Tag: impact of libraries

Performance Measures: Illustrating Value to Your Community

Rebecca Jones, Managing Partner, Dysart and Jones Associates

  • Can we talk? How’s your value measuring up?
  • Measures begin and end with conversations
  • Measure new things in new ways
    • Listen
    • Context
    • Define your success
  • Listen, then learn to convey

Meaningful measures:

  • those that matter to you and to your stakeholders
  • Demonstrate that the library makes a difference
  • Focus attention on what is being donne and what is most important for the organization.
  • Measures are for decision-making
  • Are critical for managing, planning and decision-making
  • Are organization-dependent and must be connected from strategic directives to employees
  • they focus on what you are doing.

From a morning session: if what you’re doing isn’t getting results, why do you continue to do it?

Underlying assumptions

  • Joe Matthews (Measuring for Results book)
  • We don’t have a culture of assessment
    • difficult and complex
    • most measures indicate past performance
    • no cause-and-effect relationship between measures
    • Performance measures quantitative, but library outcomes are largely quantitative
  • Identifying and illustrating depends on conversations (first conversation shouldn’t be when measures are presented) — go when you want something, not bringing them something)

Measures: are, by definition, based on a “beginning” or monitors results against an agreed-to objective or value

Clarity.

The fewer stats you try to convey the better you will be listened to.

What difference did the library make?

Successful organizations:

  • clarity of purpose
  • understand their culture
  • performance measurement
  • system that fits that culture

An effective measurement system:

  • Gauges how well your strategies are progressing
  • Focuses on what matters most to library’s success (Understanding what’s being accomplished rather than on what’s being performed) NOT stats sheet; picture that you tell a story; a paragraph that tells the impact on various segments of comunity.
  • Uses a common language with staff and ecision-makers
  • Specifies owner
  • Is valid

There’s more to value than just the bottom line (marketing from Harrah’s casinos): tangible values; soft tangible values; intangible values.

Informal survey

  • What measures demonstrate the library’s value to its users, students/faculty, university, community or clients?
  • How do you identify the measures?
  • Have you changed them in the past 2-5 years?

Medical Library Association (Federal Libraries Section of the Medical Library Association study coming out).

Studies have replaced statistics in importance.

Stories eat stats for breakfast.

Increasingly, stories have replaced stats:

  • Measures agreed to &/or aligned with decision-maker measures
  • Follow-up debriefs with a few people for impact or “difference made” discussions
  • Time saved + costs avoided: Possibly ideas generated.
  • Internal monitoring vs. decision-maker value
  • Decreasing

Usage stats —

  • looking at them through different binoculars.
  • Who has been using what?
  • Customer satisfaction

Balanced scorecard : connection between strategies and measures (Goals and Measures for each of these)

  • Customer Perspective: how do we look to our clients?
  • Innovation Perspective:  how can we improve and create value?
  • Internal Perspective: how do we look to our funders or stakeholders
  • Financial Perspective: what must we excel at?

Benefits of Scorecard

  • “a very clear understanding of what drives value within your area and what doesn’t”
  • “greater insight into senior management’s (larger organization) strategic plans”
  • “and a better knowledge not only of the strategic role you play within the organization but how you can enhance that role and sit at the decision-making table”

[Missed a good bit of the rest of the session. the stories eat stats comment got me thinking about Kan-ed situation, HB2390 in Kansas, and the Kan-ed impact stories.]

Interpret the data — take it outside the library for others to look at and interpret.

Communicate the results

Focus on the few critical solutions

Measures matter: what we do matters

Studies to link to later:

  • OCLC study
  • ARL study
  • Free Library of Philadelphia CBA