INSTG020 lecture for UCL DIS students - Project Management
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Talk delivered to UCL information sciences / library studies masters students on Tuesday 27 January 2015, then on 2 February 2016. Slides are updated for the current lecture.
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INSTG020 lecture for UCL DIS students - Project Management
- 1. Library Services Project Management UCL DIS INSTG002 2 February 2016 Andrew Preater Head of Library Information Systems @preater
- 2. Overview • Our context • My take on project management • Project management in libraries • Opportunities and pitfalls
- 3. Imperial College London context
- 5. What is project management? What we talk about when we talk about project management Hodgson, D. (2005) ‘Putting on a professional performance’: performativity, subversion and project management’, Organization, 12 (1) pp.51-68 [Online] DOI: 10.1177/1350508405048576 (Accessed 1 February 2016) Butler, J. (1990) Gender trouble. New York, NY: Routledge.
- 6. What is special about a ‘project’? • Change • Time-limited ie. they end • Cross-function • Each is unique • Risky business TSO (2009) Managing successful projects with PRINCE2. 5th edn. London: TSO. Cicmil, S. Hodgson, D., Lindgren, M., and Packendorff, J. (2009) ‘Project management behind the façade’, ephemera, 9 (2), pp. 78-92 [Online]. Available at: http://www.ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/9-2ephemera-may09.pdf (Accessed: 1 February 2016)
- 7. What is special about a ‘project’? • Change • Time-limited ie. they end • Cross-function • Each is unique • Risky business TSO (2009) Managing successful projects with PRINCE2. 5th edn. London: TSO. Cicmil, S. Hodgson, D., Lindgren, M., and Packendorff, J. (2009) ‘Project management behind the façade’, Ephemera, 9 (2), pp. 78-92 [Online]. Available at: http://www.ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/9-2ephemera-may09.pdf (Accessed: 1 February 2016)
- 8. Why manage projects? Maybe you don’t need to!
- 9. Why manage projects? • Maybe you don’t need to • Planning and managing change • Risk and quality • Learning & development
- 10. How big is a “project”? 5 days BAU 30 days change 90 days small 180 days medium >180 days big
- 11. When not to manage projects? Case 1. Federated search project brief “After investigation, we recommend that [the library] does not pursue a federated search product at this stage, but awaits developments in library management systems that may address those requirements not already met by existing connections between our catalogue and eresources and through information literacy training…”
- 12. PRINCE2 Project Brief: what we could have done • Project definition • Business case • Product description • Project approach • Project management team structure • Role descriptions • References TSO (2009) Managing successful projects with PRINCE2. 5th edn. London: TSO.
- 13. A word about PRINCE2 TSO (2009) Managing successful projects with PRINCE2. 5th edn. London: TSO. You will encounter this methodology
- 14. More words about PRINCE2 TSO (2009) Managing successful projects with PRINCE2. 5th edn. London: TSO. “Project Initiation Document (PID)” “Senior User” “Deliverable” or “Product” “Lessons Log” “Stakeholders” etc. etc.
- 15. A word about agile Rubin, K.S. (2012) Essential scrum. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley. 'Workshop exploring agile project parameters' by Flickr user Improve It, license
- 16. Project management in libraryland
- 17. What sort of projects? • Our own projects • Information technology • Estates / buildings • Cross-College • Above-College
- 18. Inheriting someone else’s project Case 2. Inheriting someone else’s project work
- 19. Inheriting someone else’s project Where’s my…? • PID • End project report • Lessons learned report • Post-project review • Follow-on actions
- 20. Real world big project: system migration Case 3. Ex Libris Alma at Imperial College London
- 21. Objective #1, from the project docs “To improve user service and enhance student experience”
- 22. Project teams: how big? Main project team Acquisitions Circulation Knowledgebase and access Collection development Communication Data migration Document Supply (ILL) Metadata & Inventory Discovery Reporting Reading Lists Systems User Management Total 83 staff
- 24. What did the project sponsor want to realise? Print and e-resource workflows
- 25. What did the project sponsor want to realise? Print and e-resource workflows Review and improve policy and processes
- 26. What did the project sponsor want to realise? Print and e-resource workflows Review and improve policy and processes Technology platform
- 27. What did the project sponsor want to realise? Print and e-resource workflows Review and improve policy and processes Technology platform Standardized approach to analytics
- 28. What happened? Alma live, July 2013
- 29. What did the staff think?
