32. WorkSmart @ University City Regional Statistics for WorkSmart 2010/11 System (2009) System (2010) UC (2009) UC (2010) CKOs 7,093,974 5,557,824 853,320 654,086 CKOs Avg. /month 591,165 463,152 71,110 54,507 Self CKO % 44.66% 49.60% 49.75% 53.29% Door Count 5,836,636 3,399,520 457,844 259,948 Door Count Avg./month 486,386 283,293 38,154 21,662 WorkSmart @ UC Feb 2011 March 2011 June 2011 August 2011 Self CKOs 66.17% 72.64% 81.84% 83.24%
33. T RUST WorkSmart in action . . . Our concerns were: How can we reengineer our workflow and environment?
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39. Added vital space to the workroom in order to accommodate volume. Before After
40. Sorted directly from delivery/bookdrops to shelf-ready carts. As a long time staff member at UC, “I was ready for any change that would increase or improve the workflow in the workroom. The removal of a few shelves and rearranging the work tables gave us much more workable space and helped to eliminate the “traffic jam” of carts and staff.”
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45. Sell! Sell! Sell! “ Staff is wonderful and provides good service. It is really great that they take the extra time to show you how to find library materials.” “ I really like the personal attention from the Greeter. It’s really great learning new skills and helping out the library staff. I didn’t realize that I could do so much myself without waiting for staff assistance. ”
67. Questions? Thanks for coming! This presentation can be found on bit.ly/worksmartncla11
Editor's Notes
Welcome slide
Michael introduces “storytellers”
We are going to tell you a story. It is a sad tale but has a happy ending of sorts but more important like with all stories we learned lots of valuable lessons that we would like to share with you. So let’s begin.
About an hour south of here.. Is the land of Charlotte, North Carolina, some of you may have heard of it.
This Land called Charlotte has a population of about 900,000 according to the new census and we are in Mecklenburg county and serve the citizens in and around Mecklenburg County. The city was founded in 1755 and named after the German queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg. Charlotte Mecklenburg Library formally PLCMC was founded in 1903. We started out as Carnegie Library of course. Our current interim Director is David Singleton. Mecklenburg Co. funds 90% of our budget. And so begins our story.
The economy in 2010 spelled some challenging times for Mecklenburg County, we had a little taste of it the end of our fiscal year 2010 but we were very dismayed at what was soon to become the Library’s reality for 2011. Mecklenburg Co. had to cut funding and they had to cut it a lot. They decided that non-essential services such as libraries and parks would pay the largest price for those cuts.
From 2009 to 2011 we had a 62% cut in our budget. Because most of our funding goes to staff salaries, we had to cut staffing by 57% . And because we had to cut staff that meant we had to cut our hours by 47% at 20 locations and close 4 or our branches. All of this was really challenging as you can imagine which is another story for another day. But you see these decisions were hard for our customers and stakeholders to understand. This is when our story gets really interesting. Let me show you what I mean.
Because our funding was cut so dramatically and remember I said 75% of our budget goes to staffing we had no choice but to cut employees.
We had to lay off over 180 staff. Freeze all open positions and you can see how just how dramatic these cuts were. This of course was the toughest part of these cuts. It was very challenging for all of us as you can imagine.
With so much fewer staff it came down to two choices, cut hours at all locations or close 12 locations and keep the hours we had. In the end the Library Board of Trustees decided to close 4 locations and shorten hours dramatically at the rest of our 20 locations.
Even though our hours were cut drastically the usage in comparison stayed fairly high. Of course door counts and PC reservations went down by virtue of the fact that we were open less hours but not to the same degree as you might expect given the other charts dramatic dips. Customers were still coming and they expected service to be the same.
So Usage per employee per hour actually went up, way up . This included things like, circulation, check in, holds, PC reservations, all the things you track when you are open was jam packed into a much smaller window of time. Staff were overwhelmed to say the least. Customers were frustrated, they wanted to know what were we going to do about it. We were suddenly under a microscope and everything we had done and were doing was questioned. They wanted answers.
And so the people of Mecklenburg Co. were not happy not happy at all. There was some nashing of teeth and stomping of feet let me tell you. They didn’t like their favorite staff person being laid off, they didn’t like their favorite library closed and they definitely didn’t like the hours of operation being cut at every location. And so the fingering pointing began. Who was to blame, how could they let this happen…. were the county commissioners clueless…… was the Library bad a managing money…. Why did library hours have to change?
Well the County decided they needed answers for the people of the Land because they didn’t like them pointing fingers at them let me tell you. So they appointed a Future of the Library Task Force made up of citizens of the Land to see just what the truth was and look at the Library at every angle. If you want to learn more about the Task Force and how they went about doing their due diligence some of the members are doing a presentation here at NCLA. They will be speaking Thurs. starting at 2:00 at M-West if you are interested.
The Library Task Force asked us some tough questions. They asked us questions that the stakeholders wanted to know. We came out of it vindicated but more importantly much wiser. We learned that we need to tell our stakeholders what a good job we do. It isn’t enough for us to know what good stewards of the tax payers monies we are but to share that with our stakeholders. We needed to be more transparent and more pro-active in telling our stories of impact.
How could we be more transparent and also make improvements to not only show we were good at what we did but could also help our staff in real tangible ways that made sense given their very heavy work loads.
How about working smarter??… could it really be that simple? Weren’t we already doing that? Here’s Michael to talk about how we went about trying to answer those very question.
