The Museum move is a mammoth undertaking. We’re moving more than 2.3 million objects off-site to make way for our redevelopment.
We’ve been extremely fortunate to have a wonderful Relocation Project Manager in Robyn Richards of B&W Consulting. Recently, we sat down with Robyn to ask how the Museum’s move compares to other big shifts she’s organised.
Hi Robyn! Can you give us a bit of background around what you do?
Moving organisations is my full-time job and has been for more than 20 years. I own my own company, B&W Consulting, and I’ve got five people who work for me around the country. Large and/or complex relocations are where we come into our own. We have more experience than anyone else in New Zealand at unravelling those big and/or complicated moves.
My job is bringing all the minds together and working out the plans and methodologies. I don’t come up with the answers in terms of how we’re physically going to move things – that’s left to the subject matter experts. But I facilitate the project, document it all and schedule it to make sure it all goes well.
Had you moved a museum before?
This is my first museum, but many years ago we relocated the National Library of New Zealand, which had some of the same elements. I was so naïve at first, I thought, “National Library, that’s all books.” But of course it’s not. There were rooms of glass plate photo negatives, like the Museum has, there were ephemera, rooms and rooms of plan cabinets that are very similar to the cabinets in the Museum’s Textiles and Documentary History storerooms. They also have a lot of artworks and musical instruments. So this project is the National Library on steroids.
Is this the most complicated move you’ve done, then?
That’s interesting because Darryl White from Crown Relocations and I have worked on many of these big, difficult projects, and we both said, ‘This is the most difficult’. But my first big hospital project was three hospitals, Auckland, Greenlane and National Women’s, all moving into one. Two hospitals were moving right across Auckland city. And that was operating theatres, neonatal babies in incubators, everything. So I sort of wonder, now that I’ve done seven hospitals, if I’m forgetting how difficult that was at the time. At least if something goes wrong here, no one is going to die! The only live things I think were the tarantulas which Johno, one of the curators, took care of.
What makes the Museum move so complex?
The Museum move is hugely complex, partly because there’s huge compacting shelving systems and other unique storage systems that have to be dismantled and installed again, but mostly because of the variety of items relocating. At National Library there were much bigger volumes than here, but mostly the objects were the same type of thing. Whereas here, the Vertebrate Store is completely different to Textiles which is completely different to Documentary History, and then the Invertebrate Store that we’re still doing, and Geology, plus all the Exhibition spaces. There’s everything you can imagine in this Museum, from shoes to umbrellas to crockery, an elephant, and all those objects have different requirements.
The move plans I write up for each storeroom/space are completely different. If I compare that to one of the big corporates or Government departments we work with, you’d have marketing and sales and so on, but 90% of it would be the same. And even with a hospital, if you’ve got four surgical wards, largely all their move plans are the same, it’s just the dates that will change. Here, every area is so different, and then within each area you have complexities. In the Textiles store it was rolled items which need to be carried down the stairs because they don’t fit in the lift, plus a special truck modification to move between sites. As for the Whale Store, well, obviously it’s the whale. There’s hours and hours of planning to get each area right. So that’s the difference, every area is so unique.
The first day I came here, I flew down and I was having a walk through the Museum and then presenting to the Museum’s leadership team. As I was going through these spaces, my jaw was just dropping and I was thinking, ‘How on earth do we do this?’ And that was just the introduction!
So have you changed the way you work to fit the project?
Ordinarily we would have a long planning phase and then the actual move would happen over a fortnight or so. Here it’s been a little bit different because we’ve been underway with parts of the move but still planning, planning, planning at the same time. If I’m moving a hospital, for example, I have a daily activity schedule with what’s happening at what time each day. But that is usually completed and signed off weeks before the move starts, whereas here that’s not the case. We have daily schedules, but they’ve been chopping and changing every day. We’ve had to be really agile. The move activity has been going every day since 5 September, other than a little bit over the Christmas holidays. So that’s pretty amazing.
And you’ve obviously worked with Crown before, but they were a good fit for this project?
Fantastic. Right from the get-go, Darryl asked that there be a proper welcome for the Crown team, so we had a ceremony and blessing with mana whenua, followed by a session where Scott, the Museum Registrar, talked about the collection, so there was that buy-in. And if you talk to the Crown staff members, they’re just amazed by some of the things they’re seeing. People don’t often get to see behind the scenes of a Museum. I never knew about these huge storerooms, not at all.
So it’s fair to say it’s been a challenging project. But have you enjoyed it?
It has been an amazing project, I’ve absolutely enjoyed it. Sleepless nights, definitely, but enjoyed it. But it’s the people, the Museum people are just amazing. The amount of hard work that they’ve put in is phenomenal. We have had a lot of challenges but everyone’s just had the right attitude.
