Where most people fall down in project management is the idea that it requires a lot of work. It really doesn’t; what requires work is starting a project over from scratch, or wading into a project halfway through and changing direction.
Project management is about reducing the amount of actual work invested, from all sides. Think of this way: you are simply adjusting the work levels so that a little more happens on the front end, in order to greatly reduce the level of work on the back end.
In archives and records management, this all starts with a solid concept of what you are dealing with. If it is a closed collection, how big is it? If it is an ongoing acquisition (such as records managers deal with in corporations or government offices), how much comes in over a given period of time? This is a very simple thing to find out by way of inventory tracking, and while it may seem like a lot of work to throw at something you don’t know much about yet, it is critical.
Too often I see archives where a collection comes in and people just open the first box and start processing. They process everything in the box, and move on to the next. They may know how many boxes are in the collection, but not particularly was the collection actually consists of (especially in 20th century manuscript collections, which can be absolute monsters of pseudo-organized post-it notes, memoranda, and printed copies of emails). This seems logical: start at the beginning, and work until you get to the end.
If the collection is all of two cartons, that’s not such a bad plan.
If, instead, the collection is 200+ extra-large cartons of files representing a class action law suit (a recent collection that passed through my purview), then that way lies madness.
Here there be monsters, indeed.
What carves that feeling of being overwhelmed down into a manageable process is the first step of simplified project management: figure out what you have, and then you will know what you need to do. If you don’t do this, chances are good that you only think you know what you need to do, and even higher that you will do the wrong thing.
Imagine processing half a collection only to find out that a third of it needs to be shredded or redacted due to privacy issues. The 200+ carton class action lawsuit collection we dealt with was reduced by over a third when, during initial inventory, we realized that a huge number of records were not of evidentiary value. The information was all kept in a much more compact form within the same collection. While we were using MPLP from the start, this revelation reduced processing time by a significant amount of time.
This represents an extreme case, and I will be honest: initial inventory of that collection was a huge devil of a pain in the ass for all of us. It took over two weeks. No one was spared paper cuts from the legal folders packed 200 to a box. There may have been pencil dueling at one point, I can neither confirm or deny…
But in the end, those two weeks saved us upwards a month of unnecessary work. That is what project management is all about.