- 30. What happened to those workflows and processes?
- 31. What lessons did we learn? Do business analysis
- 32. Lesson #1 : Do business analysis Interlending lean / kaizen process improvement exercise
- 33. 33 Library Staff I have reviewed the item request I have validated the request I have requested the item I have checked that the item arrived I have requested the item Student / Academic I am waiting for my item to arrive I have received an update I have received the requested item I am looking for an item for research I have notified of the due date I have returned / renewed the item ‘Get It’ Search Primo ‘Articles & More’ Doc Del Tab ASK the Library Primo ‘Books & More’ Signed In Pre- populated Form Not Signed In Blank Form Registered User Register Request Registration Primo ‘Books & More’ Allowance Level Challenge Level Submit Request Review Request Validate Request Cancelled Request Cancel Request Search Engine Request Additional Information Databases Publishers British Library Catalogue British Library (BL) Art UK Institutions Alma Form Campus Library Request to Central to Place BL Availability Status Report OCLC FormGoogle Spread Sheet Request Item Manual Update Receive Request Manual Update BL End User BL Doc Del Supplier Notification Physical Receipt Student / Academic Journey Notified Not Available Return Item Manual Update Due Date Notification High Level Principles It is easy to find out what I need to do It is simple and requires minimal data entry I know that my request has been processed I know that my request is on its way and when to expect it My request arrives where I need it to and is simple to retrieve It is simple to return my item and I am reminded about my due dates Library Staff Journey Lesson #1 : Interlending ‘journey’
- 34. 34 Library Staff I have reviewed the item request I have validated the request I have requested the item I have checked that the item arrived I have requested the item Student / Academic I am waiting for my item to arrive I have received an update I have received the requested item I am looking for an item for research I have notified of the due date I have returned / renewed the item ‘Get It’ Search Primo ‘Articles & More’ Doc Del Tab ASK the Library Primo ‘Books & More’ Signed In Pre- populated Form Not Signed In Blank Form Registered User Register Request Registration Primo ‘Books & More’ Allowance Level Challenge Level Submit Request Review Request Validate Request Cancelled Request Cancel Request Search Engine Request Additional Information Databases Publishers British Library Catalogue British Library (BL) Art UK Institutions Alma Form Campus Library Request to Central to Place BL Availability Status Report OCLC FormGoogle Spread Sheet Request Item Manual Update Receive Request Manual Update BL End User BL Doc Del Supplier Notification Physical Receipt Student / Academic Journey Notified Not Available Return Item Manual Update Due Date Notification High Level Principles It is easy to find out what I need to do It is simple and requires minimal data entry I know that my request has been processed I know that my request is on its way and when to expect it My request arrives where I need it to and is simple to retrieve It is simple to return my item and I am reminded about my due dates Library Staff Journey Primo / Library Search Primo Form Doc Del Tab Form Primo User Experience Registration Allowances Cancellations Review each request Manual Item Request Multiple Steps OCLC Requests Manual Alma Update No Tracking Analytics No Tracking Analytics No Tracking Analytics Manual Doc Del Form Alma Update BL Plug In Lesson #1 : Interlending ‘pain points’
- 35. “We are also reminded regularly that even the changes the vendor agrees to make cause the vendor inconvenience, and that we should change our procedures to align with the technology […] we don't like being told that we're not doing things right, from the vendor’s point of view” - anonymous Alma site Breeding, M. (2016). ‘Perceptions 2015: An international survey of library automation’. Available at: http://librarytechnology.org/survey-2015-comments.pl#Alma
- 36. What lessons did we learn? Do business analysis Rescope to meet goals
- 37. ‘Reality Triangle’ (Walsh) Resources Concept from Barry Walsh, University Information Systems and Financial Management Services, Indiana University
- 38. ‘Triangle of objectives’ (Lock) Quality Time Resources Lock, D. (2007) The essentials of project management. 3rd edn. Aldershot: Gower.
