 My name is Joy Banks and I am the project coordinator for the Clear Strategies for Advancing Hidden Collections six-part webinar series. Welcome to our sixth and final webinar, Closing the Loop, Project Assessment and Leveraging Goals for Future Planning. This series is offered through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It is my pleasure to introduce our speaker for today, Ellen Ryan. Ellen has served as the head of special collections and archives at Idaho State University since 2013. Prior to her time at ISU, Ellen spent two years as digital project manager on a highly collaborative LSTA digital imaging grant at Kent Library at Southeast Missouri State University, developing a digital repository of primary source materials pertaining to the American Civil War. Previous positions included working in historic preservation, where Ellen was charged in part with building relationships with the town and county historians, historical societies and museums in the Adirondack region of New York. Ellen has worked as a consultant and served on the boards of several historical associations and museums. Ellen received her MA history from Southeast Missouri State University and an MLIS archival studies from San Jose State University. Please welcome Ellen. Thank you for the introduction and good afternoon to everyone. I am excited to be here with you today and welcome again to the final installment of the series Strategies for Advancing Hidden Collections. The scope of this topic, Closing the Loop, Project Assessment and Leveraging Goals for Future Planning, will address process of project goals and assessment, determining useful metrics for a project, sharing methods for tracking metrics progress in time, adapting to project roadblocks and unanticipated changes to the project, defining and celebrating project success with staff management in the community, and setting new goals built on previous projects. We will approach this session in a similar fashion to the previous ones and then I will be asking you to participate from time to time by asking questions and soliciting your responses. I will also be referring back to some of the earlier sessions as well as using examples of projects I have worked on and am currently working on in order to provide you with some real-life scenarios. Even though the examples will pertain to archival projects, they can easily transfer transfer to library, gallery, or museum collections. By the end of this webinar, you will know how to set measurable goals and determine project success, have the tools needed to track project progress, be able to communicate goals and outcomes with various audiences, and feel confident about project progress even when things do not go as planned. When you first entered the lobby just moments ago for the webinar, there were some polls we asked you to take and if you have not done so already, I'm going to pull them up here now so you can respond. We are going to take a look at the responses here. There were three questions that we had asked you to respond to. The first being, are you either discussing or at the early stages of developing a project? It looks like quite a few of you are, yes, we're at 96% there. Pretty good. So I would say pretty good stats there. The second question, if you are in the early stages, have you defined your intended goals? And it looks like about 70% of you are working on them. Again, good to be working on them. 18, almost 19% say no. Okay, we're going to get you started. And about 10% saying yes on that. And then the third question that we posed was, have you ever changed or adjusted your goals once you have started a project? And a whopping 100% say yes. So I feel happy I'm not alone on that. Not probably uncommon at all, I would think. So having looked at that, we're going to move back into the classroom here. So now we have a better understanding of who is working on projects or about to start and who has or has not established their goals, or how many in this case. We have also learned that some of you, or not, have adjusted or changed your goals once the project started. We will talk about this a little later on when we talk about roadblocks and unexpected changes in your projects. But first, we are going to talk about project goals and assessment. No matter the project, all projects have a goal. So the four cornerstones of a project goal are time, target, budget, and the so what. So time is as simple as deciding how long the project is going to take. Target refers to what will the project look like? What will it result in? Budget needs to be determined by asking, of course, how much will it all cost? And the so what means answering the questions, excuse me, why are we doing this, and what problem will it solve? This can be addressed as a needs assessment. Is there a need for the intended project? And if so, what problem will it solve? The so what question can help with the prioritization of your projects and keep your project in line with your institution's mission? So for example, if we want to remodel the library to provide for one community room and two small study offices by the end of FY17 at a cost not to exceed $1.8 million so that the community has a free meeting space and the library can offer entertainment, instructional, and training programs on a regular basis. This example addresses all four cornerstones of a project goal, the time, target, the budget, and the so what. Your project's goal can be as simple as processing a collection quickly by applying MPLP to make it more readily available to researchers or as complex as a collaborative digitization project with several institutions that involves locating, digitizing, and transcribing documents and making them accessible via a content management system or creating an exhibit that highlights your hidden collections. Regardless of the nature of the project, make sure your goals address the four cornerstones. For those unfamiliar with MPLP, in 2005, archivists Mark Green and Dennis Meisner published their article More Product Less Process Revamping Traditional Archival Processing in the American Archivist, which called