staff about what's happening or not happening.

Unknown Speaker 32:24
And maybe to focus on outcomes as well, like, you know, it's going to improve efficiency. And it's going to lead to, I mean, so for advocacy, if you can focus on how it's going to improve the situation. And maybe,

Unknown Speaker 32:41
yeah, from what I remember about the way the digital working group started. It was sort of known institutionally that there were these pain points. And so there was sort of a mandate that came from above, to put a group of people across the GRI together to kind of look into how we could meet certain goals, certain institutional goals. But I don't think that one necessarily has to start that way. One could start by just, you know, supervisors or whomever, identifying people who could get together in a group, and start such a thing as a journey map, and then have that to actually present to senior staff to say, Hey, this is why we can't get done, what you need us to get done, perhaps we need some sort of a charter, or, you know, some some assistance from you to make these things happen. Because it's so much of it is about awareness. And we didn't sort of come up with the idea of the digital working group out of thin air, it's that all of these problems had been presented in one disguise or one form or another to senior staff for a long time. And it took a long time to kind of gel and become a mandate, but you wouldn't necessarily have to wait for that.

Unknown Speaker 33:55
Hoo, hoo, who makes up the steering committee? Does that executive leadership?

Unknown Speaker 33:58
Yeah. Yeah. The director, Deputy Director and three associate directors, is that the whole leadership or just that's for the Research Institute?

Unknown Speaker 34:11
Program? Yeah. Yeah. Hi. So exposing the pain points from one department to another department is fantastic. And building on empathy, and then we sort of make sense to bring other people on to the working groups who haven't had that experience. So how do you plan to continue to spread it?

Unknown Speaker 34:37
That's a great question. Debra works with me. I'm gonna pick it I don't know. Actually, on that up, I would love I would love to hear ideas because it's, we found it was so successful and it would be great to open that up and just have it be part of our normal working day instead of some special thing that we're understanding each other and what our problems are I mean, I'd be curious if you guys have thoughts on that. It's odd that we have to sort of formalize it into now we're going to sit down and understand each other and that we have this tool to help us do. That's kind of seems to be where we're all at right now and in the tool did help, but it's true. It's still somewhat a formalized tool to sit down and be able to do that together. Yeah, no, and ideas, any ideas? Do you know?

Unknown Speaker 35:33
So when you're exposing all the pain points?

Unknown Speaker 35:35
Yeah, you're writing out all the constants,

Unknown Speaker 35:39
and you're voting on saying, like seeing the various departments. I have suddenly, I may use it as a kind of abandoning your own pain points, and realizing perhaps the pain points from another department where people are even more important to you, then you have to realize,

Unknown Speaker 36:02
oh, yeah, we're all nodding vigorously. Yes. So the thing that's great about it is it takes all that away, because of course, everybody walked in the room with their own sets of ideas, and prejudices may be an issues. But then once we were tasked with just focusing on on these mapping everything out, it just right away becomes so obvious that we're all sharing in exactly the same situation. And then that all just melted away. And like 10 minutes, whether it was a curator or reference librarian, there was on Tim person finger pointing,

Unknown Speaker 36:37
I think this is something we were talking about, just in preparation. Because you're just going through the kind of the factual steps of your workflow, that it was easy to recognize that everybody has challenges. And I think in our other attempts to do something similar, that kind of workflow analysis that often ended up with finger pointing, which is so unproductive. And so this was a great way I think of just kind of conveying the idea that we all have challenges, and we might need to address your challenge before we can get to mine or vice versa, was, that's the empathy. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 37:17
I mean, I started out like, why is it so hard? We work at this huge place? Why is it so hard for me and my team, just to get one image that we need that's been digitized? Because the New York Times is calling, we should have something we can send to them? But then I find out well, wow, the I think it's changed since then. But the process of digitization where objects set on a counter top, that people would just sit there, and then they'd swap them around. And I was like, I was pretty shocked by that. And then and then it's like, oh, a paper form is filled out in triplicate, like, Wow, no wonder it's so hard for you guys. Okay, I just, I really had no idea. And it's not anybody's fault that they were working that way. These are systems that are from 20 years old. In some cases, the department's staffs were cut back in the Great Recession, and they weren't replaced. I mean, there's a million reasons why these this is so. But it was just really interesting to kind of see why it leads up to why I don't have an image when I need it. Or the New York Times, for example,

Unknown Speaker 38:18
you know, and it really took the personnel out of it. It kind of, you know, we don't like to maybe talk about this so much, but it really intellectualized things that had become very emotional for people. And so with a process like this, it just took the emotion out of the room, it was a level it leveled the playing field, because everybody could see that everyone has issues, problems, challenges. And if we could just identify that a lot of them overlapped and work on each other's even if Liz's we said priority one. But Liz is we can't address unless we address some copyright policy or something, we knew that we had all have the same goal. So at that point, everybody was moving in the same direction. And it also took it out of the the mode of the hallway conversation, which happens so much in larger organizations where you run into your colleagues in the hallway, and they're complaining about something that's not working, and you're like, Yeah, I know, there's this and there's that and there's no then there's nothing happens, it just stops there. And everybody goes back to their offices and nothing happens. So bringing that all to a to a place where we could all put it out on the table, you know, show our cards as it were, was really, really useful. And I think just really, I think made everybody feel a lot better because we were really doing something proactive as a group.

