I just lost the entire first part of my notes in a horrible wireless incident. All I can say is that for an INTERNET LIBRARIAN conference, I’m not getting much Internet. There are a lot of people tweeting about how crappy the wifi situation is and it’s bad enough that it’s distracting from the conference experience itself. Funny, since David is talking about digital experience, and my particular digital experience during his talk is not good. Not his fault, of course, and my “meatspace†experience is wonderful – he’s a funny presenter who has a LOT of great knowledge (and he rocks) but I’m having trouble concentrating on the message because the digital experience of this conference is so very bad. The really bad part – you all are getting this rant instead of reading about what David has to say. The good news? He’s written a book called Designing the Digital Experience that you can buy from Amazon and get all the good info there.
Our first keynote, which was part of the notes I’d lost in the wireless incident, was by Harold Reingold. He spoke about his recent book, Smart Mobs, and discussed the idea of collective action. He traced it from early man collecting together in order to bring down a big beast (mastodon steaks, anyone?) to the first cities and the birth of writing, to the printing press and finally to the advent of texting and the Internet. It was an interesting keynote and I took some kick-butt notes, but they are gone…. He also mentioned that, instead of keeping up with technologies, keep up with literacies. That struck me as a really good idea and well put, too!
Author: Robin
Project Management: The Prize is in the Process
Helene Blowers – Director of Digital Strategy & Macrina Gilliam – Applications Project Manager from the Columbus Metropolitan Library
Participant introductions – lots of cool people here!
Problems dump – everyone yells out issues they’ve had with projects in the past
Helene – policy, passion & practice
She wrote the book on project management for the Belk Corporation in 1995.
A project is a one-time job that has starting/stopping points, objectives, & defined scope of work.
• Required stuff – time frame, resources & scope
Extremely valuable stuff
o a champion –boss or not, whomever gains the most, will be most supportive
o passion (passion will take your projects really far – farther than project management, really)
• Project managers
o Influence #1 (coordinators – usually not managing people directly – but are influencers)
o Look beyond managers (managers do not have to manage all the projects)
o Communication skills
o Leadership potential
• Strategies are not projects and strategies aren’t projects – if the project doesn’t fit in with the organization’s strategies, why do it?
• 3 questions to answer in a project scope doc – what are we doing? Who is doing it? When are we doing it? And Why are we doing it?
• PM constraints – balancing constraints of time, resources, & scope
Slides will be posted on librarybytes.com
Macrina – Columbus Metropolitan Library’s Project Management Life Cycle
Hand-outs that detail the process they use, best practices and checklists of project tasks from their library
Project Management Life Cycle
o Initiate
o Plan
o Execute
o Close
Typical Roles
o Project Sponsor
o Process Owner/Product Owner
o Project Manager
o IT Advisor
o Subject Matter Expert (SMEs)
o “Blue Zone†– project support resources (Marketing, property management staff to help move stuff, etc.) – communicate early with these folks to let them know what they will need to do and can schedule your project and possibly think of things you haven’t thought of
We don’t manage projects, we manage initiatives – Helene speaking of an old job
Project management should be understood throughout the entire organization
10 phases divided among the 4 processes of the life cycle – and opportunities to communicate come through many of them
o Discovery-Prototyping-Beta phase
o Iterative development saves time later
o Increases input and buy-in
o Higher quality result
o let go of being perfect
“Librarians don’t really have the concept of ‘quick & dirty’ do we?†– Mary Auckland
Added a final phase to the process cycle – transitioning project results to the process owner so that there is a “person in charge†and the project’s result continues (web site (content manager type), self-check (circ manager or worker), IM reference (ref staff or manager)) and that the opportunities, user needs and improvement needs are monitored in an ongoing way.
Helene – process owners/project managers (9 people who are blue zone “folksâ€) meet every Friday to discuss resource shifting and project needs – total buy-in from all throughout the organization. The “blue zone†gets rid of info silos and lets cross-departmental communication happen easily.
http://cmlpresentations.pbwiki.com – handouts and info from slides
Amanda Etches-Johnson – One Person Project Management
Slides – http://blogwithoutalibrary.net/talk/il2008/pm.pdf
Handout – http://blogwithoutalibrary.net/talk/il2008/pm_handout.pdf
Went to a project management workshop in Feb to help her with her upcoming web redesign project and it changed her life – got lots of great info but realized that as a one-person team only uses parts of the process.
She discussed project management at her library – there are a lot of projects going on at her library and varying levels of PM training with no enterprise PM framework in place (yet). They just named a new special projects librarian and Amanda thinks she’ll start implementing more of a PM culture. Right now, there are no expectations for communication or documentation, no sponsors of particular projects which was both positive (get things done really fast) and negative (no expectations means varying degrees of communication).
Created an advisory committee from the people who she wanted to be on the project team – they have full time jobs, too, though and couldn’t commit to being true team members. Perhaps a true PM culture would have helped?
