10 simple steps to better archaeological management

Out now: "10 simple steps" the book

2012-01-21T19:56:00.000Z

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

The 10 simple steps

2012-01-01T22:01:00.000Z

Note: This post is a sticky: new posts appear below.

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

Transform your business with a 10 simple steps workshop.

Book links

2011-11-07T23:17:00.000Z

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

2011-08-18T19:56:00.000+01:00

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

2010-12-10T23:18:00.000Z

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.

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Guide for new readers

2010-12-10T15:53:00.001Z

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.

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Five things archaeologists can learn from Lean Management

2010-11-14T13:18:00.001Z

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.

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Five things archaeologists can learn from PRINCE2

2010-11-07T13:17:00.000Z

I've written about PRINCE2 before. The choice to use the PRINCE2 project management methodology has to be made at corporate level; it is rarely used in archaeology because the nature of its activities and problems do not play to PRINCE2's strengths. Nevertheless, the methodology is based on common sense and experience of project management, so there should be some elements which can be applied.

All projects involve risk
-and if this is true of something like decorating an office, how much more true of projects where the nature and complexity of the archaeological resource is unknown, and the work is subject to weather conditions and logistical complications. So how can we manage the risk? We can minimise it, by ensuring that we exploit all available information, but we cannot eliminate it. If we expect the unexpected, our best strategy is to empower those on the spot with the authority and resources to respond to the emerging situation, while being ready to provide support when needed.

Manage by stages

Every project in MAP2 and the IFA Standards starts with a big meeting of all the specialists who may be involved, from palaeo and flint expert to illustrator and archivist. Luckily, in reality these meetings do not take place, because otherwise people would get even less done, without having any effect on the 90% of projects which do not in fact produce material requiring special consideration. There are planning horizons beyond which the imponderables become so great that time spent planning is not just wasted, it's actually harmfdul, since it distracts from what can be planned for.

Product-led planning

The end results of a project are the archive and reports. Activities which do not contribute to either may well be pointless. Activities which do not lead to report content may also be pointless.

Continuing business justification

Commercial archaeology is a business. Projects which have ceased to contribute positively to the business (especially financially) should be closed down. Projects which have achieved their objectives should be closed down. It is easy to allow projects to run on to their allotted end-date, but doing so is wasting time and money. Your time and money.

Learn from experience

Archaeological businesses live and die on the quality of their estimation. Yet very few employ a formal process to review projects after the event to see whether the estimation was accurate. It is notorious that some types of project (eg desk-top studies and watching briefs) are very difficult to complete to a professional standard within the level of funding usually available. After a few have gone over-budget, maybe the lesson is that prices must rise or that this type of project should be avoided. Was it not Santana who said that those who don't remember the mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat them? (No it wasn't, it was George Santayana).

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Five things archaeologists can learn from The Apprentice

2010-10-23T15:49:00.003+01:00

Alan Sugar and the would-be apprentices (2009 series)

Photo: AJC1

The Apprentice is a reality TV entertainment show, with the emphasis on entertainment rather than reality. But it is, nevertheless, instructive to those, like archaeologists, who are isolated from the day-to-day business environment, its culture and values. It may not present a wholly representative picture, but it is still possible to learn a little about how the world seems to those with a business role.

1. They don't care

Not just about heritage, about anything. Business appears to be one big game, with money the way of keeping score. Someone who is willing to swear blind that their product is organic in order to close a sale is unlikely to be trouble by the moral issues raised by not obeying a planning condition.

See my posts on business meetings , what not to say at a client meeting and Step 5: communication.

2. They know nothing

They stopped reading when they discovered money. They may vaguely recall Elizabeth I, but don't count on it. Archaeologist will need to explain from first principles about Planning Guidance, types of project, curators and contractors, post-excavation, archives and publication. Don't assume that they know what you, or they, should be doing. They don't.

3. "Project manager" means nothing

There was a time when being a project manager implied a level of experience, competence and responsibility, and to introduce oneself as the archaeological project manager meant something that should be respected. This has been eroded recently, and when fitting a kitchen or washing cars can be 'project managed' then clearly the term has lost much of its meaning.

See my post on Step 2: labels.

4. They wear the uniform

The phot above neatly demonstrates my discussion of image. Although no dress code has ever been formalised, grey suits and black dresses have emerged as the uniform of business. These days there is much more tolerance of idiosyncrasies such as weird hair and jewellery, but it is still true that business people will only respect people who dress like them.

5. Results are what matters

If money is the yardstick applied to success, expect an uphill struggle trying to persuade them to spend more than necessary. At a certain level of maturity and seniority, company staff may be willing to consider the soft benefits of feel-good spending, but the default mode is cost minimisation. Expect this - and make sure that you have costed for everything you need.

So, to conclude: business people have a different set of values, and when communicating with them, bear this in mind.

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Five things archaeologists can learn from Dragon's Den

2010-10-19T23:12:00.001+01:00

Peter Jones
By Simontrend, via Wikimedia Commons

It's not surprising that archaeologists are, on the whole, pretty poor business people: they don't want to be business people. But an industry that employs thousands of people in hundred of companies, partnerships and freelance operations, turning over £100m a year,  IS a business: the question is whether we embrace that fact, and see what we can do to improve, or we ignore it and trust to luck.

It is possible to learn a lot about business from Dragon's Den: not so much from the revolutionary rubber hammers, innovative chocolate teapots, and re-engineered sliced bread that hopes to be the best thing since the original sliced bread, but from the pooled practical experience of the entrepreneurs. After a while their questioning starts to form a pattern, from which I'd highlight these:

1 Has it been done before?

Businesses based on innovation need to think about this all the time. Archaeology, less so, at first blush. But of course we build out work on existing knowledge. We should be prepared to invest in analysing results of previous work in the area before firing up the JCB on a new site. See Step 8

2 What's the IPR position?

Working with ideas and information intrinsically raises a whole range of issues about ownership, protection and licensing. Specifically, archaeologists generally use, as part of their commercial work, mapping, structured data and images created by others. They should be clear about what copyright they own and what copyright they use.

3 Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity

It's depressing to see how hard archaeologists work, yet leave to chance whether their businesses produce a surplus. Typically they rely on estimating the likely work and charging accordingly, unaware that they are effectively gambling on the absence of complex archaeology, and gambling with the company's money. Don't do that: follow Step 6 and Coping with the crunch and Step 7


4 It's the people not the product

Every successful business is built on its staff. If flint-hearted Gecko clones know this, archaeologists should too. Follow Step 4 and Step 10.

5 Are there hidden costs?

Most organisations carry along with them a lot of baggage - time and resources that have been sunk into things which have yet to bear fruit, or uncosted commitments that there is a contractual or moral obligation to fulfill at some point. Maybe archaeologists don't need to tell others about them, but they certainly ought to be aware of them.  These loose ends should be reviewed, quantified and allocated to someone to take ownership of, even if they're not actually being progressed. See Step 8

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Keeping it safe

2010-09-02T22:29:00.002+01:00

Tim Darvill wrote a couple of interesting papers in the 1990s on the concept of value in heritage management. value systems in archaeology he distinguished between Use value (what we get from using a resource now, by, say, digging it up with some students), Option value (what we get from keeping a site for now for possible use later) and Existence value (the vague feeling of well-being derived from knowing that something is there, without actually using it [as many people feel about libraries or, perhaps, the Royal Opera House]). What he skirted was the question of how these values affected heritage management practice.

The IFA Standard and Guidance for Stewardship says that:

Stewardship protects and enhances what is valued in inherited
historic assets and places. It responds to the needs and
perceptions of people today and seeks to have regard for the needs
of those in the future. The stewardship role includes undertaking
conservation management tasks, communicating the public value
of the heritage, promoting community awareness of the historic
environment and encouraging active engagement in protection and
enhancement.

This is a longer way of explaining the key planning principle which PPG5 (2010) words as: "A documentary record of our past is not as valuable as retaining the heritage asset" (HE12a), or in the old PPG16, that preservation in situ was the preferred option for archaeological sites.

So archaeologists and planners are agreed: sites are best off looked after, not dug up. This can lead to some strange outcomes, where an early 20th century shed in a development site is lovingly protected, while Scheduled Ancient Monuments continue to be ploughed (because they have been before, so that's all right) or dug up by students, or washed away.

It's interesting to consider what would happen if restrictions on excavation of SAMs were to be lifted (on the reasonable grounds that in 50 years time they will be underwater or enduring arid conditions anyway), so that archaeological activity could focus on investigating the best-preserved and most-interesting sites rather than the marginal ones. True, we would have to endure the scrutiny of our descendants, just as we criticise the Egyptologists who trashed the pharoah's tombs, but we could at least say that we found out some useful stuff.

Edit: fixed typos

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Can't we all just get along?

2010-04-01T23:00:00.001+01:00

As I said a long time ago, archaeologists often start with an innocent belief that they share the interests and roles of all otehr archaeologists. If only, they think, we could get the planners and builders and architects out of the room, we could sort out the rescue response required in two minutes flat, and everyone would be happy. Maybe. But probably not - because, just as lawyers are supposed to protect their client's interests, archaeologists have a responsibility to their clients, whoever they are. An archaeologist who agrees to do more archaeological work than the situation requires is acting unethically. A planning archaeologist who demands more archaeological work than the evidence supports is acting unethically. Strangely enough, in all the concern that has been expressed about the strains that commercial interests may impose on archaeological judgements, this has never been said. A recent research project looking at the Evaluation of Archaeological Decision-making Processes
and Sampling Strategies in Wales was

"a valuable opportunity to step back, take stock and think more generally about the strengths and weaknesses of developer-funded archaeological work and the role of development control archaeologists in Wales."

This project would look carefully at the data used in DC responses to developments, whether the judgements were reasonable, and whether the predicted archaeological resource was present or not. Well, it would if I had scoped it. The report has now been produced and I will return to it in another post.

For now I just want to emphasise that no, we can't all just get along. But this need not mean that we are in league with the devil. Andrew Marvell made this point eloquentaly in his paper to the IfA Conference last year, now published on Scribd:

The New WHS Trowel-Paper given to the Institute for Archaeologists conference 2009.

Copyright and the economics of archaeological publishing

2010-01-30T15:54:00.000Z

I am not a lawyer, but I have seen and signed a lot of publishing agreements, and there is a lot of confusion out there, especially now that digitisation has given new life to old and forgotten print articles.

Whose copyright in the first place?

Copyright belongs to the creator initially, automatically, unless it is being created as part of your employment, in which case it is usually the employer's. So for most commercial archaeologists, it isn't their own perosnal property. Things may be complicated by the inclusion of otehr material (illsutrations, mps and photographs) with their own rights owners. And even more complex if the original developer was one of those who require their contractors to assign copyright to them - so that a unit and its staff may have to ask permission to publish their report.

Publishing agreements

The terms on which a publisher agrees to publish a work vary considerably. In commercial scientific publishing, it used to be standard to require authors to sign the copyright over to the publisher (this is now changing significantly as the open access movement has led to pressure to allow authors to keep copyright), while in archaeology, particularly for one-off volumes, authros were asked only for a licence. In most cases, until recently, the question as never raised: if there is no signed agreement ceding copyright to the publisher then it would still with the author (or employer or client). It is administratively convenient for publishers to hold copyright, allowing them to republish, sell in other markets, and handle incoming re-print requests without a lot of correspondence. On the other hand, it may mean that authors are (or feel) precluded from re-using their work themselves (in a book or on a website) or granting others the right to re-use it.

Authors faced with a strict demand for assignment of copyright have limited room for manouever - it may be completely non-negotiable (or said to be), or the author may be allowed to retain a licence so that they can do stuff in the future.

Economics

Aside from the question of what you might want to do (or authorise otehr to do) with your work, there is the question of who makes money out of it. The short answer is, alas, nobody. Most journals and book series riley on institutionl subscriptions from universities round the world as the main market - a few hundred at most. Although the rates may be high, these need to compensate for the high start-up costs for printing and distribution (it is only in the thousands when unit costs drop, beaing spread out over so many). So most journals do not pay their authors, editoirs or reviewers for initial publication rights. And they don't make a lot more from selling rights on, either - £50 or £100 for reprint rights. Relying on arcaheological publication fees for your pesnion is not a good plan. There is one possible route for income, though: the
CLA Sticker scheme, which collects fees from people who photocopy artciels and distribute them to regsietred authors. Unfortunately, you have to register your publications with them, and pay a small fee, to be included, and of the course this is only worthwhile if you expecte there to be a fair number of copies made (in which context it is worth pointing out that only twice in my life have I ever met anyone who has said they read on emy articles, let alone copied it, let alone paid a fee).

Curatorial practice after the crunch

2009-11-28T11:10:00.002Z

They tell us that the recession is over. Over the next few years, the rate of development will increase, and commercial archaeology will be back in business, and even if it doesn't reach the frantic heights of the recent gold rush, curatorial archaeologists will be kept busy (unless a new government decides that heritage is an impediment to economic growth). There is now a breathing space in which curators have a chance to consider whether any chnages in approach are needed. I think the answer is yes, based on how it worked before (excessive documentation, delays in response, inconsistency), but also because of changes that can be foreseen. The next decade will see a revival in construction and its associated archaeological activity at the same time as savage cuts in local government budgets, falling especially heavily on non-statutory functions. It will be a lucky curatorial service that retains its current staff while facing a doubled workload. Something's gotta give - but what? An answer which would work would be a shift to light-touch regulation. The Corgi gas servicing scheme had training and accrediation for workers, but very limited inspection of work done. Maybe this is a model that could be considered for archaeology. What would this entail in practice?

Trusting the record
In assessing the possible impact of a development on archaeology, it is possible to spend an enormous amount of time wondering "if there's a flint over there, and a flint in that field, surely there must be a henge here?", or "Fred's been fieldwalking round there for years - I wonder if he's got anything in his notebooks?", or "I'll just check the early OS map and the tithe map and the APs to see if anything turns up". You should rely on the HER to tell you where the known arcaheology is. If the rason you can't is because the HER is an inadequate record of known arcaheology, then you should a) hang your head in shame that after 35 years it still isn't doing what it was supposed to do, and b) invest significant resources in enhancing it.

Focusing on important stuff
Every development might affect archaeology, known or unknown. These days, Total Archaeology runs up to the present, so any development will have an affect - removing a fecne or a lamp-post. Obviously we cannot hope to save, monitor or record it all. There will be losses. Focus on the major stuff - big holes in important sites.

Relying on Standard Operating Procedure
Don't re-invent the wheel. Almost all of curatorial and contractual archaeology involves applying a standard set of principles and practices to the specific requirements of an individual development. Most of these principles and practices are shared with the rest of the UK archaeology community, so you should think twice befoe developing local variants, and three times before tailoring them to single projects. There's no shame in saying "do the same as usual".

Trusting the contractor
The contractor is being paid to examine in great detail the development, to identify the main impacts, think about the arcaheological effects, and devising a programme of mitigation. They are being paid to prvide a professional service. Let them. If they are accredited orgaisnations or people, they have passed a gatekeeper test and are subject to monitoring by the IfA. You don't need to check whether they have costed for Portaloos or have chosen the right Roman pottery specialist. So don't check. Reserve the right to inspect if you wish, but do so sparingly.

Communicating quickly
Telephones eat time. Writing eats time. Handle all possible communications by email: a one-sentence message confirming a spec can be written in 10 seconds (after allowing 5 minutes to scan through the key archaeological elements). If you get FAQs from developers or planners, put a FAQ page on the website or send it to them.

Don't stretch a point
What also eats up time is arguing about things like landscape character. Preparing an argument takes a long time if you are having to justify a largely arbitrary and personal view. So don't do it. If you have managed to protect the hard archaeology then you've done the most important part of your job. Heritage has become an easy piece of ammo for NIMBYs, leading you into controversies in which the impacts on archaeology are negligible. Any time that you find that you are having to do a lot of research before you can comment, you're probably trying too hard to find something to complain about.

I for one will not accept any claims from curators that they are under-reseourced and over-worked unless they can claim to have followed the above. Yes, it's hard work, but it's your job, so get on with it.

CPD: no more excuses

2009-11-12T23:06:00.000Z

Fairly quietly, and fairly uncontroversially, the IfA has just transformed the way that professional archaeologists must behave, by making it compulsory for their members to undertake 25 hours of CPD a year in line with a Personal Development Plan [templates for CPD log and PDP available on their site]. From a vague statement in the code of conduct that archaeologists have a duty to keep themselves well-trained and informed, identifying training needs and fulfilling them has become one of the key responsibilities of a professional worthy of the name. This is good news - I believe that those who claim to be unable to locate any skill gaps either are already in fact managing a lot of CPD or haven't thought about it enough, or at all. They should start with my Action Plan.

The impact of the rule change will vary - in organisations which are Investors In People , employees will already have PDPs which cover both employment-focused and personal development. For others, employers will probably have to accept that training their staff is something they will have to do, and possibly pay for.

