Reaction to the North Carolina ECHO Project Management Guidelines

I just finished going over the North Carolina ECHO Project Management Guidelines, which include a good, brief overview of the steps needed to manage any small or large, institutional digitization project.

One of the main points brought up is that ‘change’ is a necessary and inherent part of any of these projects, and building in the ability to not only deal with change, but to possibly use it as a tool or an asset, is an important part of succeeding at achieving your project goals. To that end, they talk about staffing your project, and the fact that while the skill sets of employees are important, a certain amount of learning and training has to happen with every position, not only once, but continually, so it is important that employees are flexible and can take direction and/or learn well. I think that this has a lot to do with the ability of everyone working on the digitization project to be able to work well with others and communicate well.

The project guidelines state that the creation of a training manual can be helpful as well, and I’ve found this to be really true. Any job that I’ve worked with that has given me a training manual (not one that is overly complicated, out-dated, or too hard to get through) has helped me to get my job done more efficiently and accurately, without having to take another person's time to answer simple questions. Of course, it is important to have people talking to people directly, to be able to answer more complex questions or take staff members through the steps initially, but too often, without a manual, employees find themselves thrown into unanticipated situations, not sure what the protocol is, and possibly doing the wrong thing until they are able to realize it through their own experience and mistakes. While learning though mistakes and experience is important, it can also sometimes be avoided with just a little bit more information at someone's fingertips. Starting new jobs can be overwhelming, and it helps to have a document that staff can refer to when they are working on their own.

I also found the break down of about how much time each part of the process should take, interesting. The actual image capture aspect was about only 15% of the process, while the rest of the tasks, like selection, preparation, creating the metadata and the Web site, and even outsourcing, took just as much time as this or more, each, (of course this is all going to depend on the project.) I think that once you have the system set up and you are digitizing massive amounts of pages or objects, more and more of the time would be spent with the actual image capture and editing, but I'm not sure, as this isn't my area of expertise.