The 10 simple steps

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Introduction
10 simple steps: the talk the book the workshop


Step 1: Identity

Step 2: Labels (job titles)

Step 3: Image

Step 4: Invest in training
Ignore the excuses to avoid training. Get the most from external training
Prince2 Microsoft Project Getting Things Done summary [review]
iGoogle Excel

Step 5: Communication
Good and bad Powerpoint presentations
Client meetings

Step 6: Costs and risks
Coping with the crunch

Step 7: Don't overperform the spec

Step 8: Archaeology isn't just excavation

Step 9: Take Health and Safety seriously

Step 10: Look after junior staff


Background
History lessons: Changes in management training Bad habits of archaeological managers Redesigning the pyramid

Why do good Project Officers make bad Project Managers?

Isn't good management just common sense?

Delegation and succession planning

Good enough is good enough

About this blog


Toolbox
Drawing up a Personal Development Plan
How to save a failing project Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
Law for archaeologists: Contracts Copyright
Annotated book list

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Out now: "10 simple steps" the book

10 simple steps to better archaeological management available as a 150-page paperback, £10 plus P&P.

** Buy it now from Carreg Fflylfan Press  **

The contents are based on the material here, edited and expanded.

Preface

Acknowledgements

Section 1: Introduction
Why reading management books won't help archaeologists
Bad habits of archaeological managers and where they came from

Isn’t good management just common sense?

Exercise 1: Your beliefs and assumptions

Section 2: The 10 simple steps

Step 1: Identity

Step 2: Labels
Step 3: Image
Step 4: Training
Step 5: Communication
Step 6: Costs and risks
Step 7: Don’t overperform the spec
Step 8: Archaeology isn’t just excavation
Step 9: Take Health and Safety seriously
Step 10: Treat junior staff well

Section 3: The Manager’s toolkit
Email is your friend not your enemy
iGoogle can change your life
Getting Things Done
Time management
    Exercise 2: Review your current time-use
Microsoft Project
Excel cheatsheet
360 degree evaluation
   Exercise 3: Evaluation
A training buddy

Section 4: Action plan
Exercise 4: Love/hate map


Section 5: Practical management
Company health-check
Quality systems in archaeology
Succession planning and career development
How to fix a failing project
What is PRINCE2 and should I be using it?
Why do good Project Officers make bad Project Managers?
Being positive about business meetings
What not to say at a client meeting
Copyright for archaeologists
The archaeological marketplace
Commercial archaeology and the ethics of development
Preservation and ethics
Coping with the crunch: hard times are coming
Hard times economics
Bridging the skills gap and re-thinking evaluation
Curatorial practice after the crunch
Management gurus and the 10 simple steps

Afterword


Bibliography




Book links

Book links

This post provides links to the web sources and exercises for the 10 Simple Steps book.



Section  1

www.ggat.org.uk

www.archivesnetworkwales.info

welshjournals.llgc.org.uk

www.strataflorida.org

www.mindtools.com/critpath.html


www.davidzinger.com


www.gallup.com/consulting/52/employee-engagement.aspx


Exercise 1


Section 2

Step 1

www.assemblage.group.shef.ac.uk/2/2trowel2.html


leicester.academia.edu/MattEdgeworth/Books/174815/Acts_of_discovery_an_ethnography_of_an_archaeological_excavation


Step 2


www.archaeologists.net


www.archaeologists.net/development/nos


10simplesteps.blogspot.com/2008/01/redesigning-pyramid-archaeological.html


Step 3


www.cafepress.com/buy/geek




Step 4


meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/2007/10/07/should-we-take-off-those-training-wheels/


www.archaeologists.net/development/cpd


Step 6


www.archaeology.demon.co.uk


www.archaeologists.net/publications/archaeologist




Step 7


www.archaeologists.net/codes/ifa


Step 8


archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/

Step 9

www.cscs.uk.com

Step 10

www.archaeologists.net/practices/salary



Section 3

Email

http://www.drthomasjackson.com/

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/alright-fine-ill-add-a-disclaimer-to-my-emails

http://inboxzero.com/

Getting Things Done

www.davidco.com/

Time management

Exercise 2

360 degree evaluation

 "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments".