for a reduced investment of time and processing at the individual item level for the sake of speeding up overall collection processing. The More Product Less Process or MPLP method was developed specifically for 20th century collections but has been applied to older collections more or less successfully. You should revisit your project goals and assess them as you move along through your project. Continually remind yourself of what you stated as your goals and stick to them. If it means pulling out that accepted grant proposal or your notes from an earlier meeting to remind yourself of what you committed to do, do it. Otherwise, you can easily become sidetracked and steer yourself off course, which can result in loss of time and focus on the initially stated goals. And you will probably have some explaining to do to your stakeholders. There may be times when the stated goals need to be readjusted, such as or if there is a staff or volunteer turnover or budgeting issues arise. So do you remember the images from the first webinar of the project manager in the CESAW? It is always a balancing act. If you are working on a grant funded project that requires interim reporting as well as a final report, you will be looking at your goals on a more regular basis, documenting your progress and reporting to the fiscal agent. So what do we mean by assessment? When projects are not running smoothly, the focus can quickly shift to become delivery at all costs, which can then lead to a downward spiral that includes poor quality, inefficiency, late delivery and poor predictability. Assessing your project as you move forward until it's completion will keep you on task and focused. So it is now time for our first activity and similar to the previous webinars you have participated in with this series, I am going to put some questions out there so that we can learn from everyone else's experiences utilizing the chat box on the left of the screen to facilitate discussion. We will spend about five minutes on this activity. Chat comments will be captured as part of the recording in case there is something you want to refer back to later. So we're going to move into the discussion room here. And the first question is what are some problems you have encountered when working on projects? So what are some signs your project could be in trouble? Too broad of a scope, failure to meet user needs, lack of re-engineering and redefinition of job roles and responsibilities, which I think some of you just kind of touched on there, a lack of clear goals, which we just saw many of you have dealt with that, too many leaders, too much reliance on outside consultants and that would include vendors, lack of contingency plans that would come into place when people are ill or have to leave unexpectedly, inadequate testing, inadequate user training and denial that the project is even in trouble to begin with. Right? So without measuring, it is impossible to know whether a project was a success or a failure without having measured its effectiveness to begin with. Project management metrics allow for the ability to determine the success of a project, help project managers evaluate a project's status, foresee risks and assess team productivity and quality of work. As a tool, the metrics can provide several good reasons for implementation. Each project is going to have different objectives and what works for one project may not work for another, so remember to tailor your metrics and reporting to your unique needs. Different project management metrics can be defined based on a project's objective and complexity. However, the following five can typically cover the most important measurements, productivity, scope of work, quality and satisfaction, cost and gross margin. The productivity metric allows project managers to assess the utilization of resources. It compares the total effort to the budgeted effort, which has a direct impact on the bottom line. Delays in the timeline, underperformance by staff or vendor and unavoidable circumstances can all affect the productivity metric. The scope of work, a project scope is typically established upfront, but changes and additions can derail even the best project managers' efforts. Tracking change requests is necessary to control them and keep the project on time and on budget. Quality assurance is truly a patron-focused metric. Assuring low defects throughout the project, as well as a quality deliverable at its end, should be part of every project. Catching defects early can also help prevent the entire project from losing focus and failing. Measuring how costs are managed is often critical to a project's success. Cost management is related to other variables, such as quality, scope and productivity. If it varies above or below projections, the project can suffer. Ideally, cost is closely monitored throughout the project, so if costs rise unexpectedly, variables such as scope or time are adjusted accordingly and the project can still achieve its objectives. The gross margin, typically in the business world, a project's ultimate goal is to contribute to the organization by increasing profits. However, in the glam world, this could mean something very different than financial profit. The gross margin is the difference between total income achieved and total costs spent on the project, and a target gross margin should be established in the planning stages and measured throughout. So we're going to go back into the discussion realm because we have another activity to do and some more questions to kind of talk about. And the first one that I'm going to give you here are the question is, what are some ways your project will help contribute to your organization's increased profits? Before we go into the chat room, I'm just going to give you an example to kind of get you thinking about profits other than financial. So the example I'm going to give you is when working on a digitization project, we did a significant amount of outreach and a number of private families came forward to share their family papers to include as part of the project. As a result, one of those families at the end of the