Tag: change management

#NASIG2020: Vision Speaker Janetta Waterhouse

Leadership is a subset of management. Focus on developing skills in communication, active listening, time management, productivity, team building, DEI, performance management, and process management/workflow analysis.

“Managers to things right. Leaders do the right things.”

Managers need to do all of their job, which includes performance management. It’s not about being nice or not. If your staff are struggling, it’s something you need to address. Understand the difference between performance problems and disciplinary issues. Don’t avoid facing issues with less competent staff by redistributing their work to competent staff.

A part of performance management is change management. It’s not just when technology or institutional change happens that you need to manage that change. Waterhouse has found Kotter’s eight step process for leading change helpful.

Understand what kind of change needs to happen, and at what level. Some things are common/comfortable to us because of the nature of our work in libraries. Some require more transformation.

Some people are more risk adverse and some are more tolerant. A common reason why people resist change is that the expertise they have built is being set aside. They will have to learn new skills and are likely to make mistakes they may have not made for a long time because of that previous expertise. If your organization has a culture of perfection or risk-avoidance, make sure folks know it’s okay to make mistakes.

When someone moves from a technical area to a management position, they don’t have to know all of the answers. They need to make sure the answer is in the room, and that’s getting the right people together with the right resources.

Leadership competencies include emotional intelligence – it’s the one thing that’s going to help you personally and professionally above all else.

If you have someone complaining about something frequently, re-focus. If it’s not in their or your circles of concern, talk it out once. Beyond that, it’s not something that we can actually do something about, so it’s not helpful to continue to complain.

Kenneth Shaw outlines nine components of emotional competence in his book The Intentional Leader. Waterhouse notes that the willingness to self-evaluate is one of the most important components.

Goleman notes that the more styles a leader has mastered, the better. This allows you to be able to switch between styles and recognize which style works best in each situation.

Social intelligence is linked to team performance. Teams work better are teams that gel socially. Try this social intelligence test.

<had to restart computer because keyboard suddenly stopped responding and I missed most of the project management component>

Conflict is a natural part of life and can be managed in a healthy way. The most emotional person should not always get their way.

The common perception of conflict is that you have either avoidance or confrontation. The ideal process of working with conflict is negotiation. Instead of one person being frustrated with coworkers and complaining to others, or bottling it up to blow up later, negotiation requires communication. Seek to understand where people are coming from. If you’re not going to listen to them, they’re not going to listen to you.

Getting buy-in is important, but sometimes you just need to take action. Understand the emotion / cognition / behavior connection, and consider working backwards from there.

How do you want to be remembered? Do you want to be the reason why improvements didn’t happen until you left, or do you want to be the one who made work life better for everyone?

ER&L 2015 – Tuesday Short Talks: ERM topics

Leaf Rainbow
“Leaf Rainbow” by Maryann

Everything is Different: Easing the Pain of a Resource Transition
Speaker: Heather Greer Klein, NC Live

They license content as a core collection for all libraries on three year cycles, and have been doing this for the past 15 years. They also provide consultations, help desk, vendor liaisons, usage statistics, and other services.

They’ve had a 5.7% decrease in funding for materials over the past six years. There was a million dollar gap this year between their funding and the cost of existing licensed resources. The resource advisory committee evaluated the situation and came to the conclusion that they would need to change the main aggregator database for the first time in a decade. The NC Live staff had to make this transition as smoothly as possible.

They needed to get the change leaders on board. The advisory committee talked with everyone in ways that the NC Live staff could do. They also needed to give as much lead time as possible, and were able to negotiate a six month overlap between the two. The communication, however, should have begun well before the decision was made. They should have talked about the funding situation well in advance, and some were taken by surprise.

Transparency reduces anxiety and helps build confidence. They announced the change well before the transition process was outlined. They sent weekly updates with what was happening. But they needed a better plan for reaching frontline staff.

Communicate with patrons early and often, and they used the website with a splash page to do that. They feel like they could have done more, and the libraries needed more support to translate the information to their users.

Partner with the vendors. The new vendors did a lot of outreach and training.

 

Serials Renewal Cycle – Doing it the SMU (a Different U) Way!
Speaker: Heng Kai Leong, Singapore Management University

They have been around for 15 years. The library was recently renovated, and they are primarily electronic and have more electronic collections than print. Most of their journals are from aggregators or big deals, the rest are through two subscription agents.

They had a staff member assigned to each of the agents for the ordering, claiming, receiving, binding, and other processes. Each year they did a collection evaluation review.

Now, they only do the evaluation every two years. The off year is when they evaluate the agents, going with the one that is the best costs savings. This has freed up staff time to do more to support the users. They are now using only one agent for two year terms.

They have a service level agreement from the agent to document the services and products they offer to the library. It’s also helpful for the staff handling the serials so they know what should be done by the agent. It required some negotiation with the agent. When they do the evaluation every two years, they require the agent to send the SLA terms in a template that allows for easy comparison. The quote must be in Excel (not PDF). There is an example of the content of the template in the slides.