- 39. #2 Rescope to meet goals Rescoped / altered deliverables • Finance integration • Workflow analysis • Metadata optimisation • Reading lists
- 40. What lessons did we learn? Do business analysis Rescope to meet goals Set expectations in planning
- 41. #3: Set expectations in planning
- 42. “We view Alma as an immature product with great potential. Basic functionality is fairly solid though resource sharing of materials across the consortium is labor intensive and wrought with problems. Analytics and the ability to generate custom reports or otherwise assess data is very poorly developed […]” - anonymous Alma site Breeding, M. (2016). Perceptions 2015: An international survey of library automation. Available at: http://librarytechnology.org/survey-2015-comments.pl#Alma
- 43. What lessons did we learn? Do business analysis Rescope to meet goals Set expectations in planning Plan for bugs & snags
- 44. #4: Plan for bugs & snags Key issues in: • ILL & subscriptions workflow • Staff training • Systems Team dependency • Staffing changes
- 45. What next for the Library? Re-evaluating and improving processes Staff certification Focus on user experience Revisit key integrations
- 46. One •Two • Three » Four Five @imperiallibrary @preater
Editor's Notes
- Imperial College specialises in science, engineering, medicine, and business. We are highly research-intensive with a strong focus on research translation and technology transfer and the applicability of research especially to health and industrial applications. 14,735 students (about 9,000 of them undergrads) and 7,023 staff. We are spread over nine campuses – the main one is at South Kensington in London. These sites include a large medical faculty which means we need to meet the needs of clinical NHS staff too.
- As a library service we support our mission in teaching, learning and research (what else are you there for). We have our central library at South Kensington and site libraries which are mostly medical libraries at our teaching hospitals. Our libraries are busy and heavily used and there is an upward trend of use of the physical space. Our spending on resources is high for our comparators (eg. RLUK) and of our spending on resources each year, 91% of what we spend on resources is electronic. Of our journals spending, over 99% is electronic: we spend a lot on e-resources; not so much on print. We have 84,000 online journals. I reassure you we do still have books (!), about half a million.
- So what do we mean anyway when we talk about project management?
- What’s special about a project? Here I’m paraphrasing the PRINCE2 project book. There are different ways of thinking about projects, but I tend to hold to these ideas as aligned with things I know ‘look like’ projects in libraries I’ve worked in. They are about change processes, they are time-limited, they draw cross-team staff, they are unique each time (but could be very similar to other projects, and that is important to ensure you learn as an organization), and typically incur some sort of risk that the organisation wants to manage. I pick out change processes as particularly important. Not every change in our libraries needs a project, but in my experience every project delivers some sort of changes. So, why would you want to manage projects in the first place?
- However, and the first thing I’ll say about project management - maybe you don’t need to at all? I am really saying this in the project management lecture…
- Yes and no. There are situations at work where you don’t require a full project management approach and where you’ll find “getting stuff done” does not mean everything needs to be turned into a project. Having said that, my view is there are benefits from at least some form of project management for change processes over a certain size and effort spent: - Project management provides formal structure and ways of approaching - It provides ways to learn as an organisation - capturing lessons are important. - Projects provide valuable development opportunities for your people. PM roles allow people who are not in a line management role to gain ‘management’ experience which they often need to move into another role. (This is just one example – PM also allows for developing influencing skills, time management, supplier liaison, and planning and analytical skills.) - Even if you do nothing else it is valuable to logs lessons learned and ensure you are doing a minimum amount of communication and documentation around your project work.
