Standard Operating Procedures

I'm presenting on documenting your Tessitura system at the conference and one of the things I stress is that your documentation needs to reflect your organization's internal business practices and should include screenshots from your own system. There is often more than one way to accomplish something in Tessitura and it is really important that your documentation reflects how your organization has chosen to do things.

While this is totally true, let me offer something of an antithesis that I think might be helpful to a new licensee: encoded into Tessitura are a lot of best practices for managing a cultural organization (admittedly it's stronger for performances orgs than museums).  I recommend trying to document goals along with each process.  If you have defined your goals well, then you can start to be flexible with your processes, and then you can perhaps look for or be open to ways in which Tessitura's built-in assumptions can improve you processes.

What Gawain says about (organizational and departmental) goals meshes really well with my approach of encouraging setting things up (the structures in Tessitura like campaigns and production elements) according to how you want to report your progress toward those goals.   You first figure out what your goals are (revenue, attendance, etc), and document them.  Then you figure out how to structure everything in Tessitura so you can report on your progress toward those goals, and within that, which parts (sources for instance) contribute how much toward each goal, so you can tweak your processes, and you document that in greater detail.  Also agree Tessitura is good for having best practices baked in, in which cases the functionalities, as you familiarize yourselves with them, enlighten the processes so they can be improved even more ongoing. Organizational memory is very important, not just for staff turnover, but also as a reminder of where you were in the overall process last year or last quarter or last decade or whatever. In the rare cases where Tessitura lets you leave a note trail on the setups, be sure to leave some bread crumbs of what your intentions were when you did it that way, and also leave breadcrumbs outside Tessitura for the less-hands-on insights.  It's also good to have naming conventions and the reasoning behind them documented. 

What Gawain says about (organizational and departmental) goals meshes really well with my approach of encouraging setting things up (the structures in Tessitura like campaigns and production elements) according to how you want to report your progress toward those goals.   You first figure out what your goals are (revenue, attendance, etc), and document them.  Then you figure out how to structure everything in Tessitura so you can report on your progress toward those goals, and within that, which parts (sources for instance) contribute how much toward each goal, so you can tweak your processes, and you document that in greater detail.  Also agree Tessitura is good for having best practices baked in, in which cases the functionalities, as you familiarize yourselves with them, enlighten the processes so they can be improved even more ongoing. Organizational memory is very important, not just for staff turnover, but also as a reminder of where you were in the overall process last year or last quarter or last decade or whatever. In the rare cases where Tessitura lets you leave a note trail on the setups, be sure to leave some bread crumbs of what your intentions were when you did it that way, and also leave breadcrumbs outside Tessitura for the less-hands-on insights.  It's also good to have naming conventions and the reasoning behind them documented.