But what if the employer can't or won't. Here are some suggestions for CPD activities that will cost little or nothing but will have a instant payoff:

* read the legislation and guidance - Planning Policy, the Copyright Designs and Patents Act, the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Araes Act, the Valetta Convention, Environmental Information Regulations. These are quite interesting once you get into them, and will equip you with a much better grasp of the overall context of your work.

* Time management - Read Getting Things Done and implement it; make an iGoogle homepage ; or just read some advice online.

* Read some journals. Medieval Archaeology, PPS, Britannia, and Post-Medieval Archaeology contain interesting book reviews and reports as well as excavation accounts - now reading them is work.

* Attend one or two day-schools or events. Maybe ones you wouldn't normally go to.

* Generic skills: negotiation, assertiveness, project management, team leadership, effective meetings, report writing.

* Presentation skills: Powerpoint, html, Word

* Master digital photography - find out what ll those buttons actually do, nd see if you can take some photos that show what they are supposed to

That should keep you busy for the first two or three years.

Bridging the skills gap and re-thinking evaluation practice

2009-09-29T22:51:00.003+01:00

The worst of the recession appears to be over, at least for archaeology. The concern now (for the remaining members of the profession) is whether it can cope with a rise in demand for work, needing more staff, and in particular if the lack of specific skills will prevent or delay projects. I don't think it should.

There may be a pool of archaeologists, laid off in summer 2008, who would be available for recruitment. This may prove harder than expected; it is surprising how quickly people realise that archaeology may not in fact be the only way they want to spend their lives. Quite apart from the fact that they can probably earn more for doing less demanding work, the basic level benefits may prove hard to resist - the prospect of long hours in the van to be dropped in on some random site may appeal less to people who've got used to being paid from the moment they walk into the office.

But even so, that leaves a smallish gap. Even if the 600 or so posts which were lost were re-created, there have been 8,000 new graduates in archaeological subjects since September 2008 (based on the figures in Profiling the Profession). Doing some analysis of the figures for age profile and length of contract, there were 1,000 archaeologists in the age range 25-29 who responded, representing a cohort of about 600/year. (It's a shame that the websites advising would-be archaeologists on degree courses don't point out that 1 in 10 of graduates in normal conditions end up working in the profession.) So any shortfall in available existing diggers could be readily filled by new staff.

Of course, for many years now archaeologists have been unwilling to employ such people, leading to the dilemma that only those with experience will be employed. This makes life easier, since even new staff will be able to work from the start, but obscures the fact that someone somewhere must have provided some training. You hope so, anyway, although the fact that someone has been on lots of sites may not mean they have contributed much or learnt anything. Rather than rely on this informal apprenticeship, an employer would be better served by audited the skills of its new staff, identifying any gaps, and maybe, you know, provide some training. This need not be a series of lectures on the theory of stratigraphy - it could consist of being shown common local pottery types, or how to start a sludge pump.

Although it is hard to extract this directly from the report, it appears that most of these recent graduates working on commercial fieldwork projects up to the age of 29 then move on, either to other roles within archaeology, or leaving the profession. As a result, employers should expect that there will be turnover, so there will be new recruits, so there will be training needs. So plan for them.

But the other side of the concern is the loss of specific specialist skills, such as building survey. How can an organisation deliver a project without the necessary trained specialist staff? The answer is, the same way they used to, before 41% of staff had masters degrees, before Investors in People, before CPD. If you need someone to record a building, send them out with some drawing stuff and cameras, and tell them to get on with it. Archaeologists used to be good at devising, developing, and refining methodologies for new areas of work - so as soon as the Hedgerow Regulations 1997 defined the need to determine which hedgerows are historic, projects came in and were done. And desk-based assessments as a formal exercise were created overnight by PPG16- and again, they were done. Not perfectly. But archaeologists are capable flexible people with a strong grasp of recording and reporting. It may be that some silly errors are made, that buildings are misclassified or misunderstood. But a record will be made: possibly a different record, possibly a better record, than one that would have been made by a buildings expert with tunnel vision for a specific feature or type of building. It is interesting to note that East Lothian Council assumed that it would be archaeologists who would be dealing with recording buildings (see their excellent Historic Building Recording guidance (2006)), a view that would have been anathema to Conservation Officers in the 1990s who thought architectural historians should be relied upon.

And finally, it must be said that a break in continuity, and a return to first principles, might be a good thing. Commercial archaeology before the bubble burst had become a frantic, mechanical process yielding isolated factoids. OASIS now has 4000 grey literature reports for download. A random example is Wessex Arcaheology's report on The Wickets (the report is clear and detailed) (also available direct from Wessex). A planning condition, a written scheme of investigation, a specification, an evaluation, a report, an archive, to commemorate the fact that trenches were dug and nothing was found. Perhaps it was worthwhile. But for the planners to require developers to fund the excavation of 6% of the site area on the basis of: residual flints found in the general area (but not the site), residual Roman pottery and medieval found in the general area (but not the site), and the possibility that medieval tenement plots might run back 100m from the High Street (although there are no topographic grounds for expecting they might, or that they would yield significant archaeological remains if they did), seems bizarre. The report describing this evaluation says "No archaeological research, either desk based or intrusive has previously been
undertaken for this Site." Perhaps some map work might have been a simpler and better way to decide on the burgage plot question? Surely this 'dig a hole just in case' mentality should be rethought? How about assessing on some real basis the likelihood that archaeological remains might be affected before swinging into overkill mode?
(I should note that I have no particular issue about or knowledge of this development and its archaeology, but it does seem an exemplar of everbody working very hard to prove that nothing was there, when there seemed few grounds for thinking there would be).

Being positive about business meetings

2009-05-13T15:23:00.002+01:00

Archaeologists involved in fieldwork projects spend most of their time thainking about arcaheology, and talking about it to other archaeologists. This is , unfortunately, poor training for dealing effectively with non-archaeologists (see What not say at a client meeting, for example). But meetings are a critical part of the relationship between an archaeological contractor and their client; if done well, they can ensure that the project runs smoothly and any problems are resolvedin a sensible and fair manner; if done badly, they can negate all the work on marketing, branding and image and lead to misunderstandings and costly delays. So it is worth getting them right, and needs non-archaeological skills: there is therefore good reason why office managers will usually handle this part of the work. But eventually any project manager will have to attend a meeting. How they can they ensure that they come away with the right result?

Be Prepared

Print out the agenda and minutes. If you have little time, check the minutes to see whether there were any action points relating to your wokr: you can be certain that you will be asked about these. Also make sure that you know where the meeting will be held, and how to get there.

If have more time, it is worth looking at the list of attendees in order to work out who they are, and which firm they represent, and to think about whether there is anything you might want to discuss with them.

You should also prepare, preferably in writing, a short account of your progress in terms designed for a non-archaeological audience.

Be On time

It sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised. The people you meet may have no interest in or understanding of your work, may never listen to a word you say or read a report, but they will notice if you are late, destroying all the effort that your company has invested in appearing as an efficient and businesslike contractor.

You should also bear in mind what they will expect to see: if you want to confirm their opinion of archaeologists as bumbling eccentrics this is a good ay to start.

Be Smart

Don't look like an archaeologist. In most professions, status is demarcated by dress codes: important people wear ties. So if you want them to think that you're important, wear a tie. Again, confound their expectations: you want to be treated as an equal.

Be Informed

This development is probably the first time they've had to deal with archaeology (every project is a first date). Having an archaeologist there will be an excellent opportunity for them to find out about planning policies, archaeological methodologies, recent legislation, and anything else they can think of (they may well as about fossils and dinosaurs too). So it's best to be able to respond in a coherent way, at elast to the moe directly relevant questions.

Be Tactful

You may work for a lot of different developers; you may undertake work on adjoining plots for different clients. Although (from your point of view) there is no conflicty of interest, the devloper may feel that you are not 100% loyal if you spend a lot of time talking about your other work. It is important to remember that you may have been given access to commercially sensitive information (completion date, for example), and you should respect confidences.

Be Interested

Other specialists involved may mention things which are directly relevant (the ecologist may be doing some work on hedgerows; the engineer may be planning geotechnical work). But even if not, it is worth keeping your ears open so that you can understand their role better.

Be Vague

You will probably be asked questions that you cannot answer: "How long until you're finished? How much would it cost to extend the excavation? Can you move to seven-day working?" Don't feel that you have to offer guesses. If it's beyond your expertise or mandate, say so. It's better to say that you'll check back and let them know than to give a misleading or wrong snap response.

Be Efficient

After the meeting, sit down and tidy up your notes, taking special care on anything that relates to your work. Tell the office about anything substantive that you have learned.

To put it all together, be P O S I T I V E !

Email is your friend, not your enemy

2009-04-07T14:26:00.003+01:00

A recurrent feature of any discussion about time management and working practices is the feeling that email is out of control; people say that they have to check it constantly and yet know that the old messages stack up, and they can never deal with it all. As a result, they say that if only they could handle the email mountain and have confidnce that they'd seen the important stuff, they'd be able to cope, leading to the desperate arbitrary expedients of 'email free Fridays' or 'no email after 3.00' rules.

This self-analysis may not, in fact, be accurate: an overflowing inbox may just be the symptom of a wider malaise. But since handling email forms such an important part of modern working, it is worthwhile thinking a little to get it right. Unfortunately, most of the problems come from other people, sending you stuff, but you can at least try to make life easier for your recipients.

WRITING EMAILS

Use the subject line

. . . to say what the subject is. The actual subject, preferably. Anything sent under a geenric heading, or [no subject], will be difficult to locate later when you're trying to find it. Don't use ALL CAPS, and start the subject with the key words.

It's often possible to put all the necessary info in the subject.
Not:

Subject: Re: Meeting tomorrow?

Text: Yes, 10am is fine.

But:

Subject: Meeting 10am ok

Text:

Email conversations tend to drift onto new topics; if this happens it's best to re-title messages periodically, rather than end up with:

Subject: re: re: re: re: re: re: Dinner tonight?

Text: Will you marry me?

For similar reasons, it's much easier to keep track of threads if you stick to one subject per email, so that if there are three issues you want to raise with someone, send three messages: this will allow them to respond to each on its own timeframe. Otherwise it's likely that only the first, or most urgent, issue will actually be addressed.

But there is an even more basic question: should you be writing an email at all? Email is great for short, quick, transient and non-controversial communication with people with whom you have an established relationship. It is not good for arguing, or explaining at length. A good rule of thumb is the 10/5 minute rule: if it will take longer than 10 minutes to write or 5 minutes to read, don't send it by email. Turn it into a Word dodument, or talk on the phone. Few people read long emails carefully, so don't expect them to.

Think hard before you use 'reply all' It is annoying to be copied into a two-sided debate in which you have no interest. Much better to have the debate in private and then circulate the conclusion to all.

If you are going to forward an email, it is helpful to add some sort of gloss: "Do you want to go to this conference?", "See the comment in para 2 which we might want to respond to", or even just a simple "any use?".

I would discourage the use of automatic read receipts. Somebody who has read the subject of an email, and decided to open it, is ready to read the contents, and the intrusion of a pop-up that they must read and click on before they can do so breaks the flow. There are a few occasions when a positive response is needed: I would just add a note in the text: "please confirm you've had this message".

In theory it should be possible to use priority markers (red text, !) to gain the reader's urgent attention to a particular message, but unfortunately these tend to be used only by spammers, and will therefore make people less likely to read it. Instead, start the subject line with "Urgent! "

Having a corporate signature text with phone number and a web address is a good idea. Having one which is bloated with legal disclaimers and vague threats against unintended recipients is a bad idea. Often these disclaimers are so broad that anyone wishing to conduct serious business would be justified in refusing to respond and insisting on dealing with someone whose word could be taken as some form of official sanction. It would be better to train staff in what they should say than to rely on these probably unenforceable clauses. Similarly, asking "do you really need to print this email?" may be ineffective. You could argue that the environmental impact of adding to the size of a message that has to be colelcted and stored by multiple recipients might outweigh the tiny number of trees saved by indecisive readers who were persuaded not to print it.

Don't apologise for cross-posting. The days when you only got messages you wanted have, alas, gone. Wasting everbyody's time by making them read this before getting to the substance is more annoying than getting the same message twice. But equally, don't circulate needlessly. Reading irrelevant emails can absorb an enormous amount of staff time, especially if they are labelled (unhelpfully) "Important notice to all staff" but in fact are of interest to three people in the organisation.

Finally there is the question of tone. It used to be common for people to treat email as if it were an electronic letter, written in the fairly stiff and formal language adopted in many businesses. Increasingly, though, it is coming to resemble speech, and it is hard to maintain that it should necessarliy be any more formal than would be used in, say, a telephone conversation. In general, peopel would rather recive an instant response, even if brief, slangy and mis-typed, than wait half an hour for one which said the same thing but in more coherent prose.

READING EMAILS

So maybe your readers will start being glad to get messages from you. But right now, that isn't really much help with your inbox. What can you do?

Break your messages up into folders. A good way is have folders for individuals or groups. When you're looking for an old message, you may have forgotten its subject or date but probably can remember or guess who had sent it.

Use message rules and filters. It is worth setting up rules so that new messages are moved straight into the relevant folder. You can then at a glance spot responses you were waiting for while leaving others to one side.

Have a folder for newsgroups. Those messages can go straight there and wait for your leisure; alternatively you can periodically use 'mark folder as read' so you can forget the rest. If the newsgroup has an acessible archive (as Jiscmail groups do), you can safely delete these messages en bloc.

Process your emails. Leave non-urgent unread messages in their folders. Scan the messages in the active folders, open the important ones, and respond to the simple ones straight away. Then go back and deal with the important complex ones. Whether you then go on to deal with the others is up to you, but you can be confident that you know about everything you need to for now.

Book proposal

2009-03-25T19:05:00.002Z

I'm drawing up a book proposal at the moment:

Project Management for Archaeologists: A handbook

Contents

Introduction: archaeology and management

1 The archaeological manager
Ethics
Time management
Training and accreditation
Team leadership
Task management
Specialists

2 The project
Context Legislation and guidance
Documentation Briefs, specs, project designs, standards
Clients Contracts, meetings, reports, correspondence
Curators Roles, powers, styles
Fieldwork
Post-excavation and reporting
Publication
Archiving
Marketing

3 The responsibilities
Health and Safety
Employment law and administration

.. not sure whether to write it first or send the idea round to publishers.

The secret of painless downsizing

2009-03-07T15:03:00.004Z

The secret of painless downsizing is that it is impossible. Even if done well, it is a negative, distracting, unsettling, upsetting and stressful experience, not just for those directly affected but for the whole organisation. Any downsizing will absorb enoroums amounts of unproductive time in meetings, paperwork, and gossip. If done badly, it will be all of this, and more, and still fail to solve the problems of the business. So what are they keys to doing it right?

Be open

Everybody involved will feel like shit. Those who suffer will blame you, the organisation, the profession, the economy, themselves. This is not the time to forget politeness, or play favourites. Information should be clear and shared transparently. How you behave can have a determining effect on how those who are made redundant feel about your organisation, and in general.

Planning ahead

Being bounced by a sudden crisis into taking snap decisions about staff is hardly the right approach. Well before things reach that stage, you should be looking at your core business area, at trends in the marketplace, and at your staff's skills. The temptation to keep going and hope for the best should be resisted.

Take the right action

Be as drastic as you need to be. Wishful thinking isn't a business strategy, so you may have to close down entire teams or operations. What you don't want to do is have successive rounds of cuts because you couldn't face them at first.

Keep the right people

Ideally, you should have a forward plan, of how your core business will survive and in due course grow again. This should define what people you need to keep: their value to you now, and in the future, rather than in the past.

Be fair

Last in first out is a clear system: at least people know who is at risk. But it isn't likely to be the best way of deciding who best fits your business needs. Any alternative needs to be fair and transparent: this is not a chance to get rid of the people who have annoyed you at some point in the past. This is hard work, but essential. If moral arguments aren't enough, maybe the prospect of an employment tribunal would help.

Look after your leavers

It's not their fault. You should do everything you can to smooth their transition, to find new jobs, providing references. They will be talking about your organisation wherever they go: what will they be saying?

The archaeological marketplace

2009-02-27T20:00:00.003Z

In times like these, effective marketing can make all the difference between survival and closure. Does your current strategy deliver business? Or are you wasting time and money?

If you're relying on repeat business from your existing developers, you will starve

There were 4,500 developer-funded reports per year sent to HERs in England before the credit crunch (source: Archaeological Investigations Project)
There were 500,000 planning applications per year (source: Planning Portal)

So, on average, 1 in 100 planning applications leads to archaeological work of some sort. So even if a developer is highly active and submits a lot of applications, they are unlikely to need archaeological assistance more than once in a blue moon.*

If you're relying on word-of-mouth you will starve

Developers don't talk to each other very much, and certainly don't share their commercial secrets. They won't recommend you to their competitors. And in any case, given the low incidence of archaeology, it won't be often that someone who has had a problem meets someone who has got one at the moment.

If you're relying on your reputation you will starve

You can't rest on your laurels and wait for work to turn up based on your reputation. The only archaeologists likely to be recognised outside the archaeological community are Time Team (and maybe Bonekickers).

