Few institutions are more naturally “legacy” than a museum, whose purpose is to contain, curate and present the past as it flows from the present. So what would digital modernity mean for one such as the Victoria & Albert with its world-leading collections of art and design. Can something as legacy as a museum ever be “agile”, and can digital design be a lever for change in an art institution?

Those were some of the bigger questions underpinning the partnership between Made by Many and the V&A which began as a “digital brand refresh”, but ended up making a significant impact on the museum’s way of operating, its digital media team, web presence, and its capacity to luminously tell the story of its collections using its own channels.

Simultaneously venerable and avant-garde, the V&A host collections of ancient Japanese armour alongside fashion fantasias by Alexander McQueen, and it brilliantly orders the history of art and design in the altogether more disordered contemporary area. This was a challenge of both brand strategy and of the organising of information, both of which digital can help with.

Made by Many worked with the V&A on the visitor and commercial strategy and the design and technology of a new digital platform that is already having a significant impact on the way in which the museum communicates its public offering, but also on its commercial life and the way it organises itself and develops new exhibitions and services.

The first instalment of this story looks at the initial challenges presented and the project’s technology and strategic considerations, including building bespoke software, while the second part, publishing next week, considers issues of collaboration, design, and the future of the digital museum.

THINKING DIGITAL: and putting it at the heart of the V&A

Alex Stitt, Director of Commercial & Digital Development, V&A: we started off from a point where the digital team was unable to do creative or constructive work because the technology was onerous to work with. Digitally we were stalled. We couldn't get to any kind of future vision with the technology we were using. The idea was to address the toolkit and then to prove what this toolkit could do.

We were also trying to raise the level of understanding of digital in the V&A – everyone thought to the physical. If there is money to be spent it will go on refurbishing a gallery or building an extension. Museums are about the tangible, the authentic object: the core purpose is the preservation and display of objects in the physical realm. That's a challenge.

Kati Price, Head of Digital Media, V&A: It was apparent that we had a really fragmented digital platform in terms of user experience and brand experience. The technology underpinning it wasn't fit for purpose. What we wanted to do was have, as well as great user and brand experience, a brilliant editorial tool that could be used not only by the digital content team, but also by other experts who would also like to turn their hand to producing digital content.

We wanted to appoint an agency who understood that whole spectrum of user experience, brand experience and technology – that’s very hard to find.

William Owen, Founding Partner, Made by Many: Our goal was to focus first on the general visitor and to serve their purposes, to answer the simple questions: What is the V&A about? Why should I go? What can I see? When is it open? The design strategy was very simple: to use the digital channel to open access to the museum, its exhibitions and its collections, with a primary focus on visitors and a secondary focus on academic or private research. First, though, we had to prove that simple changes could have a big impact.

The V&A had invested in a fairly recent new website with a clumsy content management system and web application that the digital media team was scared to touch for fear of it breaking. The website was constrained, boxy and text-driven, and didn't do the simple job of informing and inspiring people to visit. The digital team had to rely on decisions made by an IT team that had little interest in the audience and wanted to achieve a hands-off operation, run by third party technologists; instead, we’ve given the V&A the skills and the technology to act autonomously, and grow their own platform.

Another problem was that the digital content team were acting purely as production workers because they didn't have time to do anything else. They didn't feel that they had the permission or the time to use their own editorial intelligence. We enabled people by giving them a different framework in which to act, with a much better editorial tool – with the CMS we've reduced certain tasks from two hours to 15 minutes, and from 20 minutes to seconds.

At present the museum isn’t organised to distribute the information it has about its holdings intelligently, and putting a slice of digital into that would mean that the museum becomes much more valuable to the world because it would be more accessible: how it created information around its permanent exhibitions, for example. With captions, or wifi-enabled applications that visitors could carry around with them, or trips through the museum that told particular stories. All that could and should be distributed across APIs from the web. The architecture we created enables the website and the collections’ management system to talk to each other for the first time.

TECHNOLOGY: build or buy a CMS?

Andrew Walker, Technology Director, Made by Many: The V&A had a strategy that involved a certain number of core strategic pillars – the last one being digital. But digital needs to run through everything because it can touch all aspects of the organisation. By embedding the digital media team at the Made by Many studio during the development phase, we sought to instil a culture of continuous improvement and a product mindset. We hope they will be able to work with other departments within the museum to push that message, and empower parts of the museum that haven’t yet been touched by digital.

At the start of the project, the technology looked like a huge nest of disparate systems, and our strategy had to take into account different parts of their overall technology landscape. Our point of view was that the CMS should be replaced as it couldn’t meet any of that criteria for the specific requirements of the V&A editorial workflow. Neither could any existing off the shelf solution.

Time and again we come up against the question of "build vs buy" when it comes to content platforms. Typically we find that unless you're building something where the requirements are very clear and the editorial workflow doesn't deviate from a common use case, it can be beneficial to custom build your own CMS and tailor it around the workflow of the end users. People often think that building tools like that isn’t cost effective, takes a long time and is quite hard – but we know from experience that that's not true. Ruby on Rails is very good for building a CMS from the ground up and gives us a flexible base on which to build. The alternative is buying a license for an off the shelf CMS and carrying out a lot of additional customisation, which, in our experience often takes just as long or longer. In this case the CMS was tailored to the needs of the content team and developed independently of a vendor’s upgrade path – I can't overstate how important that is. Everybody overlooks that.

