Image courtesy of the Bancroft Library

By early spring, I had a manual process in place, and in July, we went live with the automated charting, showing the trends on 11 measures from our 5 programs. The measures fall into two categories: numbers of objects and usage volume. We can add new measures easily, although we are careful about adding too many. After all, a dashboard can only get so large before the driver is too distracted to see the road ahead.

I mentioned in a July post that the tool we use is AmCharts, a tool that can extract data from .csv or .xml files and then display the data in configurable Flash charts, graphs and tables. My partner in this implementation has been Seán O’Hara of CDL’s Infrastructure and Applications Support Group. In addition to developing the dashboard reports, Seán also created an interface for the data suppliers to use to upload their monthly statistics.  He’s done great work,and I’m so grateful for his help!

I also want to thank the data suppliers, who month after month, provide the data to create the reports. This is a sizable group: Stephen Abrams, Sherri Berger, Jason Colman, Bobbi Perkins-Hill, Lisa Schiff, and Leslie Wolf. Most, if not all, of these folks have developed metrics and even dashboards at the program level. We are all learning from each others’ experiments and experiences with performance measures.

Have you tried any experiments along these lines?

We’d like to share one easy tool for team participation and engagement. Whether you’re in a business, academic, or non-profit environment, you are facing a competitive environment where money and resources are scarce. This analysis tool can help you focus your attention on the specific success factors that are right for your team.

The tool is called a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for Strengths and Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Here’s what it means:

• Strengths are those positive internal attributes that strengthen your business or team. You can develop plans to capitalize on those strengths.
• Weaknesses are those negative internal attributes that are working against your success. You can shore up those weaknesses so they don’t stop your success.
• Opportunities are those external conditions that can have a positive effect on your goals. These opportunities can point you in the right direction.
• Threats are those external conditions that can have a negative effect on your goals. These threats will affect you less if you can identify and minimize them.

How long will it take? You can do a simple SWOT analysis easily in sixty minutes.

There are many different ways to conduct a SWOT analysis; a large corporation will do this very differently than a small non-profit. We’ve given you some valuable how-to information below in the Now It’s Your Turn section so you can choose your method.

A rigid technique is less important than a well-imagined result. The important outcome of a SWOT is your understanding of the particular strengths you can count on, the pitfalls you might be facing, and the outside forces that might seriously change the landscape going forward.

What Does a SWOT Analysis Look Like?

We thought it would be helpful to show you a sample SWOT analysis for a business you can easily visualize: a small independent bookstore in a university town. The store owner brought the team together to think about how the bookstore could survive during the continuing financial downturn. After an hour of brainstorming, this is the SWOT analysis they developed.

Who Benefits from a SWOT Analysis?

Everyone who participated got something valuable from the exercise. The owner got enough actionable information to guide his planning efforts over the next 2 years. Once he developed the strategic plan, he posted it on the back office wall so that everyone could see it. The team members understood for the first time the challenges the bookstore owner was facing. They felt more engaged in the store’s success, and started suggesting additional opportunities the owner might try to build his business.

“Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.” — Alan Lakein

Now It’s Your Turn

1. Take a look at these websites to learn about SWOT analysis. We’ve provided general information as well as some examples of how it’s used in academia.

• How To Do a SWOT Analysis

• SWOT Analysis Resource Page from Idaho State University

• Strategic Planning Example from SUNY Plattsburgh

2. Try conducting a SWOT analysis. Don’t limit it to the workplace; you can just as easily provide valuable planning support to the board of your non-profit or to your child’s school. In fact, you can use it to plan your own career development!

Read more posts from Your Life@Work.

Last week, the British Library published an articulate and impressive 10-year strategy, their 2020 Vision. They tie the ideas to their organizational mission and vision, and they make 6 forecasts. I’m quoting from the document:

• The consumption of media by young people will continue to increase across the full range of media channels, day and night, seven days a week.
• Free, ‘open access’ scholarly works will enable improved access and will drive research increasingly towards open access models.
• Mobile devices will soon overtake personal computers as the most common web access tools worldwide.
• Users will increasingly demand searches that identify sources of quality information and expect prompts for new information based on previous patterns of activity–giving new context to content.
• Technology will encourage and enable discourse in a more diverse, open and participative way.

Are these outrageous claims? I don’t think so. And I assume that they are based on the consultative interviews and research described by Dame Lynne Brindley in her Foreword to the document. Interviews and research are a good way to determine the lay of the land, and even to look ahead a little bit.

Recently, CDL released the findings from a summer-long look into “All Things Mobile.” Here are just a few of the things that we found out:

• Slightly more academic survey respondents own mobile phones without internet (61%) than mobile devices that with internet (53%). Faculty were the most likely respondents (63%) to own a mobile device with internet, followed by graduate students (53%) and then undergraduates (41%).

• Most told us that they prefer to use internet from their laptops rather than their mobile devices, yet many don’t carry laptops to campus or have internet access at home.