Every project is a first date

You need to make a good first impression. It's no good muddling along and then producing the best report in the world at the end: they won't hang around. But managing that impression is difficult.

What will be noticed
Price
Answering emails and phone calls quickly and politely
Having professional-looking stationery, staff and premises
Professional and quality accreditation
Friendliness, enthusiasm and efficiency
What curators say about you

What won't be noticed
Academic credibility
Specialist knowledge
Previous experience
What past customers say about you

I man ways, this is depressing, since it means that the qulaities we value highest are least effective. But it's probably better to realise that, I think.

* Environmental Assessments are different: developers for types of development that require these *will* be repeat customers and *will* know about archaeology.

Training without a training budget

2009-02-11T19:08:00.003Z

It may seem a bad time for the IfA to be promoting CPD, when for once there really is a rational case for reducing expenditure on training. But much of the entrenched (ho ho) opposition to compulsory CPD schemes over the years has been the result of a misconception that CPD must mean training and training must mean formal expensive courses. For some topics that may be the case, but there is a great deal of value to the individuals and the organisation that can be done at little or no cost.

Sharing expertise

Do all your field staff recognise finds? If not, it would be well worthwile spending an afternoon looking at local pottery types, clay pipe, animal bone, glass. Many recent graduates may have had little opportunity to handle material and learn the diagnostic features.

Make sure everybody in the organisation takes decent photos: this may involve looking at the various cameras you use and what the options mean. Perhaps more importantly, it is a chance to discuss why we take photos and what use they are. It is depressing to think quite how many hours have been spent over the last two decades taking multiple poor photographs of uninteresting features which have each been carefully catalgued and archived.

Most organisations have people working in silos: they may have adjoining offices but have no idea at all what other people do or why. Get them to explain their role. Quite apart from anything else, it's good practice in giving presentations.

Talk about project costings. These shouldn't be mysterious: an understanding of how they are done, and what they eman, may well have an immediate pay-off in attitudes and behaviour, once they realise quite how much money goes on plant hire.

Also, it's easy for organisations to forget that new staff don't know the history: it would be useful for them to know a little about why it was set up, what its major projects have been.

And one thing you can't do enough of is discussing grammar and layout and the real nitty-gritty of report writing.

Goal-orientated learning

Arcaheologists have a long and honourable tradition of teaching themselves new stuff when they need to. This is particularly true of software. Over the last year I have picked up some html, xml, wiki formatting, Powerpoint design, and print-on-demand publishing, because, in each case, I needed or wanted to achive something and so had to work out how to do it. It's true that this reactive type of learning is hard to fit within the CPD framework, although it is possible to some extent to predict areas you might want to develop.

Updating knowledge

Unlike a lot of things for which training is expensive, gathering archaeological information, on developments in Mesolithic studies or Roman urban sites, is free or cheap. Read some books and journals; go to a talk or two. These are real and worthwhile learning activities and, who knows, may even make you better at your job.

With a little imiagination, it's possible to carry out a transfomative training porgramme across an organisation without ever having to write a hundred-pound cheque to an 'expert'.

Hard time economics

2009-02-08T10:52:00.004Z

Any doubt about the impact of the recession on commercial archaeology has been removed by the recent IFA/FAME report on Job Losses in Archaeology. Depressingly, this news has already led to the re-emergence of rhetoric about cowboy contractors and dodgy freelances. It is sad that archaeologists instinctively think that any organisation that operates more cheaply than them must be transgressing established standards of practice, when these are probably the least threatened area.

It is worth thinking, though, about what a mature commercial archaeology industry would look like. The starting point must surely be that a unit should conduct its main operations within, say, one hour travelling time from its base. It can make no sense in the long term for field teams to commute or live in accommodation: either that becomes very expensive (if those involved are properly compensated), or very demoralising (if they aren't). The logic of 'super units' like Wessex and Oxford is debatable. From the starting point of a unit covering a radius of 30-50 miles, you can work out how much archaeological work can be expected, and therefore how many staff are needed. If the current capacity is more than the work available, the unit is unsustainable even in times of high economic activity.

One question that seems mystifying to many diggers is how one-man-bands (OMBs) and freelances can undercut established units. Maybe they do turn up on site in sparkling new 4x4s and use gold-plated trowels, or maybe they don't.

What the successful ones do is:
* work hard - not 8 hours a day, 10 or 12 (office work gets done in the evenings)
* limit overheads - minimal office staff
* cost carefully
* work locally
* know their area well
* don't pay themselves much

There will always be a market for OMBs alongside larger units. OMBs offer personal service and cheapness: to compete, units need to offer something more, in terms of reliability, range of skills, track record, professionalism and scale. Some clients will go for the certainty of outcome of an established unit; others will take a risk. Perhaps the hardest thing for OMBs to handle is contingencies: if a minor watching brief suddenly turns into a Roman cemetery excavation, where can they find a digging and specialist team to deploy in a hurry? Having said that, units might have problems responding too, but since they have more than one project at once there is at least the possibility of switching resources when needed.

The real problem for unit faced with a drop in workload is cutting back. The idea that less digging means fewer diggers is one that most managers can grasp. But unless overhead costs are reduced, they will become ever more disproportionate as the volume of work drops.

How to cut overheads

There are no painless cuts. Archaeologists expect admin support, facilities, and management. Hard luck: they may be luxuries.

As turnover drops, the ability to resource secretarial and administrative support shrinks. Because archaeologists don't pay themselves very much, it is often cheaper to get them to do this work. There was a time when the hassle of sending faxes, typing letters and routing phone calls was a distraction for archaeological staff, and it therefore made sense to employ office staff to handle them, but perhaps these days with email and mobile phones that is no longer true. Most units are stuck in an 80s organisational model of who does what.

One of the problems with project work is that the team involved pays little attention to the wider organisation: it's 'just there'. 'Why aren't there any more context sheets?', people ask, not expecting the answer 'Because you didn't get any more printed.' Tools, PPE, cameras, surveying equipment, vehicles, finds bags, computers: it's all stuff that someone has to resource. It may well be that the stock of material cannot be maintained, and projects may end up having to cost for new purchases instead. This may be wasteful and expensive, but it does have the benefit of forcing managers to consider the full historic cost of their work ratehr than the incremental costs.

Cutting management costs is hard, partly because this is managers deciding to put themselves out of a job. But it is worth thinking from scratch: how large does an organisation have to be until it can support a chief executive who undertakes no chargeable work? It depends how much they get paid, of course. But most unit are top-heavy with not one but several senior managers. This may have been sustainable in the days of large project volume, but if the volume goes down, it isn't any more. Not that they need to be sacked, but they do need to change their work pattern so that they carry out their management tasks in gaps between chargeable work.

Finally, it must be faced that many of the things that units like to do may not be possible: outreach events, open days, conferences may have to be dropped unless they come attached to their own income streams.

It is interesting to note that these measures would make units much more similar to the OMBs.

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The power of the self-talk

2008-12-08T22:14:00.002Z

Modesty and self-deprecation are instinctive and engrained, even in managers. This may be particularly true in Britain, where being proud of something is considered to run perilously close to being conceited or arrogant, but it probably universal. Less universal, though, is the inability to take a compliment. I think it is reasonable that when somebody has decided to praise you, you are allowed to say " thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed the talk", not "aw shucks, it was nothing". Reasonable, yes, but easy to do, no.

But perhaps social self-doubt has its role in preserving relationships; unfortunately it often is mirrored by internal self-doubt, the monologue that says "this meeting's going to be hard, you're never very good at this, see, what did I tell you?, it'll be worse next time ...". As a result, it's all too easy to lose sight of the things you can do well, and to miss the chance to bask for a while in the satisfaction of achievement. For a course I was on recently we had to spend five minutes writing in our journals about three things we were good at. It really was hard to break out of the bonds of modesty, and felt completely unnatural. It was very useful, though, to remind us that, yes, we were ok, we weren't necessarily in crisis mode all the time. I cannot remember the last time I had thought along these lines, looking at the positives; self-criticism is a hard habit to break (not that it doesn't have its place, but it's unhealthy as the only mode of thought).

My suggested adaptation is this: write down three headings:
* a skill you have, something you are good at
* your greatest achievement
* the event or person that has changed you most

Think for a minute, then write soemthing down for each heading. You're not deciding your answers for ever; maybe tomorrow you'd choose other examples. What you should be doing is 1, reminding yourself what is important to you and how you have been effective; and 2, practising positive self-analysis that should assist you in understanding your own motivation, values and goals.

It sound silly, but it works.

Should project managers be optimists?

2008-12-02T22:46:00.002Z

[This question arose from an office discussion about targets and programming]

The short answer: probably.

The longer answer: maybe not, not completely. But a project manager needs to be optimistic about the project, and to believe that it is worth doing and is achievable. If they don't believe that, they will be unable to convince anyone else; and they will find it hard to come up with the tenacity, flexibility and single-minded purpose that is needed to drag a reluctant project to a successful conclusion.

And they need to have faith in the ability of their team to learn and grow. There's no point planning a project team by assigning the roles to experienced specialists, only to discover that when it's time to start none are available. What can you do? Give up, or gather the best team you can and fill the gaps by improvisation.

They also need to be risk-takers. All worthwhile projects involve substantial risk, vene if it's just the risk to reputation that would follow from failure and the opportunity cost of other things that could have been done instead. The exclusion of all risk would make projects impossible to start. Good risk-takers are hard to find, of course; you don't want to mistake blind insensibility to danger for courage.

At a practical level, pessimism can be useful too: if there are important deadlines, best to look at progress with a negative attitude. But pessimism is often accompanied by despair: project managers have to believe that their actions can make a difference, that the world is perfectable, that salvation can be grasped.

Coping with the crunch: hard times are coming

2008-07-27T12:30:00.002+01:00

It isn't yet clear whether we are currently going through an adjustment, a correction, a downturn, or a recession, but what is clear is that the good times are over for development. In this post I want to highlight some of the likely effects of a worsening economic climate on the practice of archaeology in the UK.

1 Less development means less archaeology. Housing is the first sector to be hit, but that will have a knock-on effect on infrastructure schemes and minerals; a poor economy will reduce the appetite for shop and industrial constructions; government income will fall and so capital projects will be curtailed. There will be fewer developments, and those that do go ahead will pay much more attention to marginal costs: it may be worthwhile reconfiguring a design to avoid triggering expensive archaeological mitigation works. 'Bonus' aspects of work like educational, display or publication will come under pressure if they are not a core planning requirement. Competition between archaeological contractors will increase, with a focus on price as the determinant.

2 Developers are exposed. Some will fail. Projects with phased programmes may see later phases stalled or abandoned. If they run out of money, some archaeological contractors won't get paid. Some companies will go bankrupt.

3 Archaeological employment will get harder. One way or another, a significant proportion of the current archaeological workforce will become surplus to requirements. The job marketplace will be full of people trying to get on board the surviving companies. In general, mobility of employment will increase, and as a result companies will draw back from long-term training and investment in staff development.

4 Curators will become laxer. When different planning authorities feel that they are competing against their neighbours to attract the few developers with money to invest in the local economy, they will be reluctant to 'put them off' by stringent conditions; the result will be a Dutch auction where L.A.s try to minimise the entry costs.

To summarise, if you're not worried you're not paying attention. The economic downturn threatens to wipe out many of the advances in commercial archaeological practice, if the profession lets it, and we know how good it is at looking after its interests.

But what can you do? I think the key first step is to reconsider the extent to which the interests of you and your employer coincide. How likely is it that in five years time, the company will still exists, and you will still be working for it?

How to protect your career

Get accredited. Get round to joining the IFA, or upgrading your membership. Go on accredited training courses. You need to have a portfolio of qualifications and experience that will make sense to other companies. This may mean you have to spend your own money. Do so.

Get noticed. Talk at conferences. Go to conferences and talk to other participants. Write articles for The Archaeologist, CBA Newsletter etc. Join the regional IFA group and go to meetings. This may mean you have to invest your own time. Do so.

Get ready to go. Think about other employers: what would you like your next job to be? Are there loose ends (old projects, publications) that you need to sort out? Update your cv and your CPD log. Get in touch with contacts elsewhere.

Pay attention. Listen out for economic forecasts, business news; check your company's financial statements. If you can jump ship three months before it all goes wrong, you'll be able to choose where you end up. If not, not.

How to protect your company

Prevention is better than cure, and the safest and best way to weather a recession is to ensure that your employer survives intact.

Deliver for your clients. On time, on cost, on quality. At least it won't be your fault if it all goes wrong. Just hope they've got another project coming along soon.

Don't exceed the task. Either by overperfoming the spec or by undertaking work in advance of formal instruction. Anything you do that doesn't get paid for is a cost the company will have to bear, if it can.

Be competitive. It's hard to insist on quality if others are charging less, but in the long run, there is only room for one cheap and cheerful bargain contractor. If that isn't going to be you, stick to quality.

Don't be proud. If another contractor wins a dig in your own office car park, live with it rather than revise your costing to make sure you do the work. If the work isn't making you money, it's a bad thing to be doing it.

Don't be sentimental. Managers have to sack people. It's their job. Keeping people on without paid work for them to do is a path to certain disaster: the company will fold and everyone will be out of a job.

Reduce waste. Try to minimise machine hire costs, travel, consumables, cabin hire ... the less money spent on these, the more there is for wages.

And in general:

keep positive!

What not to say at a client meeting

2008-07-22T22:05:00.002+01:00

Scenario:

Your unit's evaluation has revealed well-preserved stratigraphy on the development site; there is a real possibility that the archaeological impact of the proposal will be enough for the application to be refused. So what should you say? Or more to the point, not say?

Well at least we managed to resolve the question of when the Town Ditch was finally filled in.

They don't care. It's not their job to care, and they don't. You're not there to sell archaeology; you're there to advise your clients. Even if you've spent the last ten years worrying about exactly this issue, now is not the time to say so. Tell you client, instead, that the evaluation has performed its function but has left them with a possible problem.

Perhaps you could get Professor Withington to comment?

Well, yes, if you want them to think that you don't know what you're doing or what you've found. Most developers will at some point have come across a local professor with no understanding of the planning process and an axe to grind (hydrology, bats, electromagnetism) and they will hardly jump for joy at the suggestion. It is in any case a bad move: the credibility of 'authorities' in a public forum may dissolve under astute questioning ("When did you last consult the SMR?" is a good one), and for all you know he has been writing mad letters to the council since the Thatcher era. Even if you do think he may have something to say, he should be YOUR advisor, not your clients. If he is advising your clients, what are they paying you for?

The archaeology is too precious: you'll have to re-think.

Sometimes you do have to say this. But under the present framework, it's up to the planners to say this, not you, most of the time. The judgement of whether preservation by record is an appropriate response is always a finely balanced one.

I'm sure you'll get permission

Don't say this unless you really are sure. Your clients are used to the vagaries of the planning process, and ill-advised certainty at this point brings potential liability (they may go around taking up options on leases on the basis that the development will be going ahead).

What you should say

Provide a forward plan: what's next? Meeting the case officer's a good place to start.
Look at contingency plans.
Suggest changes to design to minimise risk and cost.

Above all: be the advisor they want: be clear, well informed, judicial, and open.

Commercial archaeology and the ethics of development

2008-07-11T13:17:00.008+01:00

"These are my principles - and if you don't like them, well, I have others" - Groucho Marx.

Archaeologists have a very strong ethical sense. Despite what Indiana Jones and Bonekickers imply, it's not about the fame or the treasure: it's about the Knowledge. Having signed up to the disinterested service of knowledge, archaeologists are hypercritical of any of their colleagues who appears to be swayed by other concerns. It is hardly surprising, then, that the development of commercial archaeology has involved some self-analysis, soul-searching and mud-slinging. Especially the mud-slinging: it is slightly bewildering to see the debate about the merits of the IfA as a professional body which seems to judge its performance solely on its ability to police and punish those whose practice falls below the required standard. It is important, granted, but there are other things to consider.

I have commented on the impact of PPG16 in the UK on archaeological attitudes before: the present, over-prescriptive, over-curated, arrangements for developer-funded work can be seen as a response to the deep distrust of a situation where financial or other pressure might push excavators into misrepresenting their findings.

You cannot hope
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
British journalist

But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there's
no occasion to

Humbert Wolfe

Irish archaeology is now in the process of commercialisation, and this has led to similar issues being raised. Maggie Ronayne has published a lengthy paper (pdf) in the journal Public Archaeology reflecting on the archaeological response to the M3 motorway and its effect on Tara and other sites. Her argument can be summarised as: an inadequate supervisory framework for the archaeological investigation, put in place by metaphorically and literally corrupt politicians, and implemented by metaphorically corrupt government archaeologists, led to fieldwork of varying standards by well-meaning individual archaeologists whose results were watered down to ensure that the development proceeded as intended. Specifically she draws on the experience of her sister, who was a licensee for part of the evaluation (p. 121), who hoped that if enough important archaeology were to be found on the route "it might stop the motorway".