Exercise 3

Section 4

Exercise 4

Section 5


Quality systems

http://www.prince-officialsite.com/

http://www.investorsinpeople.co.uk/Pages/Home.aspx

http://www.bsigroup.com/en/assessment-and-certification-services/management-systems/standards-and-schemes/iso-9001/

http://www.archaeologists.net/regulation/organisations

http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/professional/training-and-skills/training-schemes/short-courses/project-management-using-morphe/

PRINCE2

http://www.prince2.org.uk/home/home.asp

www.english-heritage.org.uk/professional/training-and-skills/training-schemes/short-courses/project-management-using-morphe/

Project Officers and Project Managers

http://10simplesteps.blogspot.com/2008/01/redesigning-pyramid-archaeological.html

http://www.personalitypathways.com/type_inventory.html

http://skepdic.com/myersb.html


Copyright

http://www.ipo.gov.uk/copy.htm

www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm


savageminds.org/2007/12/19/an-open-access-case-study/

www.cla.co.uk/licences_available/library/


Commercial archaeology and the ethics of development

http://www.nuigalway.ie/faculties_departments/archaeology/documents/ronayne_wac.pdf

http://www.friendsofthornborough.org.uk/

http://www.rosetheatre.org.uk/discover/the-history/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7494474.stm


Recession

www.archaeologists.net/profession/recession


Skills gap

www.eastlothian.gov.uk/downloads/HBRGuidanceFinalDraft2.pdf

archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/greylit/index.cfm

www.wessexarch.co.uk/reports/66260/wickets-cherry-orchard-close




Management gurus and the 10 simple steps


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

http://www.leanenterprise.org.uk/

Quick fix - email pop-ups

Whenever I talk about time management, people's worst problem is email, which robs them of the ability to plan their own work and concentrate on completing it.  Sometimes this is unavoidable - a project manager will have to keep up with emails as they arrive in case one is time critical.  But often the messages are completely irrelevant, routine, or non-urgent, yet they will still have intruded upon the flow of thought.  Studies have shown that after such an interruption it is likely to take 5-10 minutes before the worker returns to the original task.

So how to fix it?  One answer is to make good use of filters and folders so that important messages can be spotted immediately.  But the single simplest change you can make is to notifications.  The defaults for Microsoft Outlook were devised at a time when email traffic was rare and messages were important, so a window pops up to say a new message has arrived; in such circumstances it takes an iron will to deliberately leave the message unread while you finish the sentence you were typing.  It doesn't have to be this way.  Under Outlook > Tools > Options > Email options > Advanced options, it is the work of a few seconds to change the notification to something less distracting, like an envelope on the task bar.

Making this one simple change will give you back the feeling that you can control the way you use your time to best advantage.

Five things archaeologists can learn from The Last Lecture

Randy Pausch, 2005 image by Kevinull

In 2007, Randy Pausch,  a computer scientist, gave a talk about time management, work, life and everything, conscious that he had an inoperable cancer.  The lecture has been turned into a book The Last Lecture

The lecture is also available on Youtube:


Drawing mainly on the work of Stephen Covey and his own experience, he suggests that changing our priorities will make us mnore effective and happier. The whole thing is worth watching; I'd pick out the folliwng five points as the key learning for archaeologists.

1 Mentoring is powerful

We look back fondly on places we did good work.  We love places where we learned new things. It's not surprising, therefore, that our emotional connection to our alma mater is so powerful.  How can we replicate this level of engagement and loyalty in a company? By repltiucting the core relationship of mentor and mentee, possibly as a formal structure, but at the very least as a key corporate value.  An organisation in which people at all levels are clear about their future development paths and can depend on the interest and advice of their superiors  is incredibly powerful and resilinet, and doesn't even cost much to implement.



2 Share success with the team

It is inevitable from the shape of archaeological teams that only the senior staff are visible to the wider world of clients, media, and the profession.  Some egalitarian managers attempt to overcome this by dragging their staff in to share the limelight, but this is a mistaken approach - what they want is to be respected and valued for the work they HAVE done, not to be given the credit for work they haven't.  But make sure that if a project is a success, they know it - share the praise.


3 Don't skimp on tools and equipment

Almsot all the cost of archaeology is the cost of staff time.  If someone is idle for an hour because there aren't enough buckets, you've lost the price of a bucket in work.  The same goes for computers, screens, everything else: against a year's salary almost all kit costs are trivial.  Buy everybody a mobile phone, a GPS, a camera: anything that means they will be able to work smoothly. 


4 Delegate

There are enough management tasks that must reside in a single inidividual.  Everything esle should be ruthlessly delegated.  As with mentoring, this does not just improve effiecioncy, ift changes the atmosphere of the organisation from one that is static with defined roles, into a dynamic place where people can take on new responsibilities in a supportive environment.


5 Life's too short

If an archaeological organisation has reached the point where it is mechanically completing projects to a standardised methodology without generating new ideas and perspectives, it is wasting its time, and that of its staff.  We should be bold enough to ask fundamental questions, to explore new topics that are thrown up by our work, to  develop new methodlogies and abandon old ones.  Life really is too short to spend it doing work that has no value to you or others.





Buy 10 simple steps: the book and the e-book

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Guide for new readers

This website started out as the developing contents of a talk at the 2008 IFA Conference, 10 simple steps to better archaeological management, also available as a book and powerpoint.

Since then I have gone on adding material on how to deal with failing projects , the law and ethics and identity.

More recently I have covered questions arising from the impact of the downturn on archaeological organisations:

* hard times economics
* marketing in a recession
* downsizing
* what it means for organisations and individuals
* Bridging the skills gap

These expand on many of the themes raised in the paper I wrote with Kenny Aitchison, "Hard times: archaeology and the recession", The Archaeologist 71 (Spring 2009), 10-11.

I am now looking at various management gurus and related  topics to identify the lessons for archaeology in  the five things series.

Buy 10 simple steps: the book


Transform your business with a 10 simple steps workshop.

Five things archaeologists can learn from Lean Management

http://www.yahrx.com/ourapproach.htm

Lean management  was defined as a concept in the 1990s by Daniel T. Jones, focused on assembly line industrial processes, but has since developed into a mini-discipline http://www.leanenterprise.org.uk/ and has been extended into service industries and the public sector: lean management workshop at OGC.  At heart the approach is based on mapping your business processes, identifying waste, delays  and bottlenecks, and re-designing your workflow to aim for perfection, building quality in rather than adding it on.

1. Define value in customer terms

Archaeologists have two customers: the one that pays the bills, their clients, and the one they are answerable to for their conduct, future researchers.   Activities that benefit neither should be dropped. 

2. Follow the value stream

Where do we do work that leads to customer value?  Mostly at the report stage.  Where don't we? At the data collection stage, creating multiply-redundant images and over-detailed records of deposits of little or no significance.  Every recording activity carries a cost in creation and subsequent processing - we whould be bold enough to tailor our records to the needs of the resource (as we routinely do for watching briefs and test pits).

3. Reduce waste and failure demand

The culture of quality audting leads to the erosion of personal responsibility: there's no need for me to check the text because the manager will anyway.  And does the manager spend their time trying to reinterpret the site or rewrite the description when they should be auditing the process?  Yes.  They shouldn't: they should trust and empower the staff who have direct contact with the data.

4. Reduce inventory

For most projects. the site is excavated and reported fairly quickly as a burst of activity, and then there follows a half-life while specialist reports are commissioned, written, and collated, and eventually tidied up for archive deposition and publication. As a result, archaeological contractors live surrounded by large numbers of nearly-complete projects along with their current work, which isn't good for anybody.   Get stuff off the shelves and into museums.

5. Reduce time

The long timescale also means that cash-flow can be problematic, since there will be fees outstanding until it's all wrapped up.  In which case, wrap them up.






Buy 10 simple steps: the book and the e-book

Transform your business with a 10 simple steps workshop.