project donated their papers to our archives, thus increasing our profits. So we'll go into chat room here for number two and get you thinking about what are some ways your project will help contribute to your organization's increased profits. And this is a good question to ask when you're planning your projects because it's a good way to sell it to your stakeholders. What is going to be the outcome? Why is this project important? How is it going to benefit your organization? So moving forward and implementing project metrics. Once your metrics have been clearly defined to suit your organization's needs, it is time to begin implementing them. First, communicate with users to help them understand the process of the project. Focus on the importance of metrics and how they can help improve your project. Create a metrics plan with guidelines that everyone can understand, which may help your project gain support. And then start implementing the plan. Remember that the metrics should lead to action, otherwise they may not be useful. And update the plan as you identify usable metrics. Tracking the five project metrics management metrics that were mentioned previously, productivity, scope of work, quality and satisfaction, cost and gross margin, can help give project managers better control over the project and better odds for success. Over time, organizations can gain insights as to which methods are successful in which need tuning. Doing this can allow for improvements to later projects. Finally, implementing project management metrics can build historical data to help improve future planning. How you choose to track metrics, progress and time for your projects is important not only to the project itself, but in sharing that information to your stakeholders. Typically, I use Excel spreadsheets for tracking projects, since I already have it as part of Microsoft Office Suite. Here is an example of a spreadsheet I created for a previous project. You can see across the top where I indicated the institution, name of the collection, the items that were being digitized, the number of files, because we were uploading into ContentAM and we actually had to report that to the granting agency. When the items were digitized, transcribed, the metadata created, transcriptions and metadata checked, because students were working on these, how many items were uploaded and who was assigned to those tasks. A sample template of this spreadsheet is available in the download file box. Since every project is different, how your spreadsheet is arranged will depend upon your specific needs. There are other tools available, including templates for download and software programs. What you choose to use is really going to depend on your institution's needs and budget. So we'll now take a look at a few examples of methods used for tracking metrics, progress and time. The first is Gantt charts. Gantt charts are a visual tool used by project managers that provide a good standard format for displaying project schedules and the information contained within them by listing the project activities and their corresponding start and finish dates. Here is a simple Gantt chart created for a project that I am currently working on. All of the activities are listed on the left with the schedules of all those tasks to the right. There are different symbols that can be used on Gantt charts, including black diamonds to signify milestones, summary tasks signified by wide bars, lighter horizontal bars, arrows that show dependencies between the tasks, making them at times quite complex. Personally, I prefer simplicity and a Gantt chart is great to use for reporting or presenting on your project, which is why I like them. PERT charts, PERT or program evaluation and review technique is a project management tool used to schedule, organize and coordinate tasks within a project. It was developed in the late 1950s for the United States Navy for its pilot project developing ballistic missiles. PERT helps us identify critical tasks and activities and look at the probability of completing the project by a given date. So this is an example of a PERT chart. Based on the same project you just saw illustrated in the Gantt chart. A little more complicated than the Gantt chart, the PERT chart shows us which tasks are necessary to complete prior to moving forward to the next. Start and end dates are indicated as well as the duration of each phase of the project. The arrows are used to show where to proceed next. If we look at the two tasks that are starting simultaneously on day 31, which is digitize and housing of the negatives, we can see that their end dates differ. So digitizing ends on day 90, housing negatives ends on day 120. Since task five does not start until day 121, we need to wait until task four is completed before moving forward. Another chart that is possible to use is the CPM chart. CPM or critical path method was developed in 1957 as a network model for project management. CPM is a deterministic method that uses a fixed time estimate for each activity. While easy to understand and use, CPM does not consider the time variations that can have a great impact on the completion time of a complex project. CPM helps us analyze the cost time tradeoffs possible if we need to speed the project up. And this is an example of a CPM chart. The CPM chart involves algorithms that determine the sequential path events in a project take place indicated by the arrows. So for example, event four is preceded by event one, event five is preceded by event two, but cannot start until event one is completed. Tutorials for the GAMP, PERT, and CPM charts are available in the resource library for this series of webinars if you're interested in using those. So questions which may be addressed by PERT and CPM charts. Is the project on schedule ahead of schedule or behind schedule? Is the project over or under cost budget? Are there enough resources available to finish the project on time? And if the project must be finished in less than the scheduled amount of time, what is the way to accomplish this at the least amount of cost? Six steps common to PERT and CPM. Define