Similar statements have been made about the Thornborough Henges, the Rose Theatre, and the A34 Newbury bypass. They are based on a misconception of the role of the archaeologist in assessing impact. The archaeologist is being asked to determine what the imopact might be, by characterising the nature of the archaeological resource affected, and assigning a value of significance to that resource and the level of impact. The conclusion of a study may be (as it was with the M3 initial desk-based assessment) that the proposal would have major impacts on very important archaeological sites. But that is not to say that the development should proceed. The relative weighting given to archaeology alongside other factors (such as economic benefits, ecology, and employment) is not an archaeological question: it is a question for the wider community, society, or their appointed or elected representatives. Ronayne argues that the local community's wishes were ignored: that is a democratic deficit, not an archaeological one.

The question most often arises at the field evaluation stage, when developers ask nervously "Is it important? Nationally important? Will it be Scheduled?": to which the answer is usually "Yes, maybe, no". The recent news that 20% of Scheduled Monuments are already at risk suggests that even if the answer to the last question is "Yes" there may be wiggle room. In many ways it would be easier to manage the resource coherently if protection were more draconian: it would certainly be easier to advise clients if the position were clearer. PPG16 starts form the point that preservation in situ is the preferred option; preservation by record may be an acceptable alternative. This results in the paradoxical situation where mediocre archaeology found on development sites is carefully protected while sites like Stonehenge are dug up by students as part of a media exercise.

It remains the case that the ascription of value is the most important and most contentious part of any evaluation exercise. It is generally poor tactics for a developer to seek to underplay the archaeological value affected, since it calls into question the validity of the evaluation exercise: it is much better to say "yes, it's important, I realise that: this is what I want to do about it". Which is not to say that there aren't silly developers who think that they can override any concerns by shouting loud enough or relying on political pressure. Although there have been attempts to systematise the assignment of value, it remains a highly individual and subjective process; it is common, for example, for 'sexy' archaeology (Roman and Bronze Age) to be scored higher than industrial and recent sites.

It is best for commercial archaeologists to see themselves as barristers for their clients: sometimes you have to tell them to plead guilty.

Update: Moore Group blog on Ronayne and the M3

Buy 10 simple steps: the book

Transform your business with a 10 simple steps workshop.

Getting Things Done: review

2008-06-14T09:19:00.004+01:00

Coping with chaos without losing your way
Martin Locock

Title: Getting Things Done
How to achieve stress-free productivity
Author: David Allen
Publisher: Piatkus
Price: £10.99
ISBN: 978-0-7499-2264-1

Most management gurus sound a little detached from the reality of the modern workplace, at best providing some evangelical zeal to revive the fire of inspiration in their readers. David Allen isn't like that: he connects with managers' actual concerns: too many tasks and too little time, piles of papers awaiting action, and lists of thing to do that never get ticked off because of interruptions. He argues that your effectiveness as a decision-maker is undermined by the worry and guilt arising from these 'open loops' (incomplete commitments), and his solution is to transfer this load onto paper, where you can see it and manage it. It's a bit more complex than that, but in essence he says that skills of filing and listing lie at the heart of coping with a large and changing workload without stress.

It is refreshing to see a set of rules that embody instinctive truths: the two minute rule that says if it will take less than two minutes to deal with, do it now, and the 'waiting for' file for tasks which cannot progress until someone else has done something, and which can therefore be ignored for now. There are also refreshing hints like: don't just write in your diary 'phone Jean': write her number as well so you don't have to search for it.

This is an enjoyable and inspiring book for anybody who feels that constant change and competing demands for attention have left them lost and ineffective.

[This will appear in Catalyst, Summer 2008]

Buy the book from Amazon

IFA conference presentation

2008-03-12T21:09:00.002Z

Here is the Powerpoint I will be talking through next week at the Annual Conference for Archaeologists in Swansea as part of the Managing Archaeology session sponsored by English Heritage.

| View | Upload your own

Why do good Project Officers make bad Project Managers?

2008-03-11T21:19:00.002Z

In my Redesigning the pyramid paper I argued that the role of Project Officer was the hardest job in archaeology, owing to the punishing combination of archaeological, supervisory, administrative, legal, and managerial responsibilities, combined with stress, travel, isolation and weather. That is still true, and therefore the aim of the parent organisation should be provide all possible support to assist them.

You might think that somebody who can cope successfully with the Project Officer role would therefore be well-equipped to take on a managerial role with a significant office-based element to the work. It doesn't seem to work that way: often they find the role unrewarding, difficult, tedious, and even more stressful. Partly this may be because the Project Officer has been impelled upwards by a desire for job security, money or status, rather than a desire to become a manager as such. But partly it may be because being a Project Officer is an apprenticeship that teaches some unhelpful lessons.

The Myers-Briggs personality Type Indicator is a widely-used tool to identify the different approaches that people have towards life in general and work in particuler. It has been criticised but remains in use mainly because it is simple and is felt to reflect some real differences within the workforce.

I have devised the following exercise with a similar intent. below are listed a series of pairs of concepts, and you should choose one from each pair that you prefer on the grounds that it is important or easy or something you handle well.

List A < = > List B
Improvisation < = > Planning
Pragmatic < = > Principled
Short-term < = > Long-term
Completion < = > Sustainability
Risk tolerant < = > Risk averse
Innovation < = > Maintenance
Flexible < = > Programmed

If you have a background in successful project work, you are likely to have chosen answer A in most or all cases; the B answers sound at best irrelevant and sometimes actively negative. This is a natural result of the tunnel vision that project work encourages: focus on delivering the key targets to the exclusion of all else is (in that context) exactly what is required. But managers are expected to take a broader view: there are times when a project has to take a hit for the benefit of the organisation a a whole. Improvisational responses may, with the side-effect of exhaustion and panic, deliver successful management, but in the long term (aha!) a more structured and considered planned approach is needed. It is sometimes said that the job of managers is to tell their staff things they don't want to hear; there will be a tension between the managers' priorities and those of others. The conflict between 'site' and 'HQ' that seems an unavoidable part of archaeology reflects this: the Project Officer will want three more days to finish sampling, while being told to close the site so the team can move on to the next site and the invoices can go in.

So part of becoming a manager involves re-orientating your attitudes towards the interests of the organisation as a whole rather than your team and your projects. It is hardly surprising that this takes time: some senior managers never quite get there

Annotated book list

2008-03-05T12:46:00.008Z

A Manager's Guide to Self Development by Mike Pedler, John Burgoyne, and Tom Boydell
Buy it from Amazon

Primers on a wide range of activities and tools, framed within a programme of self assessment and review. Although the chapters contain example exercises, the further reading recommended will be needed to pursue a topic in earnest; it is an excellent way to get a feel for the issues as an introduction.

The Definitive Book of Body Language by Allan Pease and Barbara Pease
Buy it from Amazon

Although presented in a chatty and populist format, this contains a lot of interesting insights into non-verbal communication. Many of their explanations for the origins of behaviour are derived from simplistic evolutionary and sociobiological determinism, but this does not devalue their observation and analysis.

Getting Things Done by David Allen
Buy it from Amazon

Discussed elsewhere: but in summary, well worth buying. I have carried it around with me for months, telling anyone who'll listen about the almost magical powers of the Two Minute Rule (if something takes less than 2 minutes, do it straight away; if not, put it on the list), the Waiting For list (tasks which you can take no action on until someone else does something, and which, therefore, there is no point you thinking about), Next Actions (listing not a big nebulous project like 'buy a house' but the immediate next step, like 'go to an estate agent'), and Agendas (places to note down things you need to say to people when you think of them). It really will change your life, leaving your mind clear to think and your time free to do stuff, not organise stuff.

[fuller review here]

The One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson
Buy it from Amazon

Simple, painless to read advice intended mainly for people managers in offices. The three secrets of the One Minute Manager are setting and agreeing goals, praising good performance, and reprimanding poor performance, within the context of a one minute conversation. A good reminder that leaving people to get on with their work is not the best approach.

Managing Archaeology edited by M A Cooper, A Firth, J Carman and D Wheatley
Buy it from Amazon

Collected papers from sessions on management and archaeology from the TAG 1992 and IFA 1993 conferences. Includes case studies from English Heritage, MOLAS and GGAT, but half the volume is concerned with archaeological resource management and related issues, so there is less emphasis on project management than might be expected.

... and finally
10 simple steps to better archaeological management by Martin Locock
Buy it from Lulu.com

The book of the blog: details here.

Good and bad Powerpoint

2008-02-28T13:05:00.005Z

There are people who hate Powerpoint because it leads to boring talks (see Death by Powerpoint). I think it's more likely that boring talkers lead to boring talks, but certainly getting the best from it as a presentation medium takes a bit of work.

Is Powerpoint the right format? Why not just talk? Or use slides? Do you have time to put it together? If you're in a hurry, concentrate on deciding what you're going to say, not what it looks like.

Some people like to write out a talk in full and then read it out. This is less effective than a well-executed extempore talk, but much better than a bad one. If you are nervous, read. Reading a text is skill: the key rules are to slow down, leave spaces, leave room for asides that occur to you at the time, and make sure that it is written as a talk: pompous prose sounds terrible when read out.

Almost all talks end up too long. Ideally your planned presentation should run for 75% of the time you have been given: this will allow you to add stuff as you go along. There is a persistent belief that a talk that runs for 40 minutes when practised the night before can magically turn into a 20 minute talk on the day. It can't. If you don't want to run out of time halfway through your second point, you will need to prune the introduction drastically.

If you are going to use Powerpoint, you need to think about delivery. One of the reasons that Powerpoint presentations end up dull is because the speaker talks to the screen with their back to the audience, or sits at the side or the back of the hall. This means that they lose eye contact with their audience and cannot project their voices. You should (if given the choice) stand at the front, facing the audience, to one side of the screen, so that you can see people and they can see you. Be careful if you turn towards the screen or move away from a microphone, because you won't be heard. Your posture should be relaxed so that your voice can resonate, rather than stiff. If you have the slightest inclination to nervously jangle your keys or coins while you talk, it is a good idea to empty your pockets beforehand.

Use F5 Slideshow and the space bar to advance: if you use the mouse you will be trying to use that rather than paying attention to the audience.

I have compiled some advice on content in a Powerpoint Go to Slideshare to see the presentation.

This link might work too:

| View | Upload your own

Sources for sign generators:
Sign generator (book covers)
RedKen (alphabet soup)
Hetemeel (Einstein)
Atom Smasher (computer error messages)
ImageGenerator (MS Office paperclip)

Powerpoint when well-used can be a very effective tool, so it's worth spending some time on.

Copyright for archaeologists

2008-02-25T21:52:00.006Z

I am still not a lawyer.

Fortunately, there is a lot of good advice on copyright from The Intellectual Property Office.

Ways of managing your Intellectual Property Rights issues

1. Head in the sand

"We don't have any IPR issues because we're just doing research"
"We redraw the OS base maps so we don't have to worry"
"We've never really thought about it"

If you're not worried about IPR then you're not paying attention.
If you are creating or using text, images or data, on paper or electronically, you have IPR issues: maybe you just don't know it yet.

2. Hope for the best

"Nobody's ever complained"
"It's good advertising for them anyway"
"We don't sell our reports commercially"
"It's out of print"

In many ways this is a worse position than the first one: you sort of know that there is an issue and you shouldn't really be doing what you are doing, but can't be bothered to do it properly. IPR litigation is a growth industry; rights holders employ teams of lawyers whose sole job is to track down and fine hapless misusers. Do you feel lucky? Are you sure?

Some clarity about copyright

"My reports are research so I can include copies of maps" WRONG

Copyright law changed in 2003 to amend the old phrasing which allowed copying for 'private study or research': it became explicitly limited to non-commercial research.

‘Commercial’ is a broader term than ‘profit-making’. ‘Commercial’ is in practice synonymous with ‘directly or indirectly income-generating’. It is also clear that the purpose at the time the request for a copy is made is what is important and so some genuinely unforeseen income at a much later date is not relevant to the question. Your intention at the time must be unambiguously non-commercial.
When deciding whether or not something is commercial or non-commercial, is it the proposed use of the copies or the nature of the requesting organisation that is the decisive factor?
As mentioned above, the purpose for which the copies are required is the decisive factor. This will mean that non-profit institutions will need to obtain permission for some copying ...

Copyright Licensing Agency notes on changes to UK Copyright Law

You should still be able to obtain copies of maps for your own use, but if you are paid for putting the report together, by any mechanism, you will need a licence from the copyright holder to include them.

"If it's submitted as part of the planning process the report is in the public domain" HALF WRONG

There are two different meanings to the term 'public domain'. There is a general meaning of 'not confidential', 'open to public scrutiny'; this is true, of course. The planning process is a public process, and reports will be available. Even where report commissioners seek to control access, public bodies may well under FOI or the Environmenatl Information Regulations have to provide access to them. But this is access, to view and read, not to copy. The second meaning, of 'not copyright protected', is a US legal concept which has no direct application in the UK.

"Information wants to be free" DEBATABLE

Information users certainly want data to be free, but then they would say that. Users are in no position to dictate. The question that has to be asked is whether the information creators want it to be free. They have invested time and resources into creating it; they may feel that, having been paid by someone once, they can release it to the benefit of the world. Or not.

It is interesting to note that the most vociferous advocates of 'free' data are HERs wanting to collect the reports submitted to them into a digital treasure trove, yet they are the ones who are most restrictive about what people can do with their data. (see for example the recent Data Protecion Act thread on HER Forum).

It's an estate map from the 19th century: it can't be in copyright. HALF RIGHT

Old manuscript maps probably are out of copyright (although 70 years after the death of the creator might catch some young surveyor's work in the 1880s), unless they were transcribed later (in the 1930s). But if they are held in an archive, you will also need permission to reproduce the photographic image of the map, which may still be in copyright. If it has been published since 1945 it may be out of copyright: photographic copyright is complicated.

I bought an old postcard, so I own the copyright. WRONG

No you don't. It may be out of copyright, but if it's in copyright, having a copy of it confers no rights on you.

Crown copyright means it's public. WRONG

Crown copyright means that its protection runs for 50 years.

I write the report for my unit. It's my copyright HALF RIGHT

Copyright belongs in the first instance to the creator. Unless, that is, you were doing the creating as part of your employment, in which case it is automatically transferred to them (good contracts of employment say so explicitly). There is a slight grey area if you created say a popular guidebook in your own time based on data from your day job. Freelance workers would hold the copyright and would have to explicitly transfer it to the commissioner if they wanted to own it.

One unexplored complexity is that copyright duration is determined by the creator's death date, even if they no longer hold the copyright. Good record keeping long into the future is a necessity to allow rights to be managed.

It may not be my copyright, but I still have moral rights RIGHT

The main moral rights (which are inalienable and held by the creator (only)) are attribution and protection from derogatory treatment. Attribution is the right to be identified as the author; this right must be asserted. Protection from derogatory treatment provides some recourse for uses which are contrary to the creator's wishes. The case law fro this is weak and contradictory.

Joint copyright solves problems. WRONG

Joint copyright (between several authors or between an author and a publisher) makes problems, because the permission of ALL owners is needed to allow re-use.

I can use a photo from a book because it's a good advert so people will buy it WRONG

It may be a good advert. But nobody appointed you as their agent, and you will not get anywhere by arguing you did it for their benefit, when you should have been asking. Politely. With your chequebook out.

I've traced off the OS map, but the new map is mine. WRONG

If it is derived from OS data, it's still theirs. Only if you can demonstrate not only that you could create an equivalent image using no OS data, but actually did so, are you safe.

OS data is public data: I've paid already in my taxes. WRONG

The Ordnance Survey is self-funding: its survey work on behalf of the government and everybody else is paid for by its licensing and products.

Disclaimer

This is for general information purposes and is not intended to constitute legal or other professional advice. You should seek specific legal advice in relation to any particular matter.

Contract law for archaeologists

2008-02-21T10:16:00.006Z

I am not a lawyer.

I am not a lawyer, but.

I am not a lawyer, but I have spent many unhappy hours drafting, negotiating and finalising contracts, and dealing with the fallout when disputes arise.

And that is the point, of course: with a healthy relationship between the parties, the contract can be signed and forgotten about. There is a temptation for people who have had problematic projects in the past to add on clauses to attempt to pre-empt issues. But there is no correlation (in my experience) between the length and complexity of the contract, the scale and nature of the project, and the eventual satifactoriness of the outcome: small simple projects with long contracts have ended in interminable correspondence and court actions, while big complex projects agreed by exchange of letters have turned out fine.

At one stage the IFA issued a model contract for archaeological work but it proved hard to implement in practice, because developers would shrink at a 30 page document of dense and complex provisions which they couldn't understand, let alone agree, which (it turned out) contained some decidedly unusual arrangements for stewardship of the finds (ownership was handed to the excavators). This model contract is no longer publicised.

It is much better for a contract to reflect the desired substance of the agreement sought. It need not be written in complex language (in fact it need not be written at all, although as Sam Goldwyn said, a verbal [meaning oral] contract isn't worth the paper it's written on). It is worth emphasising that contracts are supposed to be a tool to provide clarity and certainty, and should be drafted with that in mind.

What is a contract?

A contract is an agreement which can be enforced by the courts. Most contract law practice in the UK is covered by common law rather than statute.