“Where does the planning stop and the doing start?†– worked on planning, took a while to realize she needed to actually start doing.
Tips to keep you sane:
o Beware over-planning
o Timeline in 1-week chunks
o Deadlines are your friend
Best practices still apply
o Project charter
o Title
o Synopsis
o Scope
o Dates
o Resources
o Stakeholders
o Version control
o Keeps you on track
o Especially important for tech projects
o Watch for scope creep
o Stick to the plan
o More features – more time OR resources (or both)
o Break the project into manageable chunks
o Manage expectations (communication, communication, communication)
o Document
Some best practices don’t apply
o Gantt charts
o Complex PM software
She spent 2 days with advisory committee to get info architecture and first 2 levels of site wireframed – hugely helpful. Amanda also created working groups that were dealing with specific issues and have a short, firm timeline. Mary mentioned that she calls them “start and finish groupsâ€.
Everyone is your project team! Don’t isolate yourself – the whole library can be your project team – they are all invested in the content and functionality of the site.
Question period
From the discussion:
o Shortish projects help keep people from losing interest
o Lessons learned become institutional memory for what works & doesn’t work
o Helene used an email newsletter (with updates from each department or project team members) and the unique communication method made a huge impact
o Too much functionality at once can cause issues with troubleshooting – when things go wrong, you don’t know what exactly doesn’t work, it could be anything that you are working on
o Determine a “main project†and the tentacles that come off of it- and decide if you need those tentacles
o The new generation is going to make us do things their way – and even if we don’t like it, we’ll have to in order to keep our users
Themes from Mary – wrap up times
o The value of planning up-front – but it needs to stop too, create a deadline for planning phase
o Breaking projects into manageable chunks
o Bringing passion into the team
o The PM team is more widespread than you think
o Achieve more communication through influencing than just straight communication (reports, etc)
o High-level sponsors/champions can do your communicating to the top levels for you
o Lots of the stumbling blocks mentioned at the beginning were answered in the presentations
o Managing by consensus/committee – PM process helps to alleviate some of that
Yesterday, I got up at 4am to get my shower, get dressed and get ready for Nikki to come pick me up so that we could go get Bobbi and head out to the great state of California. Monterey, California, to be exact. Traveling was, as always, stressful and obnoxious, but the end result was worth it. We got in to Monterey around 4pm and, after checking in, went out to get some seafood on the Fisherman’s Wharf at Gilbert’s. Good stuff there – I had the salmon. After that, we went to the Crown and Anchor for a bit of early conference socializing. I had to call it off at about 10:30, though, because that was 12:30am according to my body’s clock and I had been up and running since 4am the day before… I did have fun getting to actually *meet* all the people that I communicate with daily via Twitter and FriendFeed, though. Some were old friends (from ALA in June…) and others were new to me – but all of ’em were cool and there were many plans made for the remainder of our time here in Monterey. After the sessions and such, of course!
My first pre-conference session is this afternoon. I’m attending the Project Management In Practice session lead by Mary Auckland (who did the project management for libraries session I attended last year), Helene Blowers, Penny Phensuvabharp and Amanda Etches-Johnson. It should be interesting and fun – I’ll take good notes, too, I promise!
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New Supervisor Session…
Soaring As The New Supervisor On The Block
Alice B. Ruleman
Alice gave some excellent tips for new supervisors, including keeping track of what you can control (knowing your management style, caring – and learning about – your employees, expressing expectations, learning policies & procedures), what the challenges you will face are (amount of training you get, feeling intimidated, not having enough time, feeling alone, being overwhelmed and stressed out) and things that you need to know (how things are done and what the formal and informal routines are). She gave some tips on self-training; study your job description, learn routine activities, let employees help you, look for training opportunities, learn less routine items were all mentioned. She also gave us tips and tricks to help us find our feet as new supervisors:
* Be yourself
* You set the tone for the day
* Start slow
* Be respectful
* Be visible
* Emphasize teamwork
* Be fair and consistent
* Be a good communicator
* Provide training
* Make your own decisions
* Admit when you are wrong
* It’s a process!
We then went from tips & tricks into a discussion of leadership styles. She had us take a Leadership Styles Quiz (pdf) and then we discussed what each leadership style meant. She finished by saying that the best supervisor combines all 3 leadership styles, depending on the situation and the employees.
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A brief break for a table talk
Table Talk
Internet access & MORENet
This was pretty much worth the cost of admission, right here. I got an uninterrupted 15 minutes with Randy from MORENet to discuss *exactly* what our library needs to do to comply with MORENet’s requirements for offering Internet access wirelessly. I also got a great tip about how to do it properly (and freely) and will be putting that into place very, very soon! Yippee!!!
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SQUEEE!!
A Squee Moment In The Middle Of My Day
Borrowing a term from Christopher Gould of MOBIUS, I had a squee moment as I was checking my email today. The conference that I went to last month (National Association of Government Webmasters) sent out the compiled evaluations to presenters. They put them all neatly in a spreadsheet, gave averages for each 1-5 rating and included the comments on the same row as the rating scores. I felt that, according to the number of drinks purchased for me the night after my presentation and the number of people who commented favorably on it as I was imbibing those drinks, the presentation had gone well. I had no idea *how* well, however.
