This year, I’m taking part of an exciting program sponsored by the Illinois State Library Association called I-LEAD U. This stands for “Innovative Librarians Explore, Apply, and Discover” and I’m excited to be a part of it!
Truthfully, I’m not sure what this program will entail and involve, but I’m excited about it and plan on blogging my way through the whole experience. Starting now – with this video they suggested we watch before our March meeting.
[youtube id=”XXMx9qNGI7k”]
Project Planning
The history of project planning – mostly a post WWII innovation designed to address modern concerns of accountability and efficiency.
What is a project? “A temporary endeavor, with a defined beginning, middle, and end, undertaken to meet clearly articulated goals and objectives.” Good projects are iterative – continually going back to look again at the problem and think creatively about the solutions. “A project is typically constrained by time, staff, technology, funding, deliverables, or all of these factors.” – These aren’t necessarily bad things – rather just the facts of life. Ultimately, limitations are what make projects interesting. Just take them into account when planning.
Basic Project Planning
The part of the presentation seemed to stress that project planning is an organic process. Step 1 is obviously the beginning and step 5 the conclusion; steps 2-4 are in a dynamic relationship with each other. Projects could move between these points for quite some time before reaching their close.
- Initiation/Conceptualization
- What’s the big idea? What’s the problem?
- Give the concept room to grow and change.
- Planning and Design
- This is the heart of the matter.
- What needs to be done?
- What skills do we need to do it?
- Executing/Production/Implementation
- May be natural – may be surprising!
- Be flexible.
- Monitoring/Controlling/Adjusting
- Observe, Discuss, and Adapt!
- Closing/Termination
- What was the goal?
- How did we do?
What is success? This should be one of the first questions – and one that continually refined and asked again. Here are some basic questions: is it on time? is it within budget? does it work? does the community approve? Let it be good enough!
You are not going to fail.
I LEAD I is designed to support risks and big success! “Risk is the difference between the expected and realized value of the result(s) of a future event.” Risk is about uncertainty – not danger. Risk is a difference – not positive or negative. No need to avoid risk – just understand and control the difference between the expected and realized value. Where is the risk in the project – in concepts, technology, communications, and/or delivery? Who owns the risk – the project team, the user, a third party
Review
Overall, I thought this was a good video full of interesting content. It wasn’t exactly exciting or revolutionary – but it did apply terms of a conceptional framework to ideas that I had only loosely grasped. I think having a formal structure and a shared vocabulary – like this presentation provided – will be a helpful part of the I LEAD U experience with many applications to other parts of the library.