the project and prepare the work breakdown structure. Develop relationships among the activities, and this means deciding which activities must proceed and which must follow others. Draw the network connecting all of the activities. Assign the time and or cost estimates to each activity. Compute the longest time path through the network, and this is called the critical path, and use the network to help plan, schedule, monitor, and control the project. Expect change. We cannot predict every single moment of our lives, so it is important to remember this in terms of project management, and make every effort not to let the bumps in the road send you and your project team into a frenzy. While every effort should be made in the early stages of project planning for contingency plans, sometimes things in life just happen. Change can be costly in terms of money, time, headache, stress, heartache, and a number of other ways. Not everyone adjusts to change well, so having contingency plans stated up front could very easily save time and hopefully some stress. Now remember that barbecue you were planning in the first webinar? What if an unexpected storm happened to develop just as your guests were arriving? Did you have a contingency plan in case of inclement weather? If not, can you quickly switch gears and come up with one? Chances are your guests will adjust and everyone will have a great time regardless of the weather and where they eat. The question is, are you capable of handling unexpected change? The project manager's role is to manage the impact of change on a project and requires having a strong structure whereby you can manage the flux that happens within projects. Almost all projects will require the completion of tasks that appear not to have been planned for and that will force a correction to the established plan. Now there are two ways to deal with those tasks. There is the ad hoc process wherein anyone can force any decision without going through a structured review process. This might work well for some teams however the preferred response is to use the structured and clear review process which funnels all requests through knowledgeable and responsible parties who understand the project, its impact on the organization and the potential ramifications of the change being proposed. This process can alleviate stress within the organization and certainly within the team. Change can also lead to conflict. Ideological conflict happens when there are differing opinions and debate ensues in an honest effort to reach the truth or hopefully to agree on a plan of action. This can be productive and allows for team members to actively participate in the process. Non-productive conflict can include different motives be it political, pride, opportunism, the need to vent, annoyance, all of which can carry the common theme of being unproductive. In either case a resolution will need to be reached. Hopefully you will never have to experience conflicts with your project but if so let's hope for a quick resolution. If you had contingency plans in place from the get-go you may be able to avoid conflicts altogether. Change is a fact of life in any organization or project. The key for project managers is to learn to recognize that unexpected circumstances are going to arise and learn to cope with these changes as effectively as possible. How a project leader guides a team through times of change is not only a true measure of his or her leadership skills but it determines the outcome of the project and the mood of the project team. So as an example, and I know we covered this earlier in one of the chat sessions there, on a previous project at another institution there were a few unanticipated changes to the project that we all had to adjust to. I had a family emergency that required me to fly home on more than one occasion. My boss who was also the grant manager left to take another position about two months before the project was ending. We had computer issues and we changed our content to end subscription a month before the project ended which resulted in the entire project being moved from the library server to OCLC's server. We all managed to adjust by communicating effectively and tried not getting too stressed about the changes but you know obviously there were some levels of stress there but we did our best. So some projects can come up unexpectedly. Currently I am working on one but there is no way to anticipate the unexpected. Perhaps some of you have dealt with emergencies or pressing preservation issues with your collections. Recently our institution's photographic services department transferred all of their negatives to the university archives. Some of the negatives from the university's yearbook are in varying stages of vinegar syndrome. This has become a priority project in terms of rehousing and digitizing the negatives in order to preserve the images. Other projects I had either been working on or wanted to start working on have taken a back seat at the moment until I can complete this project. So we're going to move back into the discussion room and we're going to ask a few more questions and have some conversation about that. It's three part. So what if any roadblocks have you encountered when working on projects? How did you deal with them and how do you deal with change? Okay so defining and celebrating project success and hopefully after you know all the roadblocks and mishaps along the way we can actually celebrate something right. So defining and celebrating project success. If you are assessing your project while in progress there will be success at the end which is what we all want right. So how do we measure the success of a project? Well that depends upon the realistic and definite goals. So having a good project definition upfront from the get go. Client satisfaction that could be your colleagues, your boss, a customer, a patron, alumni, donors, benefactors, all of those. Profitability which we talked about earlier. Market or service availability. The implementation process. Perceived value of the project. Communication which is key and I know a lot of us have touched