There are three necessary elements to a contract:

offer and acceptance (some evidence that the parties have agreed)

consideration (the goods or services and payments to be exchanged (in UK common law a contract must involve an exchange not just a transfer from one party to the other))

an intention to create legal relations (some evidence that the parties wanted to be bound by the contract)

If one of the parties breaches the contract by failing to perform their duties, teh courts can require them to do so. Until recently it was arguable whether any interested parties who were not signatories to the contract could enforce its provisions, but they now can unless the contract explicitly prevents them (Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999.

Whose contract?

The choice of contract has to be agreed. This can lead to long arguments if both parties have standard contracts they use; eventually somebody has to give in. Some terms (covering copyright, for example) may not be negotiable and the signatory wil have to decide whether to enter into an agreement which does not reflect their preferred arrangements.

If there is no contract, or no agreeable contract, a simple one can be devised. The disadvantage of this is that the wording may be loose and open to interpretation and some important issues may not be covered. On the other hand, interpretation will be based on what a 'reasonable man [sic]' would have understood by the terms.

Key requirements to a new contract are:

Defining the parties

Particular care is needed when delaing with agents and shell companies: in general the landowner should be the signatory.

Requirements

Define the tasks , goods and services to be supplied.

Obligations of supplier

State the delivery and acceptance arrangements and any quality thresholds.

Timetable

The programme should be described. This should be broad enough to allow the agreement to cover works even if delayed for some time; otherwise the terms of the contact may not cover them.

Payment

The payment arrangements, and any stage payments and invoice payment period should be stated (rather than included as a unilateral statement on an invoice form). VAT should be explicitly covered.

Terms and conditions

If you have standard terms, they can be written into the contract to form part of it. If both parties do this, it will be necessary to check carefully to see whether there are any provisions in conflict. Note that the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 provides some protection for a party who accepts the other's standard terms.

Signatures

Somebody sufficiently senior to commit the orginsiation should sign; care is needed with parties who are not landowners. There is no need to sign at the same time. Two copies should be signed, one retained by each party.

Schedules

Any documentation cited in the contract should be appended as a schedule: this eliminates any doubt about versions.

Contracts and business relationships

Having a clear contract can be seen as a form of deterrence: it shouldn't be needed because it's there. It may take some time to finalise a contract, but you should NEVER start work without some form of instruction to proceed. Archaeologists are helpful people and will want to get on with the work, especially if they have made arrangements for plant and staffing for a particular date. But if you start before the client says so, you are labelling yourself as a naif who can be exploited at will.

Similarly if the client disputes an invoice you must be prepared to suspend work until it is resolved, even if this causes you considerable inconvenience.

On a positive note, you should remember that the primary duty of care your organisation owes is to your client, who should be the first, not the last, to hear of your results (even if, according to the IFA Code of Approved Practice for the Regulation of Contractual Arrangements, your personal primary duty is to the archaeological resource).

Disclaimer
This is for general information purposes and is not intended to constitute legal or other professional advice. You should seek specific legal advice in relation to any particular matter.

Failing projects 3: saving your own project

2008-02-04T21:40:00.000Z

The previous section dealt with saving a project from outside. But what if it's your project, and you're beginning to recognise the warning signs?

Don't panic, act

or rather

Don't act, think

Have you really got a problem? It is notoriously difficult to predict how much longer an excavation will take. The best way to visualise the timescale is to think that if you stopped digging now, and all you did was record, sample, and close down the site, how many weeks would it take? If your project is in any sort of trouble and nearly halfway through, the answer is likely to be "most of the remaining time". Which means that, unless something dramatic changes, you have very limited scope for further excavation if it is to be dealt with properly. And so the answer is "Yes- you have really got a problem".

This may be a deeply troubling revelation; on the other hand, you should take some comfort in the fact that maybe you can do something about it.

Am I to blame?

The honest answer is "perhaps", but that's not important right now. It may be that the tasking and resources were so mismatched that equating the two was completely impossible. That's not your fault (unless you did the estimating). Or it may be that you were treating the stratigraphy carefully hoping that there would be time to deal with the whole sequence that way. It may be you were unlucky with the weather. But whatever it was, just leave it. The important thing is how you react now; delivering projects when it's easy is easy; it's the hard stuff that's hard to do.

If at first you don't succeed, review your success criteria

Re-read the spec and brief to remind yourself what the key interests are and what you are committed to delivering. You may find that a problematic recent feature can be ignored, or left in situ. Or that full excavation is not expected. There are a lot of clauses about variations and unexpected discoveries which may provide a way out.

Renegotiate

If you can't deliver the narrowly-defined success criteria, you'll need to negotiate with your client and curator. Complete honesty is vital to this process: in most circumstances an extension can be agreed, but if the site still ins't finished then you will be stuck.

Pass the buck

Your managers are paid more than you, because they are responsible for your projects among others. Most of the time this is a hands-off role that involves them in little more than tracking and the occasional flying visit. But their most important role is when things go wrong: they are the cavalry. Call them. Tell them you're stuck and need help. If they understand their job, you will find that it ceases to be your problem and has become a company problem.

Tell your team

Keep your staff informed as the strategy changes, explaining the thinking behind it. Do NOT blame it all on head office or the developer or the curator. You should present it as your plan. If you can't do this then you shouldn't be on site any longer: go on holiday. There will inevitably be objections about whether it is proper to depart from conventional archaeological practice. Face them head on.

Don't spread despair

One definition of leadership is "transference of emotion".* What emotion will you be transferring to your team? If you spend your time bemoaning the past, criticising your bosses, and doubting whether the work can be finished, they will end up too depressed to work effectively. The role of the field officer always involves the difficult balancing act of representing the office to the site team and the site to the office staff. This becomes even harder when projects start to go wrong. But don't give in and stay positive.

My indecision is final**

Even the best people need to be told what to do. The worst, even more so. You should expect to be asked at regular intervals all through the day, every day, what needs doing next, how, who by. If you're not being asked that doesn't mean that you're safe. It probably means people are choosing themselves, and they are probably unaware of the wider picture. Nothing destroys a team's morale quicker than uncertainty at the centre (even making wrong decisions is better). If you find yourself saying "I'll have to think about it" more than twice in a day, you need to do some planning. The best solution in the short term is to spend half an hour in the evening, at home in peace and quiet, making a list of the next tasks to follow completion of the current ones. Then if inspiration fails, use the list. All of a sudden it will look like you know what you're doing.

*

"The fundamental task of leaders... is to prime good feeling in those they lead. That occurs when a leader creates resonance a reservoir of positivity that unleashes the best in people." Publisher's Weekly review of Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, Richard E. Boyatzis and Annie McKee.

My Indecision is Final by Jake Eberts is an account of the death of the British film industry.

Failing projects 2: How to save a failing project

2008-01-26T15:10:00.001Z

This section is written under the assumption that you are the office-based manager of a project team led by a field officer and the project appears to be failing. If you are the field officer, see part 3.

Houston, we've got a problem

The first step you need to take it to recognise that there is a serious problem. Accept it. If you spend all your time complaining that it isn't going as planned, you will not be in a positive enough state to drive through any improvement.

We are where we are

If saving projects was easy, none would fail. There are losses; some will be irrecoverable; not all outcomes will be achieved. You should be thinking about damage limitation: what are the key outcomes? How could we get there from here? It is important to remember that whatever you plan, it will probably have to be delivered by the existing team, the team which is already performing poorly. If they have taken 50% of the time and resources to do only 40% of the work, you have two problems: there's 60% of the work still to do, and at the current rate that will take 75% of the available time.

Do something now

Every week of underperforming creates a bigger problem to be addressed. Minor changes early on may do as much as drastic actions later.

"Do" and "Don't"

Don't tell them it's easy

There is no point saying that you could do it quicker or better, or somebody else could. They are finding it hard; unless you are intending to actually do the work yourself, the fact that you could do it standing on your head is irrelevant.

Don't apportion blame: leave the autopsy until the patient is dead

There is a time and place to work out what went wrong. Surrounded by frazzled staff who have been quietly panicking about how it is going isn't one of them. Save it for the post-project review, which will usually conclude that decisions were made with the best intentions in the circumstances as they appeared at the time.

The review may well show that the problems were caused by a combination of bad research, bad planning, overoptimistic costing, remote management, bad luck and bad weather, as well as project implementation. Often such problems only become obvious at the fieldwork stage, but that doesn't mean that's what caused them.

But even if it is true that the fault lies with the field team, who are no doubt demoralised and unmotivated, telling them this is hardly likely to inspire them.

Don't tidy up

You could clean up the cabins and tool stores and make the site look a bit smarter. But it won't help: although a dirty site is a symptom of a failing team, the obverse isn't true. The problems with the team need to be addressed if anything is going to change.

Don't work overtime and weekends

The extra work done won't compensate for the administrative and logistical problems caused, and productively in core hours will suffer.

Maybe send people on holiday

This will be good for them, and good for the site, since it provides a break which will alter the team dynamics. It's actually a good plan to include a break in projects on purpose: the need to hand over to someone else is a very good discipline.

Maybe replace the field officer

This might seem the obvious solution, but it is fraught with difficulties. For a start, it seems to personalise the issue into a matter of their competence. It will probably irreversibly damage their working relationships in the future. And it will be resented by the staff (paradoxically, this is true even if they have spent the last month complaining about how useless they are), the staff you are hoping to lead forward to success.

Maybe provide more staff or more time

Again this may seem an obvious solution. But throwing more resources into the mix will have little effect unless the fundamental problems are addressed; in no time any new staff will have gone native and be just as unproductive as the rest. And adding a few weeks to the project may be felt to be extending the prison sentence.

Even if this doesn't happen, there's likely to be friction between old and new staff, especially if the new members have been labelled as 'the ones who are coming to sort it out'.

Do make hard decisions

In general, problems arise because people defer hard decisions, rather than because they choose wrong. But archaeologists will be understandably reluctant to depart from accepted methodology. If you are going to abandon stone-by-stone planning, the decision should be made by the senior archaeologist involved, after careful thought. The team may well be reluctant: it is important to explain to them the rationale, not just the outcome.

Do support your field officer

Help them by smoothing any practical issues, listening to their views, respecting their opinions. And make sure you are available and visit site often: long distance management only works when projects are running well.

Do talk to the team

Give them information about the background to the project, what your priorities are, and how they fit in. They should be made to feel part of the company, even if they are only there for a single site.

Do listen to the team

You never know, you might learn something.

Redesigning the pyramid: archaeological management 10 years ago

2008-01-26T13:45:00.001Z

Martin Locock "Project management in a changing world: redesigning the pyramid", in M A Cooper, A Firth, J Carman and D Wheatley (eds.) 1995, Managing Archaeology (Routledge, London), pp. 208-215.

Click on an image to see a bigger version.

Failing projects: 1 - identification

2008-01-19T20:07:00.000Z

So how do you spot a failing project?

Although this question is framed as if it were about the project, it is really about the project team. Some projects will fail because they are too big, too complex, or too under-resourced to achieve their aims despite the best efforts of a fully functioning team. Here the issue is rather: how do you spot when a project threatens to fail even though it should succeed?

Teams are astonishing flexible and powerful. Humans are by nature social animals; if you put people in a room and give them a task they will become a team. As Big Brother has shown, this may not be a pleasant or wholly positive process: the missing element in the House is leadership. Most failing teams reflect a failure of leadership. There are a lot of warning signs indicating that such failure is imminent.

Site visit to a failing project

Workers will be focused on specific tasks or areas, reluctant to share equipment or lend staff

What this reflects is a lack of belief in the project as a whole. It isn't necessarily a conscious effort to avoid blame.

Untidy tool store, site and cabins

People feel too busy or too tired to do anything that isn't their direct responsibility: it's easier just to leave the rubbish on the chair or put the tools away dirty.

Minor accidents, incorrect or incomplete records

People who feel under pressure won't have their usual air of calm competence.

Minor sickness, lateness and slowness

One of the prime motivators is feeling that you can't let your team down by not playing your part: so these symptoms reflect that the central identity of the team is weak.

Poor morale and working relationships

Arguments are to be expected when people work together, but in normal circumstances they would be brief and soon forgotten. One common phenomenon is the developemnt of a strong site v office antipathy where senior managers are seen as the enemy.

It will be apparent that 10 minutes of wandering around the site and talking to a couple of the team will probably be enough to assess these warning signs. It should perhaps be emphasised that although it is often said that conditions like the weather or the nature of the work are responsible for poor morale, this isn't true: an enthused team will cope with an adverse situation positively.

Talking to the team leader (Project Officer/ Project Manager)

The team leader will be aiming to deliver a successful project completed on time. They will normally do their best to avoid admitting to uncertainty. Phrases such as "I'm not sure ...", "I don't know ... "and "I can't decide ... " should be taken as red flags that they have reached the point where they are no longer able to take effective decisions. This is usually because they feel swamped by the work to be done and therefore cannot plan ahead. Another warning phrase is the reponse, when asked for the likely completion date for a task, is "As long as it takes"or "I can't tell". This is not because people should be able to predict the future accurately, but rather because it's telling you they haven't even got a plan for how it might work out.

When people get to this state they cannot prioritise effectively, but more importantly they cannot direct the team, who will sense whether their leader has a grasp on the project.

Action is needed ... but what? See part 2.

Transform your company with "10 simple steps"

2008-01-19T16:43:00.000Z

The project management skills of your company’s staff are critical to its success. Improving them will have an immediate impact on project delivery and reliability as well as on motivation. Most generic management training is expensive and hard to apply to the specifics of the archaeological sector, and employers are sceptical of its direct benefits.

The one-day workshop, 10 simple steps to better archaeological management , is different. Aimed at senior and middle managers in archaeological organisations, it provides a mixture of practical tips, analysis of current practice, and opportunities for discussion and reflection, which will leave them ready to face the challenges of their work with a new enthusiasm and insight.

Issues covered include: communication, image, cost, risk, health and safety, and specific management tools.

If your company needs better results from its projects, you should invest in this course. It can be delivered at your workplace or in a nearby venue, at a cost of £400 for the event. Contact me at mlocockATgmailDOTcom to discuss this further.

Good enough is good enough

2008-01-16T21:51:00.000Z

I sometimes describe myself as a recovering perfectionist. I used to go to enormous lengths to ensure that every letter, report, or set of minutes was not just clear and promptly produced, but also well laid out without spelling or grammatical errors (or their increasingly-common near-equivalents, keyboard mistakes). In some circumstances this was the right approach: you don't want an advert for your new website to show the wrong url; but there is little doubt that I spent more time on these tasks than I would if I were content to tolerate minor faults.

There was a time when critical readers of reports would highlight such errors as if their presence cast doubt on the reliability of the evidence and interpretation presented. This was never, strictly speaking, fair (the process of converting handwritten manuscript into printed text involved many stages and multiple hands), and has become obsolete. These days readers are unlikely to complain about minor mistakes in web content, as long as the text is helpful and errors, once notified, are corrected. It is churlish to complain (as some do) about the low standards of academic rigour and syntax in blog entries, considering that the writers have spent their time and trouble to create them without hope of reward beyond the gratitude (if any) of their readers (if any).

The whole notion of living in perpetual beta, where you expose material you know to be incomplete or containing errors, is hard for many to accept. Hence you still find the die-hard emailers who insist on using the formatting and syntax which was appropriate to formal business correspondence 40 years ago. It is, alas, futile to object that their use of "your letter of even date", "submitted for your consideration", and "under separate cover" is as baffling to their recipients as breathless uncapitalised under-punctuated text-speak is to them.

Which is not to say that we should abandon all hope of precision. But often perfectionism is a tactic to conceal ignorance about hat is important and what is not. Like the actor who said that he didn't care what lies the newspapers told about him as long as they spelled his name right, we should spned more time ensuring that the conclusion and summary of a report are correct and clear, rather than proofreading the context catalogue.

[Incidentally, the prevalence of spellcheck and autocorrect functions is changing the sort of mistake that commonly escapes correction: because 'their' and 'there' are both plausible words that appear in the dictionary, they are becoming effectively interchangeable - in 20 years' time the grammatical niceties of their use will seem as quaint as rarified debates about split infinitives seem now.]

Focusing on the important stuff is a good thing in the office: it is vital on site. In a way, it is easy to dig a site properly: you start at the top with your trowel and toothbrush and keep digging down until you hit natural. But unless time and resources are unlimited, this approach will not work; instead, the topsoil will have been lovingly removed, each residual ploughzone find carefully recorded, and the henge or cemetery or villa will not have been reached.

The main reason that experienced excavators work faster than newcomers isn't because they can use the tools well, or because they are fit: it is that they know which tools to use, how fast to go. If you watch one at work you will see they continually switch from mattock to trowel to leaf to mattock as their confidence in the stratigraphy ebbs and flows. Equally, at a project level the specification will identify the key elements of the resource to be examined. Whatever the truth about The Digger's story of machine stripping of medieval stratigraphy, it is possible to acknowledge that in theory such an approach might be justified: I write as a member of the select club, along with Philip Barker, of those archaeologists who have dug a section through medieval town defences using a Hymac. Such actions can be defended if they provided the evidence required, regardless of their apparent brutality.