- How big is a project - at what point do we think this is something where I need to arrange some form of oversight and governance? It really depends on your organisation and the scale and scope of the work you do. This is a rule of thumb I would use and is just my opinion about my team’s work. It’ll be different in different teams even in my library, and this isn’t Imperial College policy. One example, at Imperial we team leaders recently wrote “lightweight” PIDs for things on our 2015-16 Operational Plan, some of which are well under 30 days effort. Why would you do that? Firstly we wanted to ensure some governance structure for things that needed it. Secondly we realised in writing PIDs some “projects” obviously needed to be combined with other things (they were really different strands of an overarching project) or removed as they were not achievable in the proposed timeframe. Of course, it’s important you have a culture that allows your staff to do and say things like that.
- On example about not project managing is this. This is a university that wanted to acquire a federated search product and the project team were asked for a ‘project brief’ to the senior management team. This was the right call, at the time. The market was immature and we’d have wasted money as we could not afford the best-of-breed discovery system.
- This is what could have been put into a full PRINCE2 project brief document.
- PRINCE2 is a PM methodology you will encounter in the public or private sector. Very often you will find your organization says something like, “we use a modified or a lightweight version of Prince2”. What they mean is, they are using Prince2. The Jisc PM toolkit is in my opinion a very good introduction and overview to this area.
- You’ve probably heard this sort of jargon from the land of project management – it’s not all management-speak, terms like these used within a PRINCE2 project have specific and clear meanings.
- You may have heard bad things about managing projects with Prince2, such as that it is only for “big government projects”. This is really not true. The important point is that you never “throw the PRINCE2 book” at a project. You always tailor it to meet your needs. A “good fit” means projects with defined products or deliverables or things you are making, that have measurable benefits for your organization. In that sort of situation, PRINCE2 tends to work well. It’s tried and tested, and familiar. With PRINCE2 project managers know where the pitfalls are and what to expect walking into a project.
- Agile methods work well for development and are especially popular when used for software engineering. Iterative approach to progress on deliverables. PRINCE2 plus agile is possible, you can manage the overall project framework using PRINCE2 and then agile methods for the work needed for work packages themselves. This is for example how we work with our systems supplier at Imperial. They use agile development, but our overall project locally uses a modified PRINCE2. This works fine, the two approaches don’t compete and each is an appropriate tool in its context.
- What happens in libraryland projects in the real world – what do we actually experience as project managers?
- Projects can be big and small, discrete within our libraries or working with colleagues in IT, estates and buildings, or cross college. Work we’re doing on open access is for example quintessentially cross-university for example.
- Coming into a new role at Imperial I needed to get abreast of several major systems projects my predecessor implemented including Alma. One benefit of using a standard project management approach is standardising ways of documenting things. I know up front I’m going to want to see certain documents to get a handle on things, such as: The PID The end project report Follow-on actions The lessons learned report Post-project review
- I know up front I’m going to want to see certain documents to get a handle on things, such as: The PID The end project report Follow-on actions The lessons learned report Post-project review What happened in this project…
- I’ll say something about a small systems project and talk about the tools we used.
- This is VuFind, a discovery layer which Senate House Library introduced last year. We started implementation from January 2014 with an anticipated launch in October (this is before the UoL “start of term”). I need to point out I left mid project in April, to move to my current role.
- What happened: It was well-planned – the project was low-cost and those costs were easy to predict up front.
- Gantt chart for approval by the project executive showing the timeline for various aspects of the project work. This is a simple one in Excel. I learned from a very good IT project manager that simpler tools are better, don’t use anything more complex than you need.