Alex Stitt, V&A: We were unsure about whether to build CMS and adapt it, or build our own with Made by Many. It really challenged us in terms of our decision-making: IT said, if we build this thing, in five years time who's going to be supporting it, where's the backup? That was a really difficult moment – really we were asking the finance and IT teams to have faith in the digital team to make the right decision.

There was a very slow process of proof work. Made by Many's code was subject to scrutiny and the whole thing was very cautious. Made by Many strongly advocated build: they said, you can do it, it really isn't complicated to create using certain tools. They didn't oversell and it felt like they had come across this many number of times in their experience.

Andrew Walker, Made by Many: with IT investments, organisations always think about how many features they get for their money. Adobe Experience Manager has hundreds of features but they're designed for a generic way of managing content. We also find that clients go through cycles where every three years they buy a new piece of technology promising to solve all their problems, but it’s not everything they thought it would be. Then three years later there’s another big investment, and the process repeats. We wanted to break that cycle. So we worked with the V&A content team to actually figure out what their pain points were, tailoring workflow around the team. Three months later we’d delivered the CMS.

QUICK WINS

Andrew Walker: We also promised “quick wins”: ways of helping to achieve some improvement with the existing technology. I worked at the V&A for two weeks as product manager helping put together a backlog of improvements to move the needle on KPIs such as email signup and taking people from the homepage to the exhibition pages and then on to ticket buying.

That process exposed the internal V&A tech team to a different way of working, which was really valuable. It also helped us define the argument against their current technology platform. We were able to say, “This is the limit of what’s achievable in a short space of time. If you want to radically change things, you're going to have to make a radical change in technology.”

James Doc, developer, V&A digital media team: We were very aware that our CMS wasn't flexible for the content editors or us as developers. Working with Made by Many we weren't entirely sure what we were getting ourselves into, learning a new programming language and developing new tools that we hadn't used before. We were in Python previously and we'd made a shift from PHP years ago, but the team hadn’t written Ruby – that was an interesting transition, building a big system in a language that we’d just scratched the surface of.

Made by Many let us discover it on our own, and helped us find more efficient ways of using it, reviewing code and working forward. That process took place over three months, and we built a CMS and new front-end website. At the end of the project we've got a great system that we know how to use and how to build for. As developers, we entirely own the system.

MADE BY MADE BY MANY

Andrew Walker, Made by Many: the benefit of this approach was that we embedded the V&A’s existing technology team in our studio and began building with them, teaching tools, technologies and frameworks, continuous delivery and integration and modern development practices – all the things they didn't have the opportunity to do because they were hamstrung by their tools.

As in a lot of organizations, there was ceremony around Agile without really having the benefits of doing it properly. We were able to give their approach focus and flexibility. Not only do the V&A get a new content management system, they also get a team who understand how to run it – and no vendor lock-in.

Kati Price, V&A: One of the biggest challenges in the process was around ambiguity. When we set out we didn't necessarily know what the end point was. We knew what we wanted to achieve, but we knew we had to do a lot of research both internally and with our users. That would help find what that end point might be, or at least the end point of each of stage we’ve done because it’s ongoing.

In the first phase it was very much around looking at technology, how we could work really quickly through Agile to do lots of small changes iteratively that delivered a big impact. This whet people’s appetite for the sense of whether one could scale that up and what the opportunity might be. We framed that whole business case around driving people into the building and understanding that this is the key purpose of our website.

Also, by using Agile we really opened up the way we were doing things by having these fortnightly drop-ins where anyone across the organization can come in and they can see what we’re doing, and why and how. That was really important. It gave a lot of transparency into the project, but also helped build up trust in what we were doing in why and how. We’d tried Agile before, but it really propelled us into proper Agile practice. That isn’t without its challenges, but people rose to them.

What was also interesting is that this project then been used to inform others about digital – people are seeing how we’ve met this really open and Agile process and applied some of that to other areas of V&A work. Having these fortnightly showcases has become something that other, non-digital projects have looked into.

James Doc, V&A: the digital media team was already heading in the direction of Agile, trying to reshape ourselves. Coming to Made by Many helped us to actually refine that process: “This is how sprint planning works, how sizing and prioritisation works, how a day structure works, how a close relationship between a developer, designer, product manager or owner fits together.” Seeing the fullness of that was really important.

With Agile there are so many unknowns at the beginning of the project, and that’s something that we’ve become more comfortable with. As an organisation the V&A is cautious: it’s got a 150 years of history behind it, as a result of very careful planning and thinking through things. That’s not to say that this project wasn’t carefully thought through, but it was very, “We don’t know where we’re going yet, but we’re working it out and we’re uncovering it. We’re finding that direction.” It’s been an exciting journey.

Alex Stitt, V&A: doing something in Agile was a new thing for the museum. It was very educational and Made by Many did an excellent job of running an Agile process in what is very much a waterfall organisation which doesn’t take to change. What worked extremely well was that the process was inclusive and open-minded, and encouraged and taught everyone that their voices can be heard and they can make constructive contributions.

See the Victoria & Albert Museum's digital presence at www.vam.ac.uk. Read part II of this story.