on that in the chat room is you know either lack of communication or great communication and teamwork. So it is important to remain transparent throughout the project. Let your stakeholders know what is going on which we just kind of talked about. Where you are in the progress and celebrate those milestones. Milestone celebrations could be as simple as a press release to let your stakeholders know where you are in terms of your project, how the budget is being spent, if your project is on target and the next steps that are coming up forward. Once your project is completed a celebration on a larger scale just might be in order. So we are going to go back into the chat room for one more activity and respond to the question does anyone have ideas about celebrating project success and how would you want to celebrate? And defining ways to celebrate the end of your project and we just touched on thank you notes. So on a project I worked on previously after completing it was a highly collaborative digitization project. We actually sent thank you notes to all of our participants and included a disc and in some cases several discs of copies of the scanned materials loaned from their respective collections and this was a they loved this. This was like a huge deal to them especially the smaller institutions that couldn't feasibly do this on their own. So it was a way for them to get some work done on their end. A reception and this could be specifically for the project team, the stakeholders, the general public or a combination thereof. And outing take the project team out for a nice lunch or dinner. I think some of you talked about that. Flowers I mean who doesn't like receiving flowers right. An awards ceremony create awards for project team members and these can be silly but fun and it works well with students you know who showed up on time regularly. Press releases right putting it out there for people to see lectures and this could be combined with a reception. A newsletter article if your organization or institution has a newsletter an article would be a good place to put something. Reaching out to alumni to let them know what's going on. Membership if your organization has a membership or a friends group. Reach out to them. Social media if you're loud. Exhibit if your project involved processing a hidden collection why not take the opportunity to showcase the collection. And time off this might you know be much needed by all once the project is completed and a lot of these things all of you kind of just mentioned too so that's that's good. And to give you some food for thought if you hadn't thought of some of these things. So setting new goals built on previous projects. Once you have completed your project and of course celebrated its end it is now time to take stock in what you learned along the way and use those experiences to set new goals for your next project. If we think back again to the barbecue scenario see it all goes back to food after all the guests have left if you are anything like me you will start thinking about the next time. What worked what didn't what foods went over well and those barely anyone touched. This is the time to ask yourself if I had to do it all over again what would I do differently. Then start making a list. Use your experiences to build on for the next barbecue the next project. Build on your knowledge and that of others on your team. Take stock in what you learned. You can discover lessons by asking three questions what went right what went wrong and what could have been better. If you are working as part of a project team. It may be beneficial to work on this together. People tend to remember things differently. So it is a good idea to have everyone's input. Be sure to write your out your answers and hopefully you will you will refer back to these if you ever take on a similar project. This is the time for the project manager to listen to recommendations from the project team. Feedback should be encouraged and constructive. If members of the team are uncomfortable with speaking up offer an alternative solution such as submitting their recommendations in writing and submitting them anonymously. Document and share your findings. This should be done internally so that there is a record on hand for future projects. But why not write an article for about your experiences to share with others. What about presenting at a conference. There are any number of ways to share your lessons learned. So why take stock in what we have learned. The obvious answer so that we do not repeat the same mistakes again and again and again. So some common mistakes that can happen when it comes to evaluating projects. Sometimes we are too busy to evaluate projects once they are finished. We are all busy and sometimes the next project comes right on the heels of the one we have just completed. Many of us sometimes forget to take the time to assess our projects before moving on to the next. Taking the time to reflect may actually save you time in not repeating the same mistakes give you less headaches and stress will probably make your life much more enjoyable. Moving on to the next project before taking the time to review the one you have just finished. Sometimes a common mistake. Failure to learn the lessons of past projects and not making those lessons learned available to other members of the organization. Part of taking stock in your completed project should include aspects of everything we have covered throughout this webinar series. From planning your project to building resources and relationships. Who would you work with again or hire again or not. To determining your staffing needs. To the project itself. To overcoming project hurdles. And finally to assessing your project. We hope that you have gained some insight into managing projects for your hidden collections and we can't wait to hear about them. I would just like to say thank you for everyone showing up to these you know six sessions for six weeks is kind of a big commitment I know and I wanted to thank clear as well for providing me the opportunity to develop this webinar as part of this series so thank you.