LIBRARY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM MIGRATION

April 2000 Activities Report

INTRODUCTION

This is the first of thirty monthly reports on the status of the Yale University Library’s migration to a new Library Management System (LMS). These reports will be posted to YULIB and will also be available on the LMS Migration Web site:

http://www.library.yale.edu/orbis2/public/orbis2.htm

These reports will provide a convenient summary account of LMS migration activities and the thinking that informs them. The reports and the numerous documents that will be available at the Web site are meant to help support the library-wide learning that is essential to a successful migration effort.

Comments about this material and the library’s migration activities are most welcome. Such comments can made publicly on the YULIB listserv or addressed individually to Audrey Novak, the LMS Migration Project Manager, by using the reply function at the Web site or by sending a message directly to Audrey at audrey.novak@yale.edu

APRIL ACTIVITIES

A group of about 30 library staff responded to invitations sent to every library department to participate in a pair of April planning sessions. These sessions were designed and facilitated by Kate Reynolds, Staff Training and Organizational Development Officer, to stimulate library-wide thinking about how the library might best organize itself for its LMS migration work. Chris Weideman, Assistant Director of Manuscripts and Archives, assisted the group discussions by scribing participant responses.

13 April meeting (full day)

Participants in the 13 April meeting identified a set of capabilities the library needs for LMS migration. They also identified a set of values that should inform the migration and a set of predictors for success. Closely allied to all of these were some themes that played through the 13 April meeting.

Organizational Capabilities

The organizational structure put in place for LMS migration should be capable of:

• Encouraging thinking of the library as a single organization
• Nurturing learning
• Fostering clear-sighted analysis, optimism, balanced decisions, and innovation
• Promoting collaboration and teamwork
• Managing change, uncertainty, ambiguity, and risk
• Responding flexibly to the unanticipated
• Setting priorities, finding compromises, and making decisions
• Controlling costs
• Meeting deadlines

Organizational Values

The capabilities just specified carry with them a strong set of explicit or implied values, such as innovation, efficiency, decisiveness, and cross-functional interaction. Beyond these values, and above all, the organizational structure put in place for LMS migration should strengthen the library’s:

• Reader-centered focus
• Commitment to quality improvement

Predictors of Success

Past experience with projects similar in scope or consequence to LMS migration suggests the following attributes of project management are good predictors of success:

• Clear expectations as regards project outcomes
• Strong motivation and high levels of commitment and buy-in to the project
• Ability to learn from the experience of others
• Broad-based participation among those who will be affected by the project
• Ability to command the time and attention necessary for participants to complete tasks
• Good management and, where appropriate, delegation of authority and responsibility
• Effective communication
• Unambiguous decision making authority
• Completing difficult, stressful, controversial tasks promptly

Some important but inescapable tensions that might limit success must be managed. These include:

• Competing responsibilities and demands on the time of participants
• Time requirements for absorbing factors driving change, moving through learning curves, and accommodating false starts
• Sequencing process redesign and technology change to minimize "chicken and egg" dilemmas

Recurring themes

Some ideas that found voice several times at the 13 April meeting were:

• Readers and library staff alike are keen to have the improved functionality that a new LMS will deliver; many feel that we are long overdue in securing these benefits. We should therefore look for every opportunity to shorten migration tasks when that can be done without damage to the success of the project.
• The tension between the efficient conduct of the project and the creation of a rich and pervasive learning environment around the LMS migration cannot be escaped. This tension will have to be managed with sensitivity to both sets of values.
• Excellent training in the use of the new LMS system will be needed for both library staff and readers.

Changing character of migration tasks

Participants on 13 April also described how the nature of LMS migration work will change over the course of the project. These changes were characterized as follows:

• We will continuously increase, improve, and refine our knowledge base, even after some key decisions have been made. That is, while we are committed to perfecting our knowledge, we must sometimes act on imperfect knowledge.
• Our learning starts at the conceptual level and moves to the concrete; as always, it will be important not to lose sight of the conceptual as we engage with the concrete.
• Decisions become increasingly irreversible as the migration progresses in time.
• Some significant parts of our work will be disciplined by contract performance requirements.

FOUR PROPOSITIONS

In response to the views expressed at the 13 April meeting, Scott Bennett, Audrey Novak, and Chris Weideman advanced a set of Four Propositions about an organizational structure capable of seeing LMS migration through to successful completion:

1. Structures should be as finely tuned to individual tasks as possible and should change as the task changes. This proposition will require that individual tasks be defined as crisply and discretely as possible; timelines and the terms of success must be made clear. Work groups should be constituted in ways that reflect the project values identified above as well as with regard to the expertise needed for the particular task. Assignments to work groups will reflect the need to engage both wide participation and to secure continuity of knowledge throughout the migration project. Work groups should be explicitly charged with advancing the project values appropriate to their tasks as well as with completing their substantive assignments.

2. The results of such task work should be as widely communicated as possible, to foster organization-wide learning. Such learning must itself be understood as being one of the key ways in which individuals will participate in LMS migration. While the primary goal of the project is the successful migration to a new LMS, the project should also be managed to create (1) new or enhanced expertise throughout the library on a wide set of issues, ranging from work flow design to systems interfaces, and (2) a deepened understanding of library-wide process redesign opportunities for working more effectively and improving reader services. We will feel the value of these learning outcomes long after we have completed the specific tasks of LMS migration.

3. A Migration Management Group should be created that is no larger than necessary to:
   • Define tasks, charge working groups, and recruit working group members
   • Manage communication (including about its own work)
   • Make decisions on controverted issues
   • Manage overall timetable issues and project funds
   • Membership in the Migration Management Group should endure for the length of the migration project and should be determined, not by the organizational interests that the migration project must accommodate, but by the expertise needed for successfully discharging the duties just described. The project needs to start with and to build further expertise in such fundamental activities as: acquisitions, cataloging, circulation, collection management, integrated processing, reader services, representation of non-roman scripts, special collections, and systems. Members of the Migration Management Group should expect to spend a substantial amount of time on migration tasks. The Migration Management Group should probably have twelve or fewer members; Audrey Novak and Scott Bennett, as LMS Migration Project Managers, will serve on the Group and be responsible for its working effectively.

4. The Migration Management Group should report its activities on not less than a monthly basis to the Library Management Council and to a key set of library standing committees, including the Cataloging Coordinating Committee, the Acquisitions Support Group, the Circulation Support Group, the Collection Development Council, the Service Quality Initiative Council, the Library Systems Steering Committee, and whatever Process Redesign Working Group may exist by this summer. (It is likely that one or more members of each of these groups will serve on the Migration Management Group.) These groups will almost certainly wish to reshape their agendas so that they can play a useful advisory role in migration matters. None of them will, however, have oversight or management responsibility for LMS migration.

At the same time, Audrey, Scott, and Chris prepared an Orbis 2 Project Plan identifying individual tasks and a timetable for completing these tasks. Necessarily, the Project Plan is more detailed for the work to be done in the first several months. Among other things, the plan responds to the advice given at the 13 April meeting that we should shorten as much as possible the time required to identify the vendor for our new LMS, to advance the date when we start our implementation activities.

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