 

Migrating to Intota – Updates and Dispatches from the Front
Speaker: Dani Roach, University of St. Thomas

They are in the middle of the implementation of the library services platform from ProQuest. CLIC is an eight member consortia in St. Paul, MN. They’ve had a shared ILS for a number of years, and when that contract ended. They began looking at things in 2013, and at that point they decided to get a NextGen ILS.

The two systems available at the time weren’t quite what they wanted, and the demo of Intota happened after. Due to unknown factors, one of the consortia members pulled out and selected one of the other two systems at that time. At the end of 2013, Intota was selected by the CLIC board. An implementation team was formed, and contract negotiations were completed December 31, 2013. CLIC was the first academic consortia to subscribe.

Some libraries were long-time SerialsSolultions customers; others had little or no discovery layer. The phase one implementation was setting up Summon for the consortia. The consortial implementation was a whole new creature from a single-site implementation. There were many choices that had to be made early on which had significant (and often unknown) impact further down the road. This implementation was completed by June 2014, with continue revisions of how catalog data was ingested through January 2015.

Meanwhile, in July 2014 they began implementing the Assessment portion. Part of this involved mapping data from the ILS.

Ongoing has been the implementation of the knowledgebase/ERM. Each library needed to have all of their content in there. The new interface was made live in July 2014, bugs and all. Some new features are great, some old features are missed.

Next: acquisitions (including DDA), description (cataloging), and fulfillment (circulation). No plans yet for when those will begin.

The time it takes to do this is challenging because you still have to do your day to day work. Documenting the problems and fixes takes a lot of time. Keeping track of bugs and things is frustrating.

We want vendors to succeed because we want a variety of options. We need to be involved at the development level if we want that to happen.

ER&L 2012: Next Steps in Transforming Academic Libraries — Radical Redesign to Mainstream E-Resource Management

The smallest details add up
photo by Garrett Coakley

Speaker: Steven Sowell

His position is new for his library (July 2011), and when Barbara Fister saw the job posting, she lamented that user-centered collection development would relegate librarians to signing licenses and paying invoices, but Sowell doesn’t agree.

Values and assumptions: As an academic library, we derive our reason for existing from our students and faculty. Our collections are a means to an end, rather than an end to themselves. They can do this in part because they don’t have ARL-like expectations of themselves. A number of studies has shown that users do a better job of selecting materials than we do, and they’ve been moving to more of a just in time model than a just in case.

They have had to deal with less money and many needs, so they’ve gotten creative. The university recently realigned departments and positions, and part of that included the creation of the Collections & Resource Sharing Department (CRSD). It’s nicknamed the “get it” department. Their mission is to connect the community to the content.

PDA, POV, PPV, approval plans, shelf-ready, and shared preservation are just a few of the things that have changed how we collect and do budget planning.

CRSD includes collection development, electronic resources, collections management, resource sharing & delivery, and circulation (refocusing on customer service and self-servicing, as well as some IT services). However, this is a new department, and Sowell speaks more about what these things will be doing than about what they are doing or how the change has been effective or not.

One of the things they’ve done is to rewrite position descriptions to refocus on the department goals. They’ve also been focusing on group facilitation and change management through brainstorming, parking lot, and multi-voting systems. Staff have a lot of anxiety over feeling like an expert in something and moving to where they are a novice and having to learn something new. They had to say goodbye to the old routines, mix them with new, and then eventually make the full shift.

They are using process mapping to keep up with the workflow changes. They’re also using service design tools like journey mapping (visualization of the user’s experience with a service), five whys, personas, experience analogy, and storyboards (visualization of how you would like things to occur).

For the reference staff, they are working on strategic planning about the roles and relationships of the librarians with faculty and collections.

Change takes time. When he proposed this topic, he expected to be further along than he is. Good communication, system thinking, and staff involvement are very important. There is a delicate balance between uncertainty/abstract with a desire for concrete.

Some unresolved issues include ereaders, purchasing rather than borrowing via ILL and the impact on their partner libraries, role of the catalog as an inventory in the world of PDA/PPV. The re-envisioning of the collection budget as a just in time resource. Stakeholder involvement and assessment wrap up the next steps portion of his talk.

Questions:
In moving print to the collection maintenance area, how are you handling bundled purchases (print + online)? How are you handling the impression of importance or lack thereof for staff who still work with traditional print collection management? Delicately.

Question about budgeting. Not planning to tie PDA/PPV to specific subjects. They plan to do an annual review of what was purchased and what might have been had they followed their old model.

How are they doing assessment criteria? Not yet, but will take suggestions. Need to tie activities to student academic success and teaching/researching on campus. Planning for a budget cut if they don’t get an increase to cover inflation. Planning to do some assessment of resource use.

What will you do if people can’t do their new jobs? Hopefully they will after the retraining. Will find a seat for them if they can’t do what we hope they can do.

What are you doing to organize the training so they don’t get mired in the transitional period? Met with staff to reassure them that the details will be worked out in the process. They prepared the ground a bit, and the staff are ready for change.

Question about the digital divide and how that will be addressed. Content is available on university equipment, so not really an issue/barrier.

What outreach/training to academic departments? Not much yet. Will honor print requests. Subject librarians will still have a consultative role, but not necessarily item by item selection.

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