An all-female project team at the Natural History Museum

London’s Natural History Museum will mark its 150th anniversary in 2031. To celebrate, it has kicked off a programme to create six new permanent galleries at its iconic building in South Kensington. The first, which houses the exhibition Fixing Our Broken Planet, opened in April. The exhibition focuses on the planetary emergency and the solutions that scientists, including those at the Natural History Museum, are working on.

The project office is 30-strong, and their work demands professional skills that cover everything from construction and infrastructure to exhibition design and sustainability. Being a project professional at the Natural History Museum also requires the ability to communicate well to many kinds of stakeholder in order to get them on board. These vary from curators and designers to engineers and builders.

Female project power

The team that was responsible for delivering the first gallery also happened to be all-female – a rarity in construction and refit projects like this, and something to be celebrated ahead of APM’s 2025 Women in Project Management Conference.

Meg Macdonald is Senior Project Manager and Programme Manager at the Natural History Museum, and the Fixing Our Broken Planet project was her responsibility. She has watched the project management team grow within the museum over the past decade, fuelled by giant master plans for the site and refurbishments.

"Around that comes a lot of coordination, stakeholder management and regulatory aspects that need to be considered and adhered to,” she says. “You need to have someone at the centre of that. We’re at the core to make sure we’re bringing in everything at the right time and giving everybody their cues.

“Having that role in place and making it at the heart of the project really increases the chances of delivering on time and to scope. It’s important for someone to have the big picture in their mind so that the people who are delivering work packages can just focus on their specialties.”

Nothing goes 100% to plan

Macdonald’s team worked hard to meet the delivery deadline for the gallery opening. She explains her approach to projects: “In my experience, nothing goes 100% to plan, so being able to be reactive and proactive, and also being able to manage when everything goes off track, is hugely important, and that is really tied into managing levels of stress.”

The project office has jigsaw puzzles to share among the team, clearly there to allow some headspace and downtime.

Macdonald is aware that the project office is unusual for having so many women working in it, and she is proud of this fact, although it was not consciously planned.

One of her colleagues is Sophie Dolan, a Senior Project Manager for Capital Building Projects, who was part of the team responsible for stripping out the old gallery and refurbishing the gallery shell for Fixing Our Broken Planet. A construction management graduate who worked on the Melbourne Arts Precinct transformation and the development of the National Gallery of Victoria’s newest gallery, she is APM qualified (the Natural History Museum is an APM Corporate Partner).

Making a vision a reality

Dolan is currently working on the restoration of the second gallery in the NHM150 programme – a shell refurbishment of Gallery 33, which currently houses Creepy Crawlies. Dolan says she was one of very few women who studied construction management at her university, and she feels proud of the fact that the project team at the Natural History Museum is so female-strong.

Two other women critical to the programme are Sherri-Louise Rowe, a Senior Project and Programme Manager who helped bring Fixing Our Broken Planet over the line, and Samantha Banister, who project managed the exhibition within the gallery.

Banister was involved with the project right from the start, helping decide its scope and manage the exhibition design, specimen selection, narrative and installation of everything in the gallery.

“It was a two-year programme and, walking around, it looks exactly how we envisioned it,” she says. “Within the first 15 minutes of it opening, we had 200 people come through the door, and it’s just not stopped.”

Want more? Listen to Emma’s behind-the-scenes trip to the Natural History Museum on APM Podcast via your podcast app of choice. Don’t miss the autumn 2025 issue of Project for an in-depth feature on the museum’s project work.