Purpose:
Following a transition in leadership in 2016, the Ohio State University Libraries embarked on an ambitious project to re-envision and renew its strategic intent. Prior to designing a planning process, library leaders reflected on past experiences with strategic planning, focusing on what worked well and what did not. This reflection on past planning efforts exposed a common experience of the conflation of the strategic with the operational. The plans resulting from past efforts often confused statements about strategic intent (what an organization aspires to be) with implementation plans (how that organization will get there), which usually led to somewhat unfocused, overstuffed inventories of all the good things a research library should do and muddied attempts to provide clear articulations of where it would actually place its strategic effort, supported by real financial and human resources. Leadership also reflected on how traditional strategic planning processes can often consume libraries in extended, burdensome planning activities, which often result in static 3 to 5-year plans that can bring on the unfortunate side effect of pushing organizations into collective psychologies of task list completion.
Instead of traveling this well-worn path, the Libraries chose to design and implement an agile planning framework, designed to facilitate an ongoing organizational conversation about its strategic intent and how it plans to move from intention to reality. Such a framework would necessitate a lighter-weight, open-ended process, allowing for increased flexibility and openness to unforeseen opportunities in its implementation. If implemented successfully, such an approach would ensure the continuing integration of library faculty, staff, and external stakeholder voices into planning, management, and assessment discussions because the framework itself is conceived as an ongoing, integrated discussion with and between these groups. DeEtta Jones and Associates, a consulting firm with deep experience in organizational transformation, was contracted to help facilitate the overall design process and initial stakeholder engagement activities. The authors will describe the design and implementation processes through the lenses of both a library administrator and a process consultant, sharing the methods utilized, results, as well as practical considerations.
Design, methodology or approach:
The basis of the agile planning framework is a concise statement of the Libraries’ strategic intent: articulations of who we are, what we value, and our view of the future, along with focused direction statements flowing from this context. The framework will be operationalized through more detailed action plans at the divisional and unit levels, clearly mapped to these high-level strategic directions.
The framework seeks to harmonize planning, management, and assessment processes over 18-24 month rolling time horizons, during which organizational efforts and investments would be reviewed and revised in an iterative fashion, on a quarterly or semi-annual basis. This review structure is conceived as a relatively light-weight, ongoing organizational conversation, facilitated within Management Committee, a group comprised of the Libraries’ executive team and middle managers. This structure provides a platform for broad discussion about changing user needs, emerging opportunities, and other evolving environmental factors through a series of structured processes for evaluating current activities, emerging opportunities, proposed initiatives and investments, and regular environmental scanning and stakeholder input at both the strategic and operational levels.
Findings:
The implementation of the agile planning framework is ongoing. The authors will share findings of the parts of the process that will have been completed, which will include: (1) results and analyses from stakeholder assessments (focus groups and surveys) used to develop foundational mission, vision, values, and strategic directions documentation; (2) a visual representation of the agile planning framework and its supporting processes and time horizon model; (3) rubrics designed to provide periodic, lightweight environmental scanning and assess the alignment of current and proposed activities and investments with strategic intent; and (4) a discussion of the structural, cultural, and organizational development challenges confronted and gains experienced, while implementing the framework.
Conclusions:
The motivating idea of the agile planning framework, following from the philosophy under pending agile software development, is to construct an architecture for strategic thinking and action that would obviate the need for the Libraries to drop everything every five years or so and consume itself for an extended period to build out a new, static strategic plan. If successful in creating an effective agile planning framework, the Libraries’ strategic intent and the operational work done to support it should evolve in a more organic fashion through meaningful, ongoing dialog about organizational priorities, informed by engaged interaction with users, key external stakeholders, and university-level planning efforts. If successful, the Libraries would be more adept in responding to emerging opportunities and recognizing when to move on from others because the mechanisms for detection and analysis are built into the framework and instantiated in organizational structures and processes.
Originality and value:
Many academic libraries are exploring new approaches to strategic planning, ways to enhance organizational health, and manage change. The authors are unaware of an academic or research library that has attempted to design and implement a similar approach to strategic planning and its assessment. The agile planning framework provides an alternative to traditional “waterfall” approaches to strategic planning for libraries.
Organisational issues , Culture , Impact , Value , Innovative Methods , Methods , Frameworks
An_Agile_Planning_and_Operations_Framework.pdf 