This is the chapter that I would probably refer to as the ‘bread and butter’ of operations. As much as we Visitor Experience professionals devote our time to making museum trips the absolute best they can be, it's inevitable that our roles can often be defined by what happens when something goes wrong. This is neatly summed up by the words at the start of this chapter, from the Twitter bio of a former colleague of mine, David Hingley. A great Duty Manager shift is when the building doesn't set on fire, when the tills don't go down, when a staff member isn't shouted at by an angry visitor.

In operations, though our successes are signalled more by silence than fireworks, we shouldn't underestimate the amount of work it takes to achieve relative calm. Like the swan gliding effortlessly across a pond, beneath the surface our legs are thrashing energetically through a never-ending slew of risk assessments, training modules and standard operating procedures (SOPs). To do this effectively, one needs a good understanding of the audience, a great relationship with frontline teams, an unhealthy attention to detail and most importantly, a deeply morbid imagination.

A Visitor Experience Manager might be asked to create a suite of operational procedures from scratch, but more often, procedures are already in place. They have built up over years of organisational memory, made up of incidents that have occurred and questions people have asked. They are built on good solid experience but, nevertheless, it's important to review these procedures every so often (at least once a year) to make sure they are still fit for purpose. Whether you are creating operational procedures for a brandnew offer, or just conducting a regular health check of your existing ones, hopefully this chapter will give you some practical tips around best practice, training and structure.

Before I talk about specific operational incidents, it's worth spending some time on the context in which operational management occurs.