Such a defence is, of course, undermined if it turns out that the information you were so keen to retrieve is then left to moulder in obscurity for years. Prompt dissemination is fundamental to the development of archaeological thinking -- the perfectionist's definitive account is all too likely to emerge 30 years after the debate they wished to illuminate has been settled once and for all by others with lower standards and faster publication schedules.

So before getting out a red pen to edit a report, remind yourself: good enough is good enough.

Delegation and succession planning

2008-01-10T23:09:00.000Z

There is a word for the sort of organisation with one key member of staff, in whose absence the whole thing grinds to a halt: doomed. In the short term, they will take holidays, sick leave, attend meetings; and in the long term they will leave or retire. A good warning sign is how often someone who is out of the office is phoned on their mobile.

This often happens because a dependency culture has grown up (perhaps unconciously reinforced by the key manager who insists on doing everything). A healthy organisation should be able to cope with temporary staff absences; if yours can't, you should be looking at sharing skills and knowledge more widely.

Getting the most from external training

2008-01-10T22:45:00.000Z

So you've got past the reasons not to train and are about to go into the outisde world. How can you ensure that you benefit as much as possible from the opportunity?

One way you will benefit is by coming back inspired. This may not in fact because you have learnt a lot; time away from the office and its day-to-day crises is very refreshing in itself, and it is also a good chance to think about thorny long term issues. It is worth taking some reading or writing that you have been putting off delaing with 'until you get a chance': you may not in fact deal with it, but at least it's there if you feel like it. It is also worth reading the literarture about the event you're attending, so you are clear about arrangements, and can also think about which speakers you wish to hear, which attendees you might want to link up with. This is all 'train work', and needs doing, but it is also important to arrive fresh and energetic, so you needn't feel guilty if an early start has left you unable to do more than read the paper on the journey.

It is easy to forget that travel and training can be quite hard physical work. It's no surprise that by Day 3 of a conference many attendees are falling asleep. It's a good idea to take water and fruit to suuplment the coffee and biscuits which will no doubt be supplied as a staple. It's alos a good idea to get out into the fresh air: walk in the grounds or a local park rather than attend a session you're not interested in.

And while you will hope that speakers will be clear and interesting and organised, you certainly won't be completely enthralled all the time. Don't beat yourself up about this. Even the worst speaker will probably set off some train of thought (even if it's only "I must make sure my team learn to give talks properly"); I note down such ideas around the edges of the page, with action points marked with a *.

Then on the way back these notes can be reviewed to see whether they make any sense (both as legible text and as intellectual content), and back in the office you can easily work through the action points before filing them.

If you learned stuff, say so. There's nothing more likely to smooth the next application like the demonstrable effectiveness of the previous one.

Drawing up a Personal Action Plan

2007-12-20T08:17:00.000Z

Most readers probably visited here looking for a couple of tips for specific but minor problems they had encountered. I hope they will have found something useful, or at least got some pointers to possible solutions. But to stop there is to miss an opportunity. Transformational change requires commitment from the individual, and maybe you are at the point where you are ready to take that step. If so, this section will provide a template for a personal action plan, through which you will identify your goals, define a plan, and subsequently monitor your progress and review your plan. To do this I have developed what I call a Love/hate map.

It is interesting to look at the IFA’s CPD scheme of 2002, which covered similar territory (see the download forms and further information on the IFA Training CPD page. The focus there is on knowledge and experience, directly related to current or near-future work, rather than skills; it is improved skills that provide the best pay-off, and are more likely to be transferable in the future.

Stage 1: Preparation

Projects are usually planned in great detail, even if they are short and simple. This is in complete contrast to how those involved handle their career development, which is left to chance or whim. Obviously it isn’t possible to control which jobs fall vacant, or where and when, but it is possible to have a concept of what your next move is likely to be and what would be needed to succeed. But your career development is something worth investing some time in, so treat it seriously.

Before starting the actual process, it is worth exploring whether there is someone you can share it with. If so, this can make things much more productive and enjoyable. Choosing a buddy is difficult: they must be honest and tactful, as well as trustworthy. It is best is it is not your line manager: they will almost always find the switching of roles between boss and confidante too difficult to handle, especially if your long-term aim is to leave. But find a mentor if you can.

Then you’ll need a journal or file where you can assemble your thoughts, and copies of your cv, job descriptions, and organisational documentation. And some time, undisturbed: getting up early in the morning is a good approach.

Stage 2: Analysis

The first stage is to look at your current work and skills. It is easy to define a post in terms which become a shopping list of tasks, but this isn’t very productive. A much better idea is to draw up a Love / hate map.

Write a list of the ten aspects of your current post you feel most strongly about, with a one-word title. This may be a major functional element of your job, or a small task that excites a reaction (foreboding or anticipation). For example:

Meetings Negotiating with developers and curators
Lectures Formal public speaking
Admin Timesheets, expenses and order forms
Writing Writing publication text

It is quite likely that the things that bother or please you the most are 'soft' skills like interpersonal relations, which tend to fall through the gaps in job-focused training.

Go through the list putting between one and three ticks against those you enjoy, and crosses against those you dislike.

The next stage may require external input (where your buddy/mentor might help, or your last performance appraisal), since you now want to try to decide how effective you are at those tasks, independent of whether you like doing them. Assign ticks and crosses as before, with a different colour pen. (Note that the number of ticks is not crucial and it is pointless to obsess over precise measurement).

Draw a large cross on a piece of paper: label the righthand side “Tasks I love”, the lefthand side “Tasks I hate”; the upper half “Tasks I’m good at”, and the lower half “Tasks I’m bad at”.

Grid for Love/hate map

Now write onto the grid your ten tasks in the correct position.

Love/hate map showing tasks

This map by itself shouldn’t be telling you anything you don’t already know, but it may help you understand your strengths and weaknesses.

If the bottom left box is full and the top right box is empty, you are in the wrong job. You shouldn’t spend your time doing badly the tasks you hate.

You may be reassured about the tasks in the top left: you may worry about them but they are not damaging your performance.

The tasks in the lower half are the ones which need action. To prioritise them, you should now circle those tasks which are most central or frequent in your work.

Love/hate map showing frequent tasks

Any circled tasks in the bottom left box need to be looked at first; next would be circled tasks in the bottom right box.

This exercise is not dissimilar to other methods of analysis, except that by brining your feelings into the equation it makes the outcomes much more focused, because moving tasks out of the bottom left box will not only improve your output, it will also make you feel much better. The word ‘happiness’ is not much used in management theory, even though it is critical to performance.

Stage 3: Improving performance

Now you know which tasks need attention, you will have to explore ways to improve. This may be as simple as asking your manager or colleagues for advice or help, or reading a book or website; or it may involve formal study. Most managers leave the identification of training needs to the individual, and as long as you have a clear idea of what you want and how to get it, it shouldn’t be difficult to obtain their support. It is worth noting that even for the most expensive taught courses, the main expense is your time.

It is a good idea to draw up a timetable:

Aspect Current performance Priority Action needed Date
Admin Poor High Inhouse training by May 2008
Meetings Fair Medium Remote learning course by July 2008
Supervising Fair Low Inhouse training or formal course by Dec 2008

The timetable should also have a review date (6 months or a year in the future): write it here, and put it in your diary.

Stage 4: Future plans

It will be seen that the action plan has so far dealt with your current work, not the future. This is deliberate: people's instincts about the past and present are quite reliable; their guesses about the future are not. It is possible to use the map to assist in informing your future plan.

Think about your ideal next job; be as specific as possible ("a Project Officer doing watching briefs for a commercial unit", rather than a "Project Officer"). Find a job description of a similar post, and then compare how many of your 10 mapped aspects will be relevant. If they lie mainly in the love/do badly quadrant, you should seek training to address your performance. If they lie mainly in the hate half of the map, you should look for other possible posts with a better fit.

This can then be developed into a timetable as for Stage 3, with a review date.

If you feel that it is time to move on, you should also think about the sort of application an ideal candidate would submit: what qualifications? experience? skills? attitudes? This may well reveal gaps in the evidence you can provide, which you should try to address before you start applying in earnest.

Stage 5: Review

At regular intervals (the last day of the month, or payday, are good milestones), take five minutes to look at your action plan. Are you making progress? Have you changed your mind or found new areas to explore?

Soon enough, your review date will arrive. If you find that your attitudes have changed completely, re-start the process from Stage 1. If not, consider how far you have come. Discuss your plans with your training buddy. Unlike most conversations about people's so-called careers, this should turn out to be a positive and inspiring exercise.

Discussion

It is easy for introspection to become daydreaming, and debate to become whinging. This action plan is intended to provide a structure which should clarify your goals; it contains no great insights, beyond the obvious one that people enjoy jobs which involve doing things they like and are good at.

Step 10: Look after junior staff

2007-12-10T22:35:00.000Z

In Archaeology Labour Market Intelligence: Profiling the Profession 2002/03 (table 58) (available from IFA > The Profession page), there is the sobering statistic that 25% of those aged 40-59 earned less than £18,000 per year. What this means is that low pay (low even by archaeological standards) is not a short-term problem for recent graduates. Somebody who graduated 15-35 years ago might still be at this grade. If you wish to retain your trained and experienced staff, you need to make sure they can actually afford to live on what you pay them.

Increasingly, though, money is not the only issue. Many other people manage on £18,000 per year. What is critical in the long term is the overall package that employment brings: issues like arrangements for travelling time, holidays, pension scheme, healthcare, and training, may be just as important to retaining staff.

The IFA has recognised that pay is not necessarily the biggest problem: it now expects employers to offer

• 37.5 hour average working week
• Employer pension contribution of 6%, subject to any reasonable qualifying period
• 20 days annual leave excluding statutory holidays
• Minimum sick leave allowance of 1 month on full pay, subject to any reasonable qualifying period

Step 10: how do you treat your staff?

Step 9: Take Health and Safety seriously

2007-12-10T22:01:00.000Z

One of the areas where the influence of leadership by example is strongest is in Health and Safety. The construction industry used to accept that its workers would be injured or killed in the course of their work, and there are still issues to be addressed; hence the introduction of the Construction Skills Card Scheme.

Archaeologists tend to be lax about safety; partly this is an instinctive anti-establishment reaction, and partly it is a result of the history of archaeology. There was a time, not that long ago, when most excavations were on rural summer sites, where, once people had been told how to hold a spade, the most serious risks were alcoholic poisoning, STDs and scurvy from off-site activities.

Working alongside the redevelopment of a brownfield site isn't quite the same: once you have looked at the issues of chemical exposure, plant, groundwater, scaffolding, shoring, ladders, lighting, old services, sanitation, and security, maybe you can do some work if you have your PPE in place. In such a constrained environment, a team will take its lead from, well, its leader: if he/she obeys the restrictions, wears the clothes, insists on conformance, then they will do the same; if he/she only wears a hard hat when an inspection is due, so will they.

You might think that archaeologists who set such great store by being 'professional' would respect H&S as a matter of course; having a site team behaving like a rabble can hardly help their cause.

You might well think that.

Step 9: Do you take H&S seriously?

Step 8: Archaeology isn't just excavation

2007-12-06T23:08:00.000Z

Everybody knows this, in theory. But if you listen to archaeologists talk about their work, they will describe their fieldwork as if it's the only thing that matters. And websites list in loving detail every site dug, with scant mention of the contractors' work on post-ex and publication.

• Analysis, reporting, archiving are part of the process
If archaeologists have such problems acknowledging this, it is hardly surprising that non-archaeologists fail to appreciate it.

• Uh-oh, we’ve got some finds

Digging is going to produce finds. To treat them as if they are some unforeseeable calamity is inexcusable. One of the major demerits of the 'roving contractor' is that they cannot develop any familiarity with local typologies and chronologies. A contractor from England working in south Wales once confidently identified a coin as Saxon and was taken aback at the doubt with which this was received; a little prior research would have revealed that Saxon coins are almost unknown in the region.

Unreported excavation isn’t archaeology, it is wilful destruction of the resource

Fieldwork that results in 'breathtaking discoveries that will transform our understanding' only raises the stakes higher in terms of eventual publication. If it's so important, produce the evidence.

To be fair, the discipline of work in the planning process has led to dramatic improvements in this area: even the least interesting projects will produce a basic factual account and a summary for the HER.

But there is another side to this question. Publication is important because it is supposed to add to knowledge. Excavators therefore have a duty as professionals to research previous work before they start a new excavation. Unfortunately many seem to believe that as long as they do their work properly they can ignore evidence from nearby, or rely on short summaries in the brief.

Excavators should read past reports before digging.

(based on Westheimer's Discovery - "A month in the laboratory can often save an hour in the library." - Frank H. Westheimer, chemistry professor; Runyon's corollary: "A couple of hours on the Internet can frequently save a couple of minutes in the library.")

Step 8a: Do you plan for the whole project?
Step 8b: Do you read enough before you dig?

Step 7: Don't overperform the spec

2007-12-06T22:01:00.000Z

Most project specifications include a clause that says something like:

“A minimum of 10% of the area will be excavated to the base of the archaeological deposits.”

This is a gesture towards limiting the commitment of the contractor to dealing with all the archaeology on the site and defining a measurable task. Except, of course, that when you look at it, it doesn't provide any form of certainty to the contractor, since the 'base of the archaeological deposits' is unknowable in advance. (There is a separate point that quantifying archaeological work by depth or volume pays no attention to complexity.) It might be better to phrase it as 'to a depth of 1.2m or the base of the archaeological deposits, whichever is the least', and then all you need to argue about is what an archaeological deposit is: does a prehistoric peat deposit count? An interglacial gravel terrace?

But people write these things all the time. What doesn't happen is that when people get onto site they pay any attention. If this is you, and you have fulfilled that basic minimum, you need to ask yourself in earnest:

Why do more?

There may be a good reason, if the purpose of the project has not been met. If the specification cites the IFA Standard and Guidance for archaeological field evaluation (available as a pdf from IFA Codes and Standards page), and it probably does, then there is another criterion:

Purpose of field evaluation
The purpose of field evaluation is to gain information about the
archaeological resource within a given area or site (including its
presence or absence, character, extent, date, integrity, state of
preservation and quality), in order to make an assessment of its
merit in the appropriate context, leading to one or more of the
following:
• the formulation of a strategy to ensure the recording,
preservation or management of the resource
• the formulation of a strategy to mitigate a threat to the
archaeological resource
• the formulation of a proposal for further archaeological
investigation within a programme of research

(emphasis added)

But even so those aims are limited: enough information to make an assessment of merit. Not all the archaeology, or all the archaeology exposed, or most of the archaeology exposed; enough of the archaeology.

When to stop:

• When you have met the quantification required
• When you have achieved the purpose of the work

Sounds simple. So why do people carry on? Because they want to do a good job, because their unit may not get any subsequent contract, because they are interested. True; laudable, even; but a luxury. Teams will argue that since their time is committed in any case they might as well carry on; but if the site closed early, they could be working on the report, and would not spending money on travel and plant.

However the project has been structured, overperforming costs somebody money. It might well be you. If the developer is paying for work done, then they are paying more than they should. If not, the contractor is spending its own money on unnecessary work. Some argue that since the work was overestimated (=overcosted), it does no harm, but that is only true if the occasions when it is underestimated do not incur losses.

Step 7: How often do you do more work than necessary?

Step 6: Costs and risks

2007-12-03T22:49:00.000Z

• Who should be taking the risk?

The relationship between risk and profit in business is well established. Venture capitalists who support fledgeling enterprises whose success is uncertain reap the rewards when one of them takes off. Speculative investment of this kind is a highly specialised activity, restricted largely to those with sufficient spare cash to afford backing a run of losers without feeling the pinch. Most businesses are not aiming for the big kill; they are happy to make a small but regular surplus above their costs.

When a decorator is asked to price up re-painting a house, their uncertainty is quite limited: they may find that the cheapest paint is not available, and they overspend slightly on materials; or their painters are lazy, and they overspend on labour. But they can commit themselves to finishing the job for the price, being aware of the factors under they control they need to consider. The house's walls will not suddenly double in size after the quote was submitted.

Yet that is what archaeology does all the time. The level of certainty prior to excavation, even for fully evaluated sites, is set very low. Somebody is taking a big risk in signing up to deal with it (whatever may turn up). It could be argued quite strongly that if anybody is having to take such a risk, it should be the developer, who is in some sense a speculator, rather than the archaeological unit with limited margins and cash reserve.

• Price for a completed project, or rate for work done?

Thus as a starting principle archaeologists should limit their exposure to uncertainty. The 'open book' model of simply charging for work done is much healthier all round. (It should be noted that it is even on average cheaper in the end, since the archaeological contractor does not need to load in allowances for possible but rare circumstances such as human remains or ships). But if you do get locked into providing a single price, don't explain, don't break it down. For all the client knows you may be a bunch of eccentric millionaires undertaking the work as occupational therapy, and the cost covers the caviar and champagne at tea break. But the more detail you provide the more they will haggle.