So we had our charge – the first step in this process was effectively laid out for us by the citizen task force demanding we do something different They Scoped the change: and answered Why are we doing this? Those comments were Directly from the horse’s mouth… This work was needed now more than ever. Fortunately not an entirely new phenomenon @ CMLibrary – quite the contrary – spirit of innovation established – time is ripe for seizing current opportunity in a resource conservative environment to streamline process(es). Work Smart is an extension of past practices in the area of innovation. It is not an indictment of our staff working dumb or working stupid, merely a concerted effort to streamline operations for maximum benefit and utility of our most valued asset / resource – library staff – staff time = staffing capacity
We had to Create a vision: What will the change look like? – hopefully we will collectively determine the vision, find efficiencies, eliminate steps in our workflow that are no longer necessary
Process Design – December 2010 Survey for front-line staff - 1/21/2011 Team formation & 1 st mtg. by end of January Location Mgrs. Mtg. 1/27/2011 @ MS Circulation Mgrs. Mtg. 2/3/2011 @ WBL Site visits during February / early March Recommendations for beta-testing late March / early April Beatties Ford Road Library reopens 6/13/2011 Roll-out this week with a survey to be followed by… We’d like to repeat… We acknowledge that we have less time than ever before to form a team to look at process flow and redesigning our service delivery model, however the importance of this work is crucial to demonstrating our understanding of the current reality and the significance cannot be understated. This work is needed now more than ever. Thank you for your assistance in communicating our charge to your direct reports and for requesting their participation and cooperation with our team…
What needs to happen to make the change work? – Examination of the life cycle of a book and more specifically the prime of that book’s life between adolescence and middle age, when it is fresh, new, hot on the shelf and glowing! Or in other words the circulation phase. Within circulation we examined Check-out and some of the specific processes within Check-in
Accelerate the transition: How are we going to manage the effort on an ongoing basis? The questions we need to examine are: What can we do better to improve customer service? How can we more effectively use equipment? technology? And staffing? What can we STOP doing to achieve optimal use of staffing capacity? What tasks are most important? What tasks are lower priority?
Sustain momentum: What will we have learned about these processes and how can we leverage it? We need to delve into at least 2 of these processes, one of which will be how to increase self-cko % and the other will be to be determined by our subject matter experts, the team / the staff.
Within circulation we’re going to examine Check-out and some of the specific processes within Check-in
For example, let’s take a common process, like checking in book drop. How much differentiation might exist in the system? Well it depends on the facility, the staffing, the level of business perhaps… At UC there are 2 distinct processes for checking in book drop – one process for checking in the exterior book drops
And one process for checking in the interior book drops
While at MS they have combined the two processes into one. They also have two entrances…
As far as CKO we are going to delve into our Self CKO process - SJPL and OCPL are the gold standard for self CKO % Large, urban library systems similar to Charlotte – multi-branch, innovative systems that have hit 95% CKO at Check Out machines Begs the question?! Why not us?! Well after several weeks studying this, more in-depth than you probably ever desire to know, we have a better idea of what are problems are. Currently MTI is the internal gold standard, having reached the coveted 90+% plateau, in large measure because they opened with it being the preferred method for CKO; their customers received a consistent, positive experience from staff in promoting self check from day 1
We started with asking staff who provide circulation services some questions through a survey and over 70% of public service staff responded. We already have a good idea of what some of our barriers are concerning our current level of self CKO usage thanks to your input in the recent survey. After observing CKO at our largest regional locations we found that 26.9% of our non-self CKO transactions occurred because of patron preference for staff, which mirrored the data we collected in the survey. We also found that 9.9% of our CKO transactions failed at the check out machine because of user error. 13.6% of the break-downs at the CKO machine occurred because of less subtle problems, like maybe their library card was old, bent and the scanner wasn’t hitting it just right so we would have to demo the keypad. All together 50.4% of our transactions involved staff either checking out the customer because the customer wanted them to do it, or they did not know what they were doing for one reason or another
These are our desired outcomes. This is Michael language!
Library responding to concerns from external stakeholders (Library of the Future Taskforce, County Manager, customers
Better workflow Found best practices to steal Consistent workflow practices as staff work across many locations. Free Library Cards Beta test 88% Self cko - Aug 2011
Need photos of staff and customers to make this more engaging.
As far as CKO we are going to delve into our Self CKO process - SJPL and OCPL are the gold standard for self CKO % Large, urban library systems similar to Charlotte – multi-branch, innovative systems that have hit 95% CKO at Check Out machines Begs the question?! Why not us?! Well after several weeks studying this, more in-depth than you probably ever desire to know, we have a better idea of what are problems are. Currently MTI is the internal gold standard, having reached the coveted 90+% plateau, in large measure because they opened with it being the preferred method for CKO; their customers received a consistent, positive experience from staff in promoting self check from day 1
We are already at 74% system wide. Put info about highest locations here. Discuss MTI, BFR, UC, and SOR quickly. Talk about challenge. Discuss R
WorkSmart is now a new lens to re-examine current practices 1. Reference Samples 2. Scheduling and better use of staff time
All I can say is thank G-d for streaming video! I wonder what the expression on her face is? Seriously though. This was cutting edge for the time and helped draw a lot of good attention. It took about 8 more years of post war boom but funding was found for the new 1956 main library. Revise text.