• Most noted that they did not want to do actual academic research on mobile devices. Many see research as a difficult activity that would only be more difficult on a mobile device.

• Most of our participants prefer notifications by email instead of text message.

One of the recommendations from the study was to keep on top of this topic by revisiting it every six to twelve months, because it is subject to so much change. Interviews and research have to be done over and over, in other words, and some of it has to be done locally.  Some of these trends are simply not universal.

Here, I think of Char Booth‘s call for local studies: “understanding local patron culture is essential to creating used and useful (technology) services. Environmental scanning is a scalable means of using data to test your notions of true/false.” Sometimes, we can apply the comparable studies others have done, and sometimes we need to do our own. In the case of mobile, it looks like we need to do our own.

I have one too; it’s my “Master Task List” pinned to the wall. I do pretty well getting my work done, but at the end of a busy week I sometimes realize I haven’t done the work I told myself was important – whether it’s about my professional development, my personal development, or my team’s development. It’s so tempting to check off a bunch of things on my checklist, and too easy to think that it’s progress when it’s really not.

You can boil it down to the difference between what’s urgent and what’s important, and often they are not the same. It’s a concept often discussed in time management; you can find lots of time management books, magazines, blogs, and workshop sessions devoted to the topic. I’ll leave it to you to read a few and pick the time management system that works for you. Instead, I’ll share two pieces of advice I’ve learned: one is aimed at helping individuals and another provides a new way for a whole team to create a shared understanding of what’s really important.

5 Ways You Can Stay Focused on What’s Important

Blogger Jonathan Mead, in his wonderfully titled Pick the Brain blog, gives us five ways to focus on what really matters. I see my strengths and weaknesses in each one of these areas, and I think you will too:

1. Set Three “Most Important Tasks” (MITs) for the day. Ask yourself, “If I could only do three things today, what would I feel the most fulfilled in doing?”

2. Focus on providing value. Ask yourself, “How much value will this provide me, or someone else?”

3. Think long-term. Ask yourself, “Will this make a difference in a week, a month or a year from now? Five years?”

4. Tackle first things first. Finishing the most important tasks in the beginning of the day ensures that you can get to other work and still feel you have accomplished something strategic.

5. Have a clear vision. If you can’t envision it, then you can’t measure it; if you can’t measure it, then you can’t manage it. Think about whether or not the work you’re doing is moving you closer to your vision, or if it won’t make much of a difference tomorrow or next week.

A New Way for Your Team to Stay Focused on What’s Important

Lena and I keep coming back to an intriguing idea that was developed in Silicon Valley. In a New York Times  interview, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus talked (among other things) about his success in using a simple system called OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). It was developed at Intel and used at Google.

Pincus echoes Jonathan Mead’s idea of the three most important tasks, but he takes it to the next level. The whole company and every single individual has one objective and three measurable key results. It keeps everyone focused on the same understanding of what really matters.

• The process starts with a pared-down “road map” or plan. Pincus says that if your road map has ten priorities for you and your team, you probably don’t know which of the three matter, and probably none of the ten are right.

• At the start of the week, you write down your three priorities for the week, and on Friday you track how you did. Your list shows each item you were going to do, with both their predicted results and actual results. The results are displayed in red if you missed them, yellow if they’re close and green if you met them.

• If you miss your results consistently, you can see that there’s a problem, dig deeper to find it, and course-correct. It’s much better to do that sooner than later. You don’t want to reach the end of the year with a sinking feeling that your team didn’t accomplish what it set out to do.

This method gives you an objective yardstick. You then can ask for help, renegotiate with your manager, or work with the team to make the objectives more closely tied to reality.

How Do You Put OKRs into Action?

Lena and I are planning ways to put OKRs into action. Our team did several wonderful, thoughtful brainstorming sessions and developed a very ambitious two-year plan. It’s on our shared team wiki, and every month we update our progress. We all struggle to fulfill our daily obligations along with the strategic ones, and we never get as far as we wish.

Perhaps the reason is that we have too many objectives, and we move quickly from one to the other trying to move the ball forward each month. It’s time to make some changes in our process. We’re going to share this OKR technique with our team and see if we can get some traction. If it works, and even if it doesn’t, we’ll be sure to share it with you.

“Time is a fixed income and, as with any income, the real problem facing most of us is how to live successfully within our daily allotment.”  — Margaret B. Johnstone

Now It’s Your Turn

For Yourself

• Read Jonathan Mead’s post on five ways to focus on what really matters (linked above).
• Find a time management system that fits your needs.
• Commit to one change and reward yourself when you meet it. (If you try to change your whole life at once, you will get too discouraged.)

For Your Team or Organization

• Read the interview with Mark Pincus on OKRs (linked above).
• Bring the idea to your team and ask if they are willing to try it out. Be sure to explain the benefit to them — always remember that people will be more motivated if they understand the WIIFM (“What’s in it for me?”).

We Want to Hear From You

Please share your ideas! How do you get things done that really matter as an individual, and what works for your organization?

Read more posts from Your Life@Work.