A rose is a rose is a rose…

On Tuesday afternoon me and Rochdale Borough Council go our separate ways. Strangely enough, of all the things I should be thinking about the one I keep coming back to is: "How should I describe myself on Linkedin?"

For a while (at least the four weeks I've promised myself) I'm not going to be in a job and have a job title. "Resting," while dead accurate doesn't really cut it, so I'm having a think. Besides which, I've long since been irritated by the way we all define ourselves by our jobs: when we're introduced to each other with the routine: "And what do you do?" We never boast of the many very splendid things we're capable of: we give a job title or rôle. That's a pity. Even in an employment context this tells so very little of us. So I decided to pick up the "And what do you do?" question and find a different answer.

Casting round amongst family and friends wasn't helpful, though I'll admit to being quite taken with "Provender of finely-wrought artisan drivel" and "Keen amateur idle beggar."

Thinking about my own experiences and the rôles I've assumed or had thrust upon me there are a few consistent strands:

• Identifying and documenting operational processes and procedures
• Helping lines of business find new ways of doing things that add value to the operation
• Helping operations and people accept and adapt to change
• Identifying and delivering ways of measuring continuous service improvement

Bearing this in mind I bounced a lot of descriptive phrases round in my head. Many sounded like the worst kinds of Management Speak. Many were either too vague or too narrow. A lot of them felt too much like I was parking my bike on somebody else's lawn. It boiled down to two in the end. And I'm still havering between them: one feels vague and one feels like I'm trespassing. One is the working assumption of many of the people I've said cheerio to over the past month. The other is the rôle I've taken on repeatedly over the past twenty-seven years and the one I've tended to feel has been the most productive and worthwhile.

I've a few more days for havering. Who knows, it might end up being Keen Amateur Idle Beggar after all!

Taskforce workshop: assessments

In Friday's workshop a few of us got talking about the idea of "voluntary assessments" raised in the Ambitions document. These weren't really defined so it was difficult to know quite which was the best approach for this topic.

There was some concern that any assessment would just be another stick to beat libraries with, like issue figures and visitor counts have become. Equally, would they become another set of targets to be gamed? Both are extremely valid concerns.

I think it's essential that public libraries have a solid suite of KPIs — not for comparison with so-called "peers" in a way that takes no heed of communities or contexts but for comparison with past performance and identifying strengths and weaknesses in the operation. But the "voluntary assessments" *shouldn't* be about KPIs: there are a couple of other useful functions they could perform.

One way would be to direct the stick upwards, towards the DCMS. It's vanishingly unlikely to happen but it could be that one of the Department's own performance narratives, published in its annual report, could include an assessment of the health of the national public library service derived from local returns. 

• I don't like expenditure as a measure of performance (any bloody fool can spend money) but given that the audience for such a thing would be a political one that largely measures achievement by expenditure one of the assessment measures could be expenditure per capita population, which could be broken down into: investment in buildings; investment in skilled staff; investment in stock; and investment in community activities. (Did you spot the gear-shift there?) 
• DCMS would — finally! — have to be able to report a definitive number of public libraries in the country, and any changes and trends. 
• It would be interesting to see a national picture of:
• The number of staffed library open hours
• The number of library open hours manned by volunteers
• The number of unsupervised library open hours
• The number of "daytime" (9am — 5pm) hours libraries are closed and left fallow
• And so on. I won't go into more detail because it's so unlikely to happen it's hardly worth the wishing for.

Another, possibly more plausible, function would use the assessment as a feedback mechanism for continuous service improvement (absolutely not a set of targets!). They would be used to evaluate rather than monitor the performance of the service and help direct local decision-making. 

• The assessment criteria could be deliberately aspirational and impossible to achieve: the assessment would evaluate the direction of travel of the service and the impact on resources, staff and the needs of the communities that the service serves. 
• Comparisons would be with past performance rather than against "peers," which would remove any unwelcome competitive friction between organisations that should be working collaboratively, 
• This would also mean that it would be harder to game the figures and it would be harder to coast on past glories as assessments would be reporting the direction of travel towards the impossible goal rather than the successful negotiation of an arbitrary obstacle.
• For example, one of the "impossible goals" could be 100% of the local population's being active members of the library (however that would be defined). Last year Library Service A could have attained 56% active membership and this year 58% while Library Service B managed 69% and 60%. Crude peer-to-peer analysis would suggest that Library Service B is performing better but A is actually making a better fist of continuous service improvement — it's the rate and direction of performance, not the absolute figures, that are the measure of how the service is being managed and resourced; they'll all have different baseline starting points.

There is a problem with this idea: while it works well in many organisations and is pretty standard performance management fare I don't think our political environment is adult enough not to try and turn this into a badly-fitting set of targets and league tables. It would be nice to be shown to be wrong, though.

Having a say

I went to Friday's Library Taskforce workshop in Machester Central Library on Friday.The aim of the workshop was to get feedback on the Ambitions document and suggest practical detail that should go into the action plan for it. I was interested so I signed up and was accepted in my rôle of "interested member of the public." It was an interesting few hours, here's a few thoughts on it.

Something that concerned a few of us was the rôle of the Taskforce itself. You don't have to go very far into discussions about English public libraries before you'll hear somebody say: "The Taskforce should do…" And that's a problem. The Taskforce is no magic wand, it has a finite life and actually it's just that scant handful of people who were going round sticking bits of paper on the wall in the library on Friday. It has the same rôle as a business analyst: it can facilitate and stimulate discussion, it can identify work to be done but it's down to other agencies to get on and get things done.

A recurring theme in the workshop was the need for a skilled workforce to deliver library services. A decade ago this would have been couched in terms of CPD for "professionals," here the conversation concerned all library staff. And not just the "we need people with digital skills" thing: there was a recognition that there's a swathe of skills that need developing and supporting, including having properly-trained library managers who can manage operations, services, programmes and projects. This is a welcome contrast to the ongoing narrative of staff losses, closures and farming out the work to volunteers. It's good that the Taskforce is talking up the need for a skilled staff. Translating that into action will be a stern challenge!

Another recurring theme was the tension between local authority control and opportunities for cost-sharing and delivering services to communities that aren't defined by geopolitical boundaries. Even when we look at delivering "bigger" we still seem to be bound by lines on ancient maps: local metropolitan authorities don't often think of working across the Pennine border.

Evidently there'd already been some feedback about the thinness of the digital strand of the document: there were a few more ideas pinned to the wall for us to respond to than I'd been expecting. This suggests that somebody's listening. Actually, I've been consistently getting the impression that the Taskforce members are listening to people. And they're trying to have conversations with people aside from chiefs and politicians. I think the workshops could have been better publicised away from the usual channels to try and get more library customers into the mix because I think it would have proved very useful.

A few of us thought that "income generation" is a tricky topic. It's important that libraries try to maximise their income (good services don't pay their bills in daydreams) but the phrase "income generation" is unfortunately a bit loaded. It's important that libraries stay that safe, trusted place where nobody's asking you what's in your wallet and that shouldn't be compromised. And whenever libraries are told to be more commercially-minded it's conveniently forgotten that local authorities don't work in a commercial environment. The twelve- month budget lifetime isn't anything any commercial operation would be able to live with: the mad March spend it or lose it would be ludicrous in that context. There was a lot said about that! The other problem, of course is that as soon as you say that you're going to generate some income some clever body will impose an income target. Income targets work this way: you make a business case for spending £100 to set up a business selling apples from a barrow; you're told: great, go ahead and by the way we're going to assume that you're going to make a £50 profit so we'll take that off you now; and you're left with enough money to buy either the barrow or the apples but not both and your business plan fails. There's no real money to be had selling off odd scraps of thing or hiring out rooms or