Notes and thoughts.

What follows is a transcript of things I wrote down during the Pat Wagner workshop. It’s good to review the ideas that matter sometimes when you are planning projects and taking next steps rapidly.

It hurts your library when your public expects more than you can deliver on half the budget.

What is the core of your business?

We are forced to innovate. What innovative policy can we place into Resource Sharing to make it most effective?

Truths I believe:
Local district loan is cheap collection sharing.
When time isn’t a factor, we can get most things customers want.
Format shouldn’t matter as much as content
When libraries share all clients benefit.

Stick with the choices you make.

Have the guts to enforce the plan or you let them steal money and time.

Perfectionism is like standing outside your building ripping up $100 bills.

What should the ratio be between items loaned and items borrowed?

Local library loans + district loans + Interlibrary Loans from Access + Interlibrary loans from OCLC = Items borrowed?

Total Items loaned outside our library cannot exceed : ________ (insert number here: what would you base it on?)

People procrastinate on stuff they don’t have to do or stuff without immediate consequences. Who stops you from procrastinating? How does knowledge of fear, policy, evaluation, and humanity help those consequences?

Tip: If you’re trying to explain something, make a graphic equation. Examples:
customer needs + library resouces = better community
Library Resources – Community Needs = Remaining Community Needs
Hours open (Physical Space) / Staff Hours or Staff Costs (How does that look by county or by circulation?)

Who makes the decision so we can get the work done?

How do you know you were successful?

Statistics are the perfect picture of whatever you counted yesterday.

What are the signs you see in a community that show it is prosperous? Be specific about things you see…

Try this exercise: Write a press release or an essay. What 5 things do you give your community?
Try to use concrete evidence, think Law & Order.

Libraries say: Even if we can’t fill your request, we treat you with respect and might offer an alternative.

What are the steps in triage? While we’re not in a critical care unit, how could these help us think about doing effective public library work?

Agreed: Humans misunderstand, make mistakes, and disagree.

Should everybody learn to think like a manager? (depend on who your managers are…)

Keep staff informed of major checkpoints on the way to benchmarks. How do they know they are getting there…?

Scenario for Staff:
1000 people are standing at the desk waving a piece of paper with a request. What do you do?

If you could only fill 100 of them, how would you decide? (With the economy, this reminds me of the scene from It’s a Wonderful Life where George Bailey uses his honeymoon money to help everyone get by until the bank reopened, saving the Bailey Building & Loan. What would happen today?)

How do you communicate to those with needs you cannot meet? (Side story: I was offered money this week to do a job for a patron when I was helping out a customer in a district library while the director answered the phone during our meeting regarding grant funding…Did I want to help the man, yes, but I couldn’t take the time to help him forever, I could only do so much. See, he’d bought a service to make money through a website and he didn’t have an email address. He wanted me to find a way to make his money making scheme work, and to be honest, the sales person who sent him the Priority Mail envelop about his service should have been ashamed of taking someone’s money who couldn’t use the service really, but that’s a whole other story. I couldn’t do it for him, and I didn’t have a friend I could recommend to help, except, well, there’s self education online, programs in community centers, and the director printed contact info on where to register a business complaint because the company was no longer returning phone calls. The one-on0one customer interaction is a difficulty for reference librarians to limit.)

Best tip of the Day for Time Management: Figure out how much time you have before you decide what you will do. (align your expectations!)

For project managers, bad news is good information. It’s GREAT if staff tell you what doesn’t look good, what doesn’t work, and what bumps they hit along the way. This means you are a trusted project manager and that you’re working well together.

Beware of project drift…

There’s no room for grammar in project management, however, you need to DEFINE concrete expectations and milestones.

What’s the ratio between Fast, speed of service; Cheap/Cost/Commodities used or traded ; and Quality/Effectiveness at meeting goals
Quality Metric / Cost = Effective Service Delivery to meet need
Quality + Time = 10
Quality (aka Impact) / cost (aka Resources) = 10 (but 9 is okay too)

What “timing” matters in District Loan/ILL?

How can employees gauge how much time they should spend on a customer request?
Can we write a procedure to enforce common sense?

If your library got a bequest of $1,000,000 and offered to split the ownership of the results of an investment between all the staff and board, how many of your staff would support that idea?
Now…think this: Which programs or services would staff rather sell and split the profits from rather than continue? You’ll see which ones aren’t making an impact.

Something has to be more important than something else. Will you flip a coin to make your decision?

If you can hold a gun to someone’s head and they can complete a task, it is not a training issue.

Define Goals and constraints. Explain the how. (Page 23 of Pat Wagner handouts see here: Project Management and Priorities Sheets by Pat Wagner 2010will be a structure for a few district project outlines I am working on)