- What happened: It was well-planned – the project was low-cost and those costs were easy to predict. We scoped the development so that we could achieve something. Our previous work researching staff requirements for discovery was that staff tended to want “full discovery of everything” but this is not realistic for a systems specification. The project was realistically scoped project that did what we needed to replace the current system, and deliver various benefits. It was not an ‘aspirational’ specification.
- We thought we managed the risks well – within the scope of what we antiipated would happen.
- The software was open source so is a rare example of being able to modify library software to meet local needs, and we had the expertise needed in-house to do it. It actually launched early for beta testing on 18th August.
- What happened next: well, the systems librarian left University of London for a new job at SOAS during the course of this project. He actually implemented a whole new live VuFind instance for SOAS as well, going live on 29 August 2014. That’s within the estimated timescale for the original Senate House project…! As it turns out, Senate House Library no longer use VuFind, though another of the central libraries of the University of London (IALS, School of Advanced Study) are doing so.
- This is an example of a fairly large systems project at Imperial College that closed in August 2013. We had our legacy system since 1999. This was very much an integrated library system from the 20th century, based around a print world with eresources “bolted on” rather than being at the core - and we were becoming increasingly focused on e-resources.
- This is a quote from our PID, the project initiating document. Ultimately, from a higher education point of view you’d better be sure this is at the core of why you’d want to change systems. That said, remember that a library management system is fundamentally not a user-facing system. If you’re lucky they see your catalogue or discovery system. So with this sort of project you need to take care you’re defining expected benefits that actually meet your objectives of say, improved student experience.
- This is a big project for the library as it touches all areas of our work, even those that don’t expect huge benefits from the project or to have their processes and work revolutionised.
- I wanted to give you a flavour of the speed of our implementation. Compare this with our VuFind implementation that ran from January to August. This to me was very fast and highly intensive, starting from kick off in December 2012 and cutting over to a live Alma system July 2013. This included a migration of our Primo discovery instance to cloud hosting at the same time. There was a relatively short testing process, and there are only two data migrations so limited in what you can do around metadata optimisation. One point about the early adopter experience is that when we had access to webinars and the sandbox test system, we found things changed on Alma very very quickly.
- We wanted to revise all workflows and procedures, but the main focus is on improving print and eresource workflows. This is the thing about moving to a 21st century system – you really want to ensure you are not running with your 20th century print workflow still in place! To us a successful system would be one based around a single, unified workflow. This is fundamental and non-negotiable.
- We also took the opportunity to review and improve our policies and processes. You could argue you could do this anyway, but in reality I rarely see libraries do this. The disruption of a systems migration brings a particularly helpful opportunity while everyone is focused on change processes in general.
- The technology platform provides robust cloud hosting that has substantially reduced the burden on the systems team (and ICT) and meant we left behind a lot of sysadmin work that did not add value for our users.
- Finally, a standard approach to analytics. I do mean analytics, rather than simple reporting. We are using the same Oracle Business Intelligence system across College so there was potential for sharing knowledge and best practices.
- So what happened? We launched on July 29th last year which is at the end of our academic year. We had a longer “freeze” on circulation than this – about 10 days of not checking in our out physical items.
- The staff view of things. - With some specific exceptions our library staff view has been very positive – most positive among those doing acquisitions, cataloguing, and managing subscriptions. - It’s important to be sensitive to expertise, as a feeling of mastery is key to professional identity for many of us. Many staff had years of experience with the legacy ILS and in some ways (not all ways of course) they find they are back to square one learning a new system. To be fair, some staff loved the learning processes around systems migration. - We’ve hugely simplified our policies, especially around circulation so it is much simpler for staff working front-of-house supporting users. - From a systems point of view, there is so much less that needs to be done that you actually forget the amount you used to need to do managing servers and software.
- This bit about print and e-resources workflow is important and I want to emphasise it. A unified system as made a huge difference to the day-to-day of staff who do serials and book acquisitions and cataloguing, and particularly appreciate the ease of working with ebooks and ejournal subscriptions. Because we are electronic-heavy this plays to the strengths of our collection and our collection development approach.