My average scores, on a scale of 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest) were all above 4.2 – most were in the 4.5 or 4.6 range. The “average of my averages” was 4.5 out of the 36 people who turned in evaluations. That’s a lot of 5’s!! The comments, though, were truly wonderful. I did have some constructive criticism (one person felt that my visuals needed more color) and I LOVE getting those – they help make the next presentation better – but much of the commentary was positively blushworthy.
Stuff like, “Very interesting subject. Great presenter.” and “Perfect balance between technical and non-technical info. Engaging presenter. Would love to hear from her again!” and “Great content. Well done. Thanks Robin” were enough to make me giddy. You better bet they are going on my “raves and reviews” page!
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Meetings without the meeting part
Meeting Without Meeting In Person
Tom Peters
Tom came to MLA to discuss the different kinds of meetings we hold in library-land, the number of meeting we hold and how to make them easier, cheaper and better. He identified 5 types of meetings:
* Face-to-Face
* Conference Call
* Video Conference
* Web-Based
* Virtual World-Based
and identified how often we meet. In a series of mathematical calculations (described in more detail in his slides he calculated that librarians convene 25 million meetings a year – and that the vast majority of them were face-to-face, with a few (23% or so) conference calls and less than 1% of each of the others. He also described doing some quick calculations during a face-to-face meeting that was dragging on about the expenditure of a couple of thousand dollars and concluded that the staff salaries alone made the meeting more expensive than whatever it was they were arguing over. His proposal was to move more meetings into the virtual space (and not by using conference calls, either, which he hates) so that people can multi-task, share rich information (documents, etc.) and be productive while meeting. He mentioned the use of social networking sites as a way to keep in touch in between meetings as well, a topic close to my heart, as you all know…
Check out his slides – they are packed with information and ideas on how to evaluate your current meetings and make ’em better. Also, check out his upcoming ALA Tech Source Tech Report for information on using virtual worlds as meeting “places”.
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Usability for website redesigns
Three Low-Cost Usability Evaluation Methods For Library Website Redesign
Kim Thompson, Hsin-Liang Chen & Sanda Erdelez
This session went through 3 ways that the University of Missouri-Columbia folks conduct first-round usability testing on websites. The first method, Information Horizons, was one that they came up with themselves and was explained by Dr. Erdelez. The idea behind this method was to get users into a room with some paper and markers and have them draw out a mind-map sort of thing with themselves in the middle and the sources they would turn to for a particular information need branching out. Each successive “layer” of info sources would be in a different color. If your website doesn’t come up in the session naturally, you would bring it up yourself to see if they *ever* think of your site as an information provider. After discussing that, we went into paper prototyping (which I’ve discussed on this blog before and, since I have no Internet and I’m typing this up in Notepad, will ask you to search for because I can’t look up the URL of *where* I’d mentioned it before…) and Dr. Chen discussed his method that he uses to interactively create paper prototypes. He encourages his testing subjects to use paper “widgets” to lay out the page as they would like to see it, with their own labels and their own drawings if a widget isn’t available that suits them. Finally, Dr. Thompson discussed the idea of cognitive walk-throughs. This would happen before you bring in users to test out your paper prototypes – you envision a user, envision the steps that they would take to find the information and then use the prototype to see if there are any issues that come up during the execution of the task.
All 3 methods were interesting, pretty much free, and they looked quite useful!
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Vietnamese food = yummy!
Last night, in what I sincerely hope will become a conference tradition for me, Natasha, Qhyrrae and I went out for Vietnamese food. It was seriously yummy, but – even beyond the yumminess – it provided us with a venue for a great conversation. All of us had been to various programs throughout the day and were excited about all the information we’d picked up. The nice part about going to conferences like this with co-workers was that we not only shared the information, but got a chance to discuss the possibilities of implementation of that information in an informal setting. I won’t bore you all with details about the various schemes we hatched (MWAHAHAHAHA), but I will tell you that this makes going to conferences, putting up with crappy hotels and being away from the family (not that this is always a bad thing…) and all the other inconveniences that we put up with completely worth it. Even though I was excited by a lot of the information I picked up during the day, I got even more excited by the prospect of it going into practice at my library! This year has been a lot of conferencing on my own, and being able to process through the info with smart, dedicated co-workers at this conference made it special!
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My session
During this year’s MLA conference, I presented on Collaborating In The Cloud, a reprise of the session I first did in Jamaica in June. It seemed to go pretty well, with a lot of questions afterward and a lot of nodding and “a-ha” moments from the crowd. Bobbi was kind enough to snap a few pics of me in action during the presentation, so I’ll let you all check out the wiki and a quickly posted blog post of my presentation from an attendee and leave you with the pics…