Mike Heaton has argued for much greater transparency in costing (see 'Costing the earth' in The Archaeologist 59 (2006), p. 34-5 (large pdf of No. 59 Word document available here ), in line, ironically with usual practice in the construction industry, whose expectations of competitive tendering archaeologists say they are meeting (see bad habits, PPG16 section).

• Archaeology is expensive, but have you hired a plumber recently?

Sometimes developers will be shocked at the costs. But they shouldn't be. Everything costs a lot these days; anything that is labour intensive especially so. No building contractor would dream of moving tons of spoil by hand, because it would take too long and cost too much. In which case they should understand where the money is going.

• Don’t cut corners in pricing

If you are, reluctantly, pricing for a whole job, be clear about the likely final cost. Trying to sweeten the pill by putting in contingency sums is a recipe for future trouble: who decides when these are triggered? If the answer is you, you may as well just say the total, and if you feel like it, at the end under-charge them. Not that that's a good idea, since you cannot recover overspends from other projects.

• For most clients, certainty is more important than price

Archaeology is a headache. If the developer knows that it will go away at a specific time for a set amount they can stop worrying about it and just wait, chequebook in hand. Only the seriously mean or financially troubled will be desperate to shave off a little on a subcontractor cost. It's best to act as if the price is completely fixed.

• Overheads are expected

If you quote day rates, quote them all in. Don't give a basic wage and then add in extras to cover holiday, tax, and admin. Even including overheads developers will be astonished at archaeologists' low pay. Cost all inputs: office support, attendance at meetings, senior staff visiting site, travel. If you weren't doing the project you wouldn't incur the cost, so this is legitimate.

• Post-project review

This is the most important tip of all. Every project should end with a debriefing where lessons are learned: was it costed right? Which risks weren't allowed for? Where were the underspends: could they have been trimmed? Unless you actively review performance over time, the same mistakes will continue to recur.

Step 6: Are you costing projects realistically?
Who pays if you get things wrong?

Changes in management training

2007-12-02T12:16:00.000Z

While archaeologists have in general avoided management training, there has been a quiet revolution in the nature of that training. In the 1980s, it was about processes and structures, decision making and critical path analysis. As such it was essentially mechanistic: problems were defined as administrative, technical or organisational issues.

This was fine as far as it went, but rather lacked the human dimension. In response to the disjuncture between the difficulties managers faced in the workplace and the solutions being offered, there emerged a spate of books like Kenneth H. Blanchard and Spencer Johnson's The One Minute Manager (1982) and Mark McCormack's What They Don't Teach You At Harvard Business School: Notes From A Street-Smart Executive (1986) which addressed the reality of working better within a system that was effectively fixed.

The shift towards soft skills is now reflected in training. The key words now are empowerment, consensus building, and fostering creativity. The MBA course at Bath University includes ethics and action learning alongside its more conventional content. One result of this shift is a focus on the actor as agent, on how you personally influence outcomes. Therefore, rather than proposing the restructuring of organisations, the achievable objective is to change oneself. This may be defined very broadly, taking in improving personal effectiveness by using tools and promoting self-management, but also covers attitudes, beliefs and social skills.

It has been estimated that the balance between 'people work' and 'tasks' is something like:
Executives: 80% people; 20% tasks
Senior Managers: 65% people; 35% tasks
Middle Managers: 50% people; 50% tasks
Operatives: 15% people; 85% tasks
(Source: PSMW Leading for Wales Directory 07/08 [very large pdf])

Purely on this basis, middle managers who ignore the importance of interaction with people are going to fail.

It is interesting to see that the Archaeology Training Forum's Roles and Skills project (2002) identify core skills needed by archaeologists:

* Manage team (by talking to people)
* Manage projects (by talking to people)
* Manage and develop yourself
* Develop and promote the organisation (by talking to people)
* Resource and control finances

Thus personal development should not be seen as a matter of an individual's career progression: it lies at the centre of their professional performance.

I would recommend A manager’s guide to self-development by Mike Pedler, John Burgoyne and Tom Boydell, as an excellent place to start.

Excel cheatsheet

2007-12-02T10:50:00.000Z

Excel is a powerful and flexible program; the Help area is also well-presented and tells you most things you need to know. Here's a few tips, though.

* Excel is NOT A DATABASE. It isn't. It doesn't pretend to be. It might look a bit like a data input form, but that is not the same thing. (It is common these days in interviews for people to mention Excel when you ask them about database experience). It does, however, have some clever text-handling properties, as well as dealing with figures.

* Problem: cell showing no data, just ########. This perplexes new users and looks fatal. It is completely harmless: this is displayed when the content for a cell is longer than the column width. Widen the column, and the data is shown. (There is a fairly good reason for this feature of the program: if you are showing financial data then you wouldn't want a column showing a deficit of £1003 when the figure was actually £100,300,000).

* Use 'Print selection' and define the area of interest unless you want pages of blank squares

* Use 'Hide columns' when you are working on two widely-separated groups of data (unfortunately this part of the program is not very well developed: an alternative is to copy the data to a new worksheet and delete the unwanted columns from there) (note also that copied and printed data will show Hidden columns) (for this reason it as well to think about the sequence of data elements when you are setting up your worksheet)

* To quickly sum a group of figures, highlight the area; the total is shown at the bottom righthand corner of the screen

* Entering repetitive data: enter the same data in two rows, then select those rows and a block of subsequent rows: it will be entered in all

* Be careful with column/cell properties: unless set to text then any leading zeroes will be dropped (eg an entry listing context "0096" will become "96"). If a column is set to text it will be displayed as entered, but mathematical functions will not work.

* The formula bar should be used for any calculation which may be needed more than once. It is possible to copy a formula into another cell. The default behaviour is if you have created formula "=sum(a2.a12)" in cell a13, to total the column, and then paste it into b13, it will automatically alter the formula to "=sum(b2.b12)". This is very useful but may cause problems if you lay out the data in an unusual way.

* The formula bar can also be used to assemble text strings (for example generating a series of urls by combining the elements: a_href="http://domain.name.com/ | pagename.htm"/ | Page title text | /a using "=concatenate(a1.a12)" to create the string a_href="http://domain.name.com/pagename.htm"/Page title text/a for each row).

* Make sure you save changes when you close the file; it is easy to discard them by mistake

* Excel data can be readily shared and imported into databases by saving as a .csv format file

Introduction

2007-12-01T15:05:00.000Z

A bold title like '10 simple steps' demand some credibility from the speaker, if the audience is to believe, firstly, that these are the steps that are needed and, secondly, that they are indeed simple (they may be simpler to identify than to take, but that's another issue). So it is pertinent to review my experience, which will also explain the focus of my remarks on, specifically, evaluations. My pre-PPG16 career at Stanwick Roman villa, Dudley Castle, and Castle Bromwich Hall Gardens was conventionally archaeological; in 1991 I joined GGAT as a Project Officer, concentrating on desk-tops and evaluations, and in 1992 became Project Manager, responsible for costing and managing developer-funded work in an increasingly competitive marketplace. In 2003 I moved out of archaeological project management into generic project management, and have since delivered a series of projects for the National Library of Wales, including Archives Network Wales. I recognised at an early stage that project management wasn't archaeology, needing a different set of skills and attitudes, and I have sought out techniques and learning opportunities to equip me for the role including, most recently, the
Institute of Leadership and Management's Introductory Certificate in First Line Management and Public Service Management Wales Connect4Cymru leadership development course.

Not that this makes me an expert. I have undertaken no formal analysis or research; I have sent no questionnaires, conducted no surveys. What I present here are observations and anecdotes based on what I have encountered, at first, second or third-hand.

But I am not intending to lay down a set of rules that you should follow: I am hoping to ask some interesting questions for you to consider. Some may resonate with you, some may not.

Finally I should say that these are my individual opinions; others are available. It is not my intention to criticise or condemn (although sometimes it may sound like it is); I am aiming for dispassionate narrative. I should emphasise that my current and former employers and any other body with which I have been associated do not endorse my views.

Bad habits of archaeological managers and where they came from

2007-11-30T21:49:00.000Z

Some of the stranger attitudes displayed by senior archaeological managers are inexplicable without some reference to the changing nature of archaeology as an activity and a business over the last 25 years. What I want to present is an alternative narrative of that change, highlighting the implications for the viewpoints of those involved.

1982: old-style Rescue

This is the first stage where I have direct experience. I started as a Volunteer. This status needs some explanation to younger readers. The archaeological bodies at the time used the term 'volunteer' as a legal manouvre, so that technically the site staff were not employees, and thus did not have to have things like NI, sick pay or holidays. It was just about possible to work full-time as a digger on the circuit of government-funded rescue digs around the UK, although it wasn't comfortable: the only accommodation provided was a campsite. This rigorous apprenticeship weeded out all but the fanatical would-be diggers. So summer excavations (in particular) had very large numbers of very poorly paid staff who would be expected to leave after a fairly short period.

Myth 1: It's not worth training people, you won't get the benefit

This sorry state is perhaps well-enough known. Less well-known is the other side of the coin: the supervisors and directors, in contrast, were quite well-paid, and enjoyed generous subsistence allowances. As a result, those diggers who did make it into their ranks suddenly enjoyed a transformed lifestyle.

Myth 2: You don't have to treat people well now, they will get rewarded later

The natural rhythm of the rescue year was an alternation of a short and intense period of excavation and then a quieter post-ex time for the core staff.

Myth 3: Don't let the diggers get near recording, they won't be around to analyse it

1986: MSC Schemes

The economic problems of the early 1980s led to the creation of Manpower Services Commission and its Community Programme, aimed at using the long-term unemployed to do some socially useful work. Archaeologists found that projects which would have attracted no other funding were suddenly viable; having large teams was a positive benefit. There were some downsides to this: the proportion of supervisory staff was limited to less than 1 in 10; the diggers, drawn from the local unemployed, were completely unskilled in archaeology, and were in some cases unwilling draftees.

One of the principles of the CP was that the staff had to paid the rate for the job; since council's didn't employ archaeologists, the nearest equivalent was chosen (unskilled manual staff). The paradox resulted in which experienced graduate diggers were being paid less than their MSC counterparts, who also enjoyed employment rights.

There were some very good results of this enforced contact with the general public. It sowed the seeds of the emphasis on outreach and education that eventually created the TV archaeology boom of the recent past. The certain knowledge that new staff were unfamiliar with the excavation process meant that induction and training were formalised. And the social background of archaeologists was diversified, as it was discovered that being a middle class graduate was not a necessary qualification.

But because of the structuring of the funding, anomalies in tasking arose. Anything that could be done by non-archaeological staff was effectively free. Anything that could only be done by archaeological staff unencumbered by people to supervise was almost impossible. Anything that involved spending money on equipment or external staff was severely restricted.

Most projects found themselves caught in a cycle of running an excavation team to provide the funding for some post-ex work on the previous excavation, and then needing a new excavation to fund ... and so on

Myth 4: Keep digging, never mind the post-ex

Restrictions on funding for specialists led to a healthy tradition of DIY finds work, and an unhealthy tradition of ignoring finds and environmental work completely.

Myth 5: Specialists? What do they know?

1989: PPG16 and contract archaeology

PPG16 was a shock to the established archaeological structures, the county archaeologists and the regional units. It is not surprising that it was met with suspicion and indeed outright hostility. It is unfortunate that the terms of debate, such as it was, took place in an information vacuum, in which nobody understood business or commercial practice.

The closest that county archaeologists had come to this within councils was the then-current process of floating off the direct labour departments as separate businesses, driven by CCT: Compulsory Competitive Tendering. Since this was what they had heard of, they assumed that the best, or perhaps only, way by which developers would procure services was by competitive tender, heedless of the few voices that pointed out that this was only appropriate when the task could be clearly specified and quantified in advance.

Myth 6: Competitive tendering is how business works

This is nonsense. Most archaeological evaluations fall well below the £25K threshold for public bodies to run an open tender; private bodies wouldn't think twice about using their preferred supplier for such a paltry sum.

There was also a paranoia about standards, or more particularly cowboys. I recall the baffling sight of archaeologists who had previously complained bitterly about the poor excavation standards, inadequate records, and nonexistent publication plans of their local unit desperately defending them against outsiders who might, well, ok, do the job, and write a report, but they weren't local.

Myth 7: Only the locals can do archaeology properly

The question then arose of how you can define good practice, now that it was something to worry about. The answer was to specify in minute detail the way to dig (even though in the past considerable freedom had been granted to excavators to select their own approach). A long and comprehensive brief was answered by a longer and more comprehensive specification. The fact that, prior to excavation, nobody knew what would turn up and how to deal with it when it did was simply ignored.

Myth 8: Specifying methods in advance ensures correct outcomes

Sadly the tendency towards long briefs has eroded the idea that somebody digging a site has a duty to familiarise themselves with the context of the site by reading about nearby sites, attending lectures and conferences, and talking to other archaeologists.

Myth 9: Archaeology is about digging, not understanding

Discussion

The myths I have listed above emerged from the particular circumstances of the time. I have implied that many were recognisable as myths, or at best partial truths, at the time; but they certainly form poor insights into modern practice. But the senior archaeologists of today will have been exposed to those conditions in the past, and unless they have unlearned them they will still hold sway subconsciously.

This is an important point: it is only by trying to articulate the beliefs now that I have recognised their source; you would be hard pushed to get anyone to say any of these out loud, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't inform their thinking.

Keep this list to hand, and see how many myths you recognise a someone tells you why you don't need a finds budget, or you have to write a 20 page spec for a three-day evaluation, or you shouldn't worry about junior staff's employment conditions.

Step 3: Image

2007-11-28T22:21:00.000Z

I have written before on my literary blog, A Few Words about the interaction between codes of dress and business in the realm of archaeology.

All across the country, favourite jumpers were consigned to bonfires or dog bedding, as the strange new world of short hair and clean clothes opened out. For the die-hards, it only took a couple of occasions on which their opinions or assistance were dismissed by busy businessmen because they looked like the people who cleaned the site toilets to recommend a change.

This was perhaps a simplistic view. What I struggled with was how to explain the culture of archaeological dress. Now I propose to follow a more roundabout route, going back to first principles: what is the function of clothing?

A recent study reported:

"… students indicated why an item of clothing they particularly valued was important to them, including perceived functional and mood-related benefits, but also clothes as means for expressing personal and social identity."

Jason Cox and Helga Dittmar, "The functions of clothes and clothing (dis)satisfaction: A gender analysis among British students" Journal of Consumer Policy 2-3 (1995) [text not available online to non-subscribers]

If you ask people about the clothes they choose to buy or wear, they will talk about aesthetics (they look good, or make the wearer look good, or feel nice), practicalities (keeps me warm, handy pockets), status (makes me look rich), and personal identity (expresses my personality). What they don't say is that it expresses their group identity.

For example, IT tekkies would consider themselves a fiercely independent and individualistic bunch who reject the norms of business fashion and wear what they, individually, want.

What then are we to make of a fashion range of geek chic like Cafe Press? It seems that, like skaters, Goths and punks before them, their individualism is expressed by wearing the same clothes as their friends.

This photograph of a group of countryside rangers and volunteers is interesting because only half of them are wearing a uniform. The others have adopted the green shirt and jeans as a form of protective coloration. Note that the only person wearing 'normal' clothes, in this context, appears as an outsider, clearly other than the rest.

I was at a large informal meeting of local government employees recently where one could immediately identify the biodiversity officers, because they wore fleeces, and the sustainability officers, because they wore woolly jumpers. People with similar interests do end up wearing similar clothes. Partly this might be explained by shared tastes, but it is also partly because we choose to dress like people we identify with. This is the power of clothes to express group identity.

However, like all such expressions, there is a price to pay. Signalling to your colleagues that you are like them also signals to others that you are different.

Time Team want to look like archaeologists.

Cornelius Holtorf quotes Mick Aston
as saying "we’re complete scruffbags but I don’t care. I’m not remotely interested in appearances, life’s too short for that”. But if you were a businessperson, would you trust them with thousands of pounds to deliver a critical part of your development?

Step 3: Are you creating the image you want?

Step 2: Labels

2007-11-27T22:44:00.000Z

So we have seen in Step 1 that archaeologists are a little unclear about who they are and what they do. It is not surprising to find that this confusion extends to what they are called.

In Kenneth Aitchinson and Rachel Edwards' Archaeology Labour Market Intelligence: Profiling the Profession 2002-03 (2003) (available from IFA The Profession page), there is the sobering statement:

Details relating to 2348 archaeologists and support staff working in jobs with 428 different post titles were received. This represents one post title for every 5.5 individuals and indicates that there is little consistency in the use of post titles across the UK. This is a slight improvement on the situation reported for 1997/98, when there was one post title for every 4.7 individuals. (p. 38; emphasis added)

This situation has the important corollary that many archaeologists carrying out similar roles are called different things; it is resonable to suppose that many called the same thing are in fact fulfilling different roles. It is therefore hardly surprising that non-archaeologists are baffled by the hierarchy of personnel they encounter: it defies understanding. Can it really be the case that (on average) there are only five people in the UK who share the same role?

