Glasgow Science Centre (GSC) is what we at Access call ‘a bleeding-edge Gamma user’; they’re truly pushing operational efficiency. Once GSC had built the big picture in Gamma, they even developed their own API to further support the attraction.
What GSC has achieved is advanced and something many Visitor Attractions can aspire to.
When Yasmina started in her role more than seven years ago, the Centre’s operations hadn’t changed much in 10 years, a situation that’s far from unique in the world of visitor attractions. She brought in Access Gamma to solve a list of problems faced by GSC – problems that many attractions will be familiar with.
Visitor Attractions are multifaceted businesses. They wear a lot of hats: as educators, as attractions, as corporate events venues, and perhaps a touring side too. GSC was using several different operational streams, which were each living in isolation: a ticketing system for admissions, a shop system for selling things in the shop, a touring program that was kept on a spreadsheet (a terrifying reality for a program that goes to schools the length and breadth of the UK). It was a simplistic, linear system and it was causing operational problems that, on occasion, could really trip them up.
Yasmina wanted to introduce a single source of information that would bring everything together into one place so that not only would everyone know what was happening, but from a core operational and resource planning perspective, they could all hand off to each other and collaborate cleanly. No more surprises, please! Access Gamma was the answer.
Since GSC first went live with Gamma in 2013, the team has undergone a huge – but gradual – shift towards coherence. They started with admissions and school bookings, then added the touring programme, corporate events, the café and retail. This was achieved through a planned and reasonably organised process; they got to a stage where everybody felt comfortable before they expanded to incorporate that little bit more.
Yasmina went about the change intentionally, carefully considering the kind of experience for the team that they were trying to create. Here she shares 6 of her hard-won tips for a successful journey towards introducing new technology to bring about operational improvements.
6 tips for successfully changing your visitor attraction’s operational technology, from Yasmina Khan
1. Generate buy-in at every level
Having a long-term plan in place right from the start will help generate buy-in from the top. If you can tell a director that in five years’ time you want the organisation to look like this, and this is how you intend to get there, it will be easier for them to buy-in to your plans.
Also, talk to other people who've been through this process before. People who can say, ‘Oh, yes, I've done this, and it was great,’ are great for generating wider buy-in.
2. Build an adaptable mindset to unlock creativity
Once we started to become more adaptable – by which I mean we had technology in place that was more adaptable and people in the mindset to be more adaptable – more people started to approach me with their own ideas on how things could be improved. For example, from a ticketing perspective, having flexible tech can make it easier for people to book into multiple dates at once, meaning you can run a long-term course about space in the planetarium.
The right technology means people don’t fall at the first logistical hurdle, so they’re more likely to make their ideas a reality.
3. Encourage experimentation to gain financially
The big win is being able to try things and make them happen, but there’s a commercial and financial gain element to that, too. GSC has gained financially from doing a lot of things that we didn’t use to do.
4. Ask the right question
Rather than going into the process thinking that you need a specific solution, take a step back and ask instead: ‘What is the problem we are trying to solve?’
This simple mindset shift will give you the freedom to have more impactful conversations.
5. Talk to everyone. And then talk to them again
Ask questions of everybody who is a stakeholder in your project: your finance team, your education team, your ops team – everybody, absolutely everybody who might need the new system to do something for them. And those people you're not sure whether they have a stake in it or not? Talk to them anyway!
Talk to them, chat to them, find out what they need. Give them three weeks, then do the whole thing again, because they're going tell you something they didn't tell you the first time. And after that, just keep asking in case anything else happens to filter out. Then, when you get live, expect that more things will still filter out!
Keep the dialogue going throughout. Dialogue is super important. When I talk about making sure that your teams who are using your systems to deliver your operations are comfortable, I primarily mean keep talking to them.
6. Be open to ideas
The best ideas for how we've improved operational efficiency have always come from the people who are actually doing it. A big part of my job is to make sure they know that option for dialogue is there, and that they are comfortable in coming to me and saying, ‘I really don't like this. I can understand how it looks on paper but this isn't what it's like to a customer. Could it work like this, could it work like that?’ All the best ideas come from there.
Watch the full conversation between Yasmina and Chris. They drill down into the process GSC went through, including the importance of changing the organisation’s mindset, being adaptable and how adopting a slow pace of change helped them navigate the pandemic.
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