- The big question about this project, did it deliver compared with what was promised on the PID?
- The lessons learned are important for this project, because it was big and touched on many areas of work.
- We call our interlending section the “document delivery service”, and it supplies over 8000 items a year to Imperial College staff and students. In the UK our model includes a lot of items sourced electronically from the British Library. We took a lean approach to this to revise workflow and reduce waste, rework, and simplify processes. It comes from manufacturing originally but the basic idea can be applied to knowledge work and creation. There is a focus on continuous improvement which anyone from an IT background will appreciate. :-) I know other libraries are doing similar work during Alma implementation to revise workflows. It would have been wonderful to do this at the time, but we rescoped to remove it.
- This is an example showing analysis of our interlending (document delivery) analysis and how complex the process can be. This project is running now (November-December 2014) and is making progress to eliminate waste from our interlending workflow and improve user experience.
- This is just to show you the same processes with ‘pain points’ highlighted! One interesting thing is how quickly we went from looking at problems in Alma, that is outstanding things we needed fixed by Ex Libris to support our processes, to concentrating on waste, for example failed searches that lead to people submitting requests for things we already have subscribed.
- You may have seen variants on this sort of diagram elsewhere in projects or IT, but this specific interpretation is from Barry Walsh at University of Indiana. His idea is that you can’t control all three of the factors represented by the sides of the triangle, only two. So if you have a fixed deadline (time) and resources (money, staff), then you may find the scope of what you deliver shrinks so you can achieve it within those constraints. This is a variation on the idea of the points of a triangle being resources (money), time, and quality – which is commonly found in PM textbooks, like Dennis Lock’s book. What they’re getting across to you is the idea of operating under constraints of various types which include scope (or quality), time available, and resources (or money) and you cannot always control of have choice over all three.
- Rescoped / altered deliverables over the course of the project. Each of these is project-sized in itself rather than being a ‘work package’ within a systems migration project; it’s not surprising some of these were dropped from scope.
- It’s important to have realistic expectations about what the system will do, and what a modern library system looks like. At the stage of writing functional requirements it’s a mistake to focus on legacy requirements and features as “must haves” for a systems that is radically different. As a basic starting point it’s worth using something like the Alma spec from Ken Chad’s LibTechRFP site: http://libtechrfp.wikispaces.com/Unified+library+resource+management+specification rather than the legacy equivalent.
- It’s important to have realistic expectations about what the system will do, and what a modern library system looks like. At the stage of writing functional requirements it’s a mistake to focus on legacy requirements and features as “must haves” for a systems that is radically different. As a basic starting point it’s worth using something like the Alma spec from Ken Chad’s LibTechRFP site: http://libtechrfp.wikispaces.com/Unified+library+resource+management+specification rather than the legacy equivalent.
- You need contingency for problems that come up. A project like Alma could assume 10-15% total cost to allow for contingency in additional costs that weren’t anticipated. In PRINCE2 the concept of tolerance allows the project to deviate somewhat from the originally planned time and cost (and sometimes quality) without the project manager taking every decision back to the project board.
- In the end there were various issues: In quality with some aspects of interlending workflow. We were the first in the world (!) to try various things with Alma Resource Sharing distributed across multiple campus sites, so we found issues no-one else had encountered. A great deal of staff training was provided by our vendor, but we found their agile development methods and short release cycle meant what was in the training didn’t always match the training materials. A lot of dependencies on the Systems team were unearthed. In some ways, a development opportunity for other staff. Senior management staffing changes happened – not necessary a bad thing, but can introduce risk for a project to change “sponsor” or executive role mid-project.
- Summary: Big projects such as a systems migration are about continuous improvement, rather than models of change that takes a problem and goes through and “fixes it”. We’re now starting to realise those benefits, but there is a lot still to do. That said after 16 months from going live, we feel we are stable and well bedded-in.