Marrying Agile Project Management and Museum Curation Processes: match made in heaven or an unlikely pair? How are agile working methods, explicitly and consciously or implicitly and unconsciously, applied in the cultural sector, and specifically into the curating process in museums?

Over the past two decades, the concept of agile working has been gaining ground in a multitude of sectors, for example, banking, IT, healthcare and engineering. It is a project management method founded by seventeen software developers that works according to the Agile Manifesto, which entails twelve principles that guide teams in becoming more agile in their practices. Working agile has been successful in these different industries by improving flexibility, efficiency and customer satisfaction. Further interests arise as to how agile working can lend itself to the cultural sector. Specifically, the museum sector was opted to be studied in light of agile working, as museums are traditional, unwieldy institutions with few incentives for innovation, often resistant to change. Agile working, which enables flexibility and adaptation to change, could help museums become more adaptive to the challenges that are brought about by external shocks. This research employs a qualitative research method, with the main research question as follows: How are agile working methods, explicitly and consciously or implicitly and unconsciously, applied in the cultural sector, and specifically into the curating process in museums? First, elaborate theoretical research on agile project management and the museum curation process has been conducted. From this research, a theoretical framework was developed, consisting of four themes - “customer collaboration”, “teamwork”, “internal processes” and “responding to change” - that aids in identifying agile enablers and agile principles within the museum curation process. In the next step, 13 semi-structured in-depth interviews were held with Dutch museum curators. The interviews were then analyzed via deductive coding according to the themes in the theoretical framework. The key results of this research are that even though museum curation processes still resemble much of the traditional project management method as described by Salameh (2014), there are several aspects of agile working to be noted in the museum curation process. Important enablers that facilitate the adoption of agile working to the curation process, such as multidisciplinary teams and the involvement of customers and stakeholders in the process, are present. Also, though unconsciously, several agile principles are already currently applied within the curation process, such as stakeholder collaboration and project teams being multidisciplinary. Furthermore, agile working could help museums handle some of the major challenges that they face.