People often assume that project management (PM) is all about someone “in charge” telling other people what to do. That is fairly accurate, but gives PM a reputation as being the refuge of the bossy and the incapable. The truth is that PM is all about someone “in charge” making everyone else’s jobs easier.
Project Management is about being able to see the big picture, and break it down into steps/processes in order to facilitate completion.
There are a lot (a lot) of books about PM and almost all of them are geared towards the corporate sector: construction, software development, manufacturing, product design, etc. It is easy to think that there is no place for PM, with all its risk benefit analyses and cost efficiencies, in archives or libraries.
I disagree.
I’m currently working on a paper on how to implement PM strategies in archives. Honestly, it tends to read a lot like common sense, but I think that as professionals we get lulled into habits of doing things a certain way both because it is traditionally effective and because it is familiar. We know from experience many of the metrics (time, resources, personnel, etc.) that we need to know. We do PM informally and it works, if not giving us peak efficiency then at least reliable results.
But with the level of backlog of collections that almost every archives faces today, we need different methods. The “More Product, Less Process” concept for 20th century collections has a place, but it is not the panacea for all backlogs. On the other hand, Project Management concepts are not necessarily helpful for very small collections. There is, in short, no one size fits all solution.
But I believe that PM can help a lot, because when used in appropriate situations, it helps everyone do their jobs better, which means better productivity and faster processing without sacrificing standards.
I’ll be writing more about this, but I wanted to make this introduction to the topic for those curious.
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