Unknown Speaker 39:34
You know, and to your question earlier to it's also all the dependencies. So, for me, I just need an image, okay, well, they might fix one thing, maybe they take it off the countertop and put it in a more organized way but it still doesn't deal with then it goes over to a paper form and there's 40 Different things that have to happen. And if one is fixed, the other 39 aren't it's still not going to work. So everybody's just still feeling kind of frustrated. So

Unknown Speaker 40:03
by the way, we have a new non paper form.

Unknown Speaker 40:08
We're gonna have a party when that thing's ready anyway. So I think there's first someone at the back had a question. So all of the various

Unknown Speaker 40:16
projects, the working groups, committees that we're all on in our institutions, if

Unknown Speaker 40:21
you've been able to make any headway on the actual work, we have your work day to focus for

Unknown Speaker 40:28
just one of the challenge. It's very challenging. I mean, we talk about that all the time.

Unknown Speaker 40:37
But that's why we do have a weekly meeting, which seems excessive, but if it wasn't weekly, we tried for a while having it monthly, but then if you cancel it once. It's you know, yeah,

Unknown Speaker 40:52
I will say that, for instance, it may have sounded like just clicking our fingers and hiring a rights analyst was easy. It took that was a year, it took a year to actually get that.

Unknown Speaker 41:06
You guys know, so

Unknown Speaker 41:07
you know, and first of all, I mean, we proposed it, but that doesn't mean that it was going to be accepted. And we were going to be able to move forward. And then it went through the job description alone went through many, many iterations. And then, you know, that process, so that took a year right there. But you know,

Unknown Speaker 41:23
is you have compelling data,

Unknown Speaker 41:26
because you've gone through this process that might

Unknown Speaker 41:29
make that more successful,

Unknown Speaker 41:31
in fact, what we identified as the responsibilities that we would assign to a position like a rights analyst, that some of which you saw on the slide, we use, we incorporated that into the job description. So it was really helpful. We were able to repurpose, repurpose that and use that as the basis for the job description.

Unknown Speaker 41:52
And by the time juvie has the rights analysts finally arrived. I mean, she was like mobbed. I think she's still she was like, the most popular person on our building for a really long time. Yeah, I'm not sure if I missed it. But were you saying how many people learn? I know the subgroups are like two or three. Like this. The working group

Unknown Speaker 42:14
membership has changed a little bit, but it's 12 to 15 people.

Unknown Speaker 42:20
Yeah, basically, somebody from all of our departments showing up. Yeah, a lot of departments a lot of departments. Yeah. Yeah. How do you structure

Unknown Speaker 42:33
your meetings to see if we all contribute to the agenda. So on the confluence page I referenced earlier, I set up a blank agenda at the end of one meeting. But we give regular updates from the subgroups. It's it's very participatory, I'm the chair, but I made it clear that I don't really have any more time than anyone else. So we all kind of share the burden of planning for and managing the group and ensuring productivity.

Unknown Speaker 43:10
Yeah, have you found

Unknown Speaker 43:11
that you have to like revisit your journey maps as new people join,

Unknown Speaker 43:15
like when the rights analysis joined? Did you have to sit with that person and be like, Okay,

Unknown Speaker 43:18
this is the journey map we have.

Unknown Speaker 43:21
Were like, what,

Unknown Speaker 43:22
you know what I mean,

Unknown Speaker 43:23
like when we haven't, but I think we probably should, because that would get to the, you know, kind of the empathy issue that we were talking about when new people come on and haven't spent the, you know, several hours, kind of going through every detail. So I think maybe if we we never got our genetic map remains on post. Its we never used software to turn it into a more kind of accessible and visual document that would be easier to share. I think that could help.

Unknown Speaker 43:58
Yeah, someone in the back had a question, then we'll come back. Oh, Hi, Tanya.

Unknown Speaker 44:09
affected your budget planning.

Unknown Speaker 44:10
And we kind of redirected your focus on those

Unknown Speaker 44:14
pressure points. Yes.

Unknown Speaker 44:19
Well, we got a position. But otherwise, I think so we had this restructuring, kind of in the middle of it that we mentioned where a lot of our digital staff were, well, all of the Gettys digital staff were kind of centralized in one unit, which is called Getty digital. And so I think, as opposed to much of you know, funding, it has been more kind of helping us prioritize issues for collaboration with that group and trying to get our concerns to the top of the queue. When we are, you know, now that they, the same people are working on digital issues across the Get ready. So

Unknown Speaker 45:01
I don't know if you want yeah. So for example, that paper form we were talking about we we also got budget, I'm putting in scare quotes or budget in the sense that we were able to enlist the help of a digital project manager who's over in a different, completely different program was Smith, who's come on to help do that. And she's marshaling her time and energy and has been working with all of us. So yeah, it's been pretty helpful for that.

Unknown Speaker 45:26
And that's to replace a process that hadn't changed in 20 years. So I've used that as a victory for sure. I

Unknown Speaker 45:33
think so. Do you have an I think you had a question?

Unknown Speaker 45:37
In her office it's all about

Unknown Speaker 45:42
the Sick, Sad rolled up thing, but and then and then screenshots of it as well. Yeah. Anyway, any but anyone else? Any more questions? As your organizational archivist asked for your journey map. She's in the group. So I'm sure she will. I'm sure she will. Yeah. Any more questions? All right. Well, thank you, everybody. Thanks so much for coming.