Competencies
Competency 4: Management
Lead flight director Gene Kranz (wearing vest) celebrates with his team as Apollo 13 has a safe, successful splashdown
COMPETENCY STATEMENT
Each graduate of the Master of Library and Information Science program is able to…
…apply the fundamental principles of planning, management, marketing, and advocacy
Page Contents
- Importance of the competency to me
- What work prepared me to understand and perform this competency
- Evidence
- Conclusion
- References
IMPORTANCE OF THE COMPETENCY TO ME
In order to collect, store, and retrieve information, I need to be able to perform the elements of this competency. Knowing which tasks need to be done and figuring out when to do them and who should do them requires good planning. Management skills are critical because even if I am not directly managing employees, all jobs are based on managing relationships with other people. Marketing is important so that clients are aware of information and services available to them. And advocacy, both for the information in my care and the people I work with, means that information is protected and quality of life is raised for the people around me.
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WHAT WORK PREPARED ME TO UNDERSTAND AND PERFORM THIS COMPETENCY?
I have had two work experiences where I was managing more than just my own duties. When I was a senior software tester at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), I managed the process of multiple testers testing the integration of science software with a specialized operating system. The key interface between the two sets of software was the hierarchical data format (HDF) metadata standard, which was unfortunately changed on a near-weekly basis as committees worked to define the needs of the dataset. The science software also had to meet coding standards defined by NASA or else it would not operate properly within the system.
This science software was being created by multiple groups at multiple universities. Our test team was the first place that it was ever run on the custom operating system and integrated with the other science software components. Our job was to check that the coding standards were met and the data conformed to the metadata standards, so I was an expert in all of these standards, wrote the tests, and managed the testers. Some of the testers were scientists who believed they were “above” the tedium of their testing jobs. This was my first taste of the difficulties of software testing; you have to tell people (developers) that they didn’t do something correctly and insist that they fix it, and you have to try to get other people (testers) to do a job that is critical but that seems much easier, and therefore less valuable, than it really is.
At Cytobank, I am in a similar position, except that now I am not just the manager of the test process but also the testers, one of whom is a scientist who only wants to do interesting science testing and not any of the necessary but tedious routine testing, the rest of whom are a team in India on a 12-and-a-half hour time difference. Working with the India team has been challenging because the telecommunications are less than idea. Seconds-long delays in voice communications make understanding difficult; communicating technical details in email can be overwhelming to read; and the Indian contractor culture of deferring to an American supervisor and not speaking up about problems is subtle. I believe I have learned to improve my email communications, I have worked to make meetings briefer to work around telecommunication issues with humor and patience, and I have convinced the Indian lead that there won’t be retribution if he lets me know that something needs to change.
I’m still very new at managing people, but because I come to it so late in my career, I have had plenty of time to observe other managers and take notes on what does and does not work. The mistakes I am making seem to be different mistakes than my previous managers have made–more on the side of a lack of confidence than not caring about or not listening to the people I am managing. I took “Information Organizations and Management” (LIBR204) several years before I became a manager at Cytobank, and the lessons I learned in that class are proving useful in the field.
I have many years experience in planning, from my work as a computer programmer, technical writer/editor, a public relations assistant, a software tester, and now a software quality manager. I have mastered multiple computer planning tools and I am comfortable making schedules and modifying them as issues come up. I do not have much experience with marketing, but I have become aware of the need for it through instruction in the classes “Information and Society” (LIBR200), “Information Organizations and Management” (LIBR204), “Reference and Information Services” (LIBR210), and readings I have done in _Information Today_. Advocacy is something that comes naturally for me; I was passionate in meetings at GSFC, LookSmart, and Cytobank for coding standards and for keeping data safe and preserved, and I am always looking out for ways to support co-workers and, now, employees in their jobs and in their personal lives (if they wish).
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EVIDENCE
“Organizational Change: Upgrading a Wiki Whether We Need to or Not”
For an assignment in “Information Organizations and Management” (LIBR204), I interviewed two people at information organizations about change that had happened or was ongoing in their organizations, analyzed how it had been handled, and came up with a hypothetical way that one of the changes could have been better handled. I drew upon class readings and personal work experience to do the analysis and suggested revamp. In particular, the first change example in the paper was very similar to many events I have seen throughout my career where someone randomly decides something should be changed, people assume it will be simple, and it ends up taking quite a lot of time with no obvious benefit. The suggestions I make for how to better approach that sort of situation do add a little overhead planning time, but they come with the benefit of possibly deciding not to do the change in the first place, keeping customer needs in focus, and reusing the process in future, more critical changes.
In “Seminar in Archives and Records Management: Electronic Records” (LIBR284) I wrote an analysis of a content management system, Alfresco. This is one of the tools that can facilitate in planning and preserving an organization’s history. I recommended it as a document solution to the founder of Cytobank (where I am the Software Quality Manager). Although it was not adopted as a solution, I still think that it would be beneficial. At present, Cytobank uses a myriad of low-cost or open-source applications and information on the company’s history and development is scattered throughout multiple sites. At a start-up, the focus is on fast innovation and market share; while Cytobank definitely strives for preservation of its documents, it might be easier if they were collected in one place, such as Alfresco. Doing the Alfresco analysis gave me a broader insight into how and why an information organization’s documents are important and can be managed, even when that organization’s focus is on customer datasets.
I got the opportunity to create a proposed Gantt chart in “Research Methods in Library and Information Science” (LIBR285) when I made a proposed timetable for a theoretical study. I have also used Gantt charts in my work. While Gantt charts are a reasonable way to get an idea of how much time it may take to finish a project, I find them somewhat clumsy when the inevitable schedule slips happen and the chart has to be updated. My current preference for assigning tasks is the kanban paradigm; I use it for personal tasks through the application Trello, and at Cytobank we use a plug-in for Jira that provides kanban-style card assignments. The kanban method is less date-dependent; however, for overall project management, a planning system such as Gantt charts is useful, and it’s important to know how to use it as a basis for project planning.
Term Paper: “Strategic Plan for the San Mateo County Library System”
I participated in a group project to analyze the San Mateo County Public Library system’s five-year strategic plan and come up with details and suggestions for how it could be implemented. We had weekly Elluminate meetings to discuss our research and our progress, and we split into pairs to create initial drafts of sections of the paper. I created the structure for our suggestions: “group member Jennifer Davis created the specific focuses of the goals and ways in which to evaluate success regarding the goals” (Davis, Esquivel, Leong, Mullesch, Ogden, Shields, 2009, p. 60). This process led to an in-depth understanding of issues facing public libraries and how they might be solved. It was also a good experience in working with a team and finding effective ways to leverage everyone’s individual assets.
Through creating this paper I got a better idea of some of the management challenges that come with working in a large, distributed organization.
The team made a joint presentation to the class; however, I have not received any presentation recordings (requested in June 2014, per instructions, when all Elluminate recordings before 2013 were purged). The slides we used can be found here.
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CONCLUSION
I am still new at managing people, but I have a wealth of experience in managing projects from my career and from my classes, not to mention the process of getting a master’s degree while being disabled and working. Like anything in life, becoming a good manager will be an ongoing learning process. The theoretical analysis of management I received at iSchool will help me as I confront real-life management challenges in my career ahead.
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REFERENCES
Davis, J., Esquivel, J., Leong, M., Mullesch, K., Ogden, N., & Shields, S. (2009, November 30). Strategic plan for the San Mateo County Library System. Unpublished manuscript. iSchool, San Jose State University, San Jose, California.
NASA [Online image]. (1970, April 17). Mission Control celebrates. Retrieved from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mission_Control_Celebrates_-_GPN-2000–001313.jpg
Last updated: Friday, April 17, 2015
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