Overview
As the largest art museum in the United States, the Metropolitan Museum of Art works with thousands of priceless works on a daily basis. Their Objects Conservation Department at The Met felt the pain points of tracking their work through disparate, and often manual, systems. Wanting a better solution to tracking both work and resources for centralized reporting, The Metropolitan Museum of Art sought us out to bring our Atlassian and process expertise to this unique project. Working closely with subject matter experts at The Met, our team delivered Jira Software, custom-configured to our client's specifications to allow for maximized reporting and enthusiastic adoption.
THE CHALLENGE
Before our engagement, the Metropolitan Museum of Art employed disparate systems to track work. The Objects Conservation Department (which is responsible for priceless art objects such as artifacts and relics) tracks work during intake, conservation, and return. Often, a Conservator's work includes traveling off-site to perform a variety of conservation activities, which also requires tracking. Prior to their move to Jira, tracking occurred over email, spreadsheets, and manual log books pass from hand to hand. Not only did this disconnected system lead to human error (and lack of versioning to boot), but reporting on resource time spent on any given work took countless hours of paper shuffling to accomplish. Having a paper or email process made it exceptionally difficult to do any reporting on the amount of work the department did; it also made it difficult to track if they actually had an object in their possession, or if it had been delivered or returned. Without a real-time view of resources and work, the Metropolitan Museum of Art lacked the ability to plan effectively and responsively.
THE SOLUTION
Our Atlassian experts worked with stakeholders at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to implement and configure Jira Software to meet their unique needs. Mapping their processes to custom fields, workflows, and projects in Jira Software, our experts leveraged marketplace add-ons to enhance the functionality of Jira for the museum's use case. The Jira Software we delivered to the Metropolitan Museum of Art provided them not only the data they needed for accurate reporting but built in process efficiency to streamline the department's daily efforts to help them get work done better and faster.
CUSTOM NFEED INTEGRATION
To increase the traceability of work and ensure the right piece was in the right hands, our experts integrated nFeed with Jira Software and the museum's image database. With this custom integration, nFeed pulls pertinent data on the work for the corresponding Jira issue to populate the ticket accordingly. Now, the Metropolitan Museum of Art gets critical information on the work in question inside the Jira issue to further codify their processes.
REPORTING WITH SUMUP FOR JIRA
Integrating the sumUp add-on for Jira, our experts provided the Metropolitan Museum of Art with real-time, at-a-glance reporting. Pulling data from defined Jira fields, sumUp gives the department's managers a dashboard of real-time insight into the total number of objects processed by the department. What previously took hours (if not days) to report on now takes mere minutes, and the museum can now make informed decisions faster and with better data.
THE RESULTS
With our delivery of a custom configured Jira Software application, built to reflect and streamline the processes of the Objects Conservation Department, the Metropolitan Museum of Art gained seamless tracking and reporting capabilities. Now reflected inside Jira Software, the department saw their over 8,000 objects translated into more than 3,000 Jira issues they can now easily track and report on. Reporting turnaround time went from days to less than an hour, giving the Metropolitan Museum of Art real-time insight into the Object Conservation Department's activities, and now informs resource allocation for upcoming exhibits. The Objects Conservation Department was so enthused by our work with Jira Software that news spread across the museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art is now seeking to bring additional departments onto Jira Software.