There are further difficulties which have arisen from changes in usage that have occurred outside archaeology. In the mid 90s, when the shift from 'field officer' post titles to 'project' titles was largely complete, there was a general agreement on the level of responsibility they implied:

* a project officer was, in archaeology, somewhere between a supervisor and field officer, in charge of a small team for fieldwork projects such as evaluations, writing the report

* a project manager was an office-based senior officer with overall responsibility for the project, among others, and costing and tracking the work

This is the situation outlined by my 1995 paper "Project management in a changing world: redesigning the pyramid", in M A Cooper, A Firth, J Carman and D Wheatley (eds.), 1995 Managing Archaeology (Routledge, London: EuroTAG series), 208-215, selections from which can be found on Google Scholar.

This arrangement was probably fairly comparable to project officers in other fields at the time, and is (as far as anyone can tell) still the basic distinction used in archaeology.

But in the outside world, the meaning of these terms have shifted. Project Officer these days is seen most frequently in the public and voluntary sectors, defining an entry-level post with limited freedom of action and no supervisory role; typical requirements will be a degree in something unrelated and generic office skills. Project Officers, as the name suggests, are hired and fired with their project lifecycle. It will be seen that this is some distance from the expectation of an archaeological Project Officer.

A parallel shift has occurred with Project Manager. While the term has always straddled the line between overseeing and undertaking projects, under systems like Prince2, the role of Project Manager has become fixed as the senior person involved in undertaking the work, reporting to the line manager (in Prince2 parlance the Project Director) from day to day and to the Project Board for strategy. Such project managers are brought into the project after it has been planned, costed and procured. These days project management has develoepd its own identity as a skill and in practice most PMs have little knowledge of the substance of the project they are responsible for. This is perhaps a point for archaeologists to ponder: would projects benefit if the administrative tasks were separated from the archaeological?

The demotion of Project Manager has left a gap for the senior role, the perosn with responsibility for devising and overseeing several projects and their managers. A term becoming common for this is Programme Manager.

Step 2: Review your current post titles.
Do they describe what the role is?
Do they give others the correct expectation of their seniority and experience?

Step 1: identity

2007-11-25T15:58:00.000Z

The relationship between an archaeologist and their trowel is powerful. As Matt Lemke's collection of testimonies (in Trowels , in Assemblage 2 (1997), shows, the trowel is not a tool, it is almost an extension of the digger's self. I found myself as outraged by the person who kept several trowels as I would have been by a bigamist. Having-a-trowel is assumed to be identical to being-an-archaeologist.

Or see Chapter 4 of Matt Edgeworth's Act of Discovery: an ethnography of archaeological practice (pdf e-book), where (on p. 94), he says:

"A well-worn trowel is taken to symbolize the experience and skill of the digger ... Clearly it is not just a functional implement ... but also an object of significance in itself".

But what do you call an archaeologist who doesn't use a trowel? Here I think, is the explanation for the historic antipathy between diggers and people like geophysics, finds and environmental specialists, may appear on site but don't quite belong. That is perhaps a minor issue of politics; more important is the effect it has on the diggers as they progress through their careers.

It is common to meet senior managers who feel, and even say, that they belong on site, digging things up, and would do so if they could get all this management stuff out of the way. This is a recipe for disaster: any sane analysis of the skills and training that someone need as should be based on what their role is, not what they wished it was.

As a starting point, you could consider the following questions:

Do you excavate?
Do you record?
Do you analyse?
Do you interpret?
Do you administer?
Do you monitor?
Do you manage?
Do you enable?

You could then, if you wish, have a rather sterile debate about which activities were still 'real' archaeology, and which were not. More importantly, those who have drifted to the latter end of the list, in search of status, security, and power, must recognise that they are no longer directly involved in investigating the archaeological resource. Until they face up to this, a process which may well involve some mourning, they will fail at their new role, since they will place no value on managerial tasks, will be uninterested in fulfilling them efficiently, and will instead embroil themselves in interfering with the archaeological conduct of excavations at the slightest opportunity.

If, after careful thought, you realise that you are still at heart a digger, but your job title says manager, you will probably be happier and more effective if you change jobs. If you decide you want to be a manager, your should equip yourself for that role as best as you can.

Step 1: What is your current role?

Step 5: Communication

2007-11-24T14:07:00.000Z

Communicating with non-archaeologists is something that archaeologists are not, in fact, very good at. Talking archaeology at them, fine. But that isn't the same thing.

• Don’t expect them to share your viewpoint
• Don’t expect them to know your terminology
• Do tell them how it affects them
• Do give them bad news clearly

WHAT THE ARCHAEOLOGIST SAYS

WHAT THE DEVELOPER HEARS

Some golden rules
• Consider your audience: what matter to them?
• Provide a clear message: don't tell them 'we don't really know'
• Avoid wishful thinking: don't say you might be finished next week if you won't
• Don’t get bogged down in detail: they don't care about feature 1099
• Check they understand: ask them; listen to the answers
• Don’t be misled by politeness: they may be humouring you

Step 5: How well do you communicate?

Step 4: Invest in training

2007-11-23T23:56:00.000Z

A short argument for training:

• New roles need new skills
• Learning by trial and error involves trials and errors
• Invest in training
• Prioritise training needs

You might think this hardly worth saying, but there are many reasons why people are hostile to the idea that they might benefit from training.

There are a lot of tools out there, ranging in cost from expensive to free, that could have immediate results in efficiency: see for example Prince2, Microsoft Project, Getting Things Done, iGoogle.

Invest in tools not systems

It's easy to be tempted by the prestigious, complex, formal training opportunities; deciding which to pursue requires thought.

• How much more would you achieve if you spent 50% less time dealing with emails?
So look at Getting Things Done

• How often will you use the knowledge gained from a Palaeolithic rock art conference in Australia?
So unless you are a full-time specialist in rock art, don't go.

• Is your organisation ready to adopt Prince2 throughout?
If not, don't get Prince2 accredited.

Step 4a: Do you know everything already? If not, get some training.

Step 4b: Start with the tasks you spend the most time doing, or the ones you do worst

Isn't good management just common sense?

2007-11-23T23:40:00.001Z

In general, of course it is.
But as Voltaire says "le sens commun est fort rare" (Common sense is very rare) (Dictionnaire Philosophique, 1764).

And in any case, there are some things which are counter-intuitive:

* if you have two tasks to do, start with the hard one
* if you are negotiating with two people, and one is argiung and the other is silent, it is the silent one that needs convincing
* do the most important thing not the most urgent

The arguments usually comes from those who would call themselves good managers, having learned the hard way. It's almost as if they think that telling people how to do it is cheating in some way.

The foundation of successful projects is management science, not rocket science.

iGoogle can change your life

2007-11-23T22:15:00.000Z

I have never been a great fan of customisation. While others were merrily swapping their Windows wallpapers weekly, mine stayed default blue. The only gesture towards personalisation that I made was changing the homepage to Google, as soon as I realised that I visited it 10 times more often than any other. So when Google started to offer add-ons to their classic white screen by showing the small iGoogle option, I wasn't very interested at first: what could it deliver? I eventually had a look, in pursuit of an RSS feed reader (of which more later), and found a wealth of little tools which seemed useful and simple. Now I don't know how I coped before: I certainly wasted a lot more time, effort and nervous energy beforehand.

The process of signing up is straightforward: if you a Gmail.com or Googlemail.co.uk account you just need to log in, if not there's a minute's registration. You should be aware of the fact that you are giving Google even more information about your web activities. At present the worst they seem to threaten is showing you more targeted Google Ads, but it's worth thinking about.

You are then shown a list of possible features to add to your Google page, which could transform it into a virtual desktop.

Here's mine. You'll notice that I've left a fair amount of white space down the middle, but the content runs down further.

This is a deliberate trick; if you fill the screen with tools you will commit the fatal error of making the page slow to load. Similarly some tools are best kept rolled up to the taskbar if not needed. Here is my explanation of what I have chosen:

RSS feed

I don't read a lot of blogs, but spent a lot of time viisting them in turn to see whether anything new had been added, what RSS feeds are designed for. Although other feed utilities are available, Google Reader is the simplest I have found. Every time I use Google I can check to see which blogs have new posts. This can become a distraction; I have to be strict and say:
* use 'mark all as read' even if they're not (you can always go back to read them all at a quieter moment)
* exclude blogs which are updated more than a few times a week (otherwise the list will be overloaded): instead these are bookmarked and visited at leisure (if any)
* exclude blogs where comments are important (you don't see the comments in the feed)

Wikipedia search

One of the key benefits of Wikipedia is that it gives you infromation rather than trying to sell you things. I find Google searches for things like infromation about file formats frustrating because the first two npages of results are effectively commercials.

Gmail

Much the same applies to email: if this were your main email account it would be swamped too quickly to keep track of. Gmail is in any case clunky and prone to freezing and would drive you mad if you used it much. It can be used in clever ways, though: it is a good way of transferring files around as attachments (so that a Powerpoint can be sent to a Gmail address and will be availabel at any conference venue with Internet access); it is also possible to copy all your emails to Gmail to act as a back-up store.

Dilbert

What's that doing here? I thought we were working. Yes, but: if you were going to read the daily cartoon anyway, this is a quicker way of getting there than the rather clumsy website interface.

Personal calendar and planner

Google has its own Calendar system but for some reason I couldn't get it to work. This is a simple alternative, which I use to block out days with meetings on. Logically I should take the plunge and abandon my paper diary, but every few days the calendar can't be reached. Having this on the desktop means that I can access it remotely, a trick not easy to replicate with the diary.

To-do list

This is perhaps the single most powerful yet simplest tool. Create a task by typing it in (carefully: the edit text option doesn't work); then assign it high, medium or low priority. You can change priority at any time. Once a task is complet, click on the X to delete it. I haven't completely abandoned paper lists for very short-term tasks (finished that day), but it is a good way to see at a glance the things that need doing beyond your current task. At one point I found the list getting longer and longer and more and more urgent, until I was spurred into delegating as the only way to deliver; having handed out the jobs to the team it was managebale once more.

I use two lists at the moment, for work and non-work activities; it would be possible to use one per project.

Some negatives

The documentation provided for the tools is minimal and unhelpful; you have to explore how to use them yourself. Many of them are buggy and slightly unreliable; some are slow (the calendar should be kept rolled up for this reason).

But iGoogle is the closest that anyone has yet come to bringing together all the tools you need to operate effectively; once set up, it feels like a rational and effective utility.

Does Getting Things Done get things done?

2007-11-22T22:30:00.001Z

David Allen has developed personal effectiveness and productivity into a business, under the slogan "Getting Things Done". He provides a range of timesaving tips for efficient working, focusing particularly on habits of filing and storing data and prioritisation. If followed in full, GTD is not so much good practice and more a way of life, but many people find that adopting some of his techniques can transform their workrate and makes them feel that they are in control of their work rather than the other way around. There are expensive options to pursue this but a cheap place to start is the Penguin book.

You may find the relentless enthusiasm and optimism a little wearing in large doses, but you are bound to learn something useful along the way.

[fuller review here]

Using Microsoft Project

2007-11-22T19:15:00.000Z

Microsoft Project is a sophisticated Office application that can be used to plan, estimate, and monitor projects, tasks, and resources. It is fairly cheap for a piece of business software (£400 or so), although licensing may be an issue (there is a free Project Viewer to allow others on the network read-only access).

Inputting the data into Project takes some time, and this investment is best rewarded if the program is used for the whole life cycle of the project, rather than just planning or implementation. It is possible to use multiple installations across a network to share information about resource availability (so that allocating the same person to work on two projects at the same time would raise a conflict flag, alerting users that action was needed).

The usefulness of the program decreases if it is only employed on a single project; it should not be seen as way of drawing Gantt charts. It can do that, but if that's all you want there are simpler options.

On a final point, this application is unlike most Office programs in requiring professional training to make much use of: trying to teach yourself to use it is hard.

What is Prince2™ and should I be using it?

2007-11-21T22:58:00.000Z

These are two separate questions, of course.

What is Prince2™?

Prince2 (Projects in Controlled Environments) was developed as a project management tool in UK government IT applications. It was then rolled out as a generic approach to project implementation, and has been taken up by many public bodies in the local government and HE sectors, as well as in business.
Prince2™ website

Essentially Prince2™ provides a structure and terminology to manage a project from initial identification through to completion with clearly defined stages and targets. There is an emphasis on explicit terms of reference and governance through Project Boards, intended to ensure that mission creep is prevented. As such it formalises good practice. Unfortunately its terminology is precise and counter-intuitive: a clear distinction is made, for example, between a task and a process. As a result, Prince2™-speak may be unintelligible to outsiders, although some phrases have gained wider currency, including:

management by exception focus on the things that are going wrong

lessons learned log this is where Prince2 projects report their mistakes

PID Project Initiation Document

Prince2™ practitioners can gain accredited qualifications; this process is fairly longwinded and expensive. Partly as a result, there has developed a distinct field of practice called PINO (Prince In Name Only) projects, where the broad terminology and structure is adopted but day-to-day implementation is less formalised.

It has also been argued that much of the process is excessively timeconsuming and the key issue leading to past project failure is in fact lack of clarity and purpose from the client group. See for example Prince2™ problems.

Should I be using it?

The short answer is no, not least because the adoption of Prince2™ as a method has to be a decision taken at a corporate level. To implement elements of its process within an individual project is pointless and will almost certainly result in duplication of effort.

Whetehr organisations should be adopting it is less clear. If they are to do so, they must commit themselves to getting their staff accredited and following through on the paperwork that will results.

In practice, Prince2™ works best in organisations whose projects are:

partnerships between different bodies with equal power

long-term (2 years +)

delivered by a third party contractor

subject to frequent change of approach

closely defined at the planning stage

which suggests that archaeology is not its most fertile ground.

However, it is worth picking out the key Prince2™ principles for what makes a project work:

define a management structure with clear terms of reference

define the level of autonomy you are giving the project manager

have a reporting schedule and distribution list for progress reports

record changes in plan, with reasons

record your mistakes and learn from them

This is part of the training theme: start here.

Excuses to avoid training

2007-11-18T16:01:00.000Z

• I'm too busy to go on a time management course
• I can’t afford to go on a finance course
• I can't go on a leadership course when my team's morale is so low

I've heard something like this a lot. I think it's partly a generational thing: when I was doing my degree in the 1980s, the courses seemed to be intended to provide everything you would ever need for your subsequent career, including directing excavations, which would have lain 20 years in the future for most students (or so it was thought at the time, before PPG16 was thought of). Of course, this creates problems in a chnaging world, but what happens when you encounter something new? You obviously hadn't been paying attention when this was covered in your degree.

By the early 90s, the rhetoric had changed and everyone was being exhorted to follow lifelong learning, developing a portfolio career for several employers, and needing training doesn't necessarily signal weakness. There is a downside to this, though: what Caveat Lector calls the Training wheels culture, where any innovation is met with cries of 'I need training'. Archaeologists used to be largely self-taught in IT; although this may mean that we have gaps in knowledge, it also means that we are used to getting to grips with innovation by using it to do things.

Reasons not to train

There are, however, rational grounds for a reluctance to engage in training.

Irrelevance

Most skills are generic skills, but it helps if they are presented in a recognisable context. Management courses tend to be either business or public body focused, and it is not always easy to see their usefulness. I hadn't thought that "Negotiating" was a skill I would have much use for, but in fact I need it every day.

Lack of corporate support

If an employer is reluctant to support its staff in their pursuit of opportunities, it is easy for a vicious circle to develop where instant pay-offs are demanded: "You need to prove to me you've learned something useful", which is hardly conducive to a fruitful learning experience, and leads to a focus on nuts-and-bolts How To training when it may well be that personal development is the greater need.

Timetabling

Finding time within a work programme is never easy. But training these days need not be a formal taught course: you could always do a distance learning modular course, or read a book. It's unreasonable for an employer to expect all training to take place in your own time, but you should be prepared to stretch a little.

Culture

Some workplaces despise training. Some do not. If yours does, you're in for a long battle.

Lack of interest

Some people don't want to learn new things; they are happy where they are. Except they're not, of course. But even so, there's no point pushing people who aren't interested.

Lack of information

If it is left for would-be trainees to identify suitable opportunities, most will not.

About this blog

2007-11-18T14:34:00.000Z

This blog provides a range of resources, links, and further discussion of the contents of my forthcoming paper "10 simple steps to better archaeological management" to be presented at the Archaeology in Britain Conference, March 2008.

I've always thought there was something very strange about the whole process of disseminating knowledge through conference papers: an authority on a topic, with a wealth of information to share, spends days boiling it down to a twenty-minute presentation which the audience vaguely attends to, and then on occasion, the paper emerges in print in re-jigged and truncated form a couple of years later. And of course these days every talk has its Powerpoint, and every Powerpoint has its hyperlinks, for which the audience has to scribble down the urls in a way that they don't with web text. So I intend to use this blog to post bits of the talk as they develop, with working hyperlinks to sources and related materials, and also to reflect the adjustments and corrections that arise through the drafting process. And after the event it will continue to exist as an archive of what was said.

Disclaimer

All opinions presented here are those held by me, not my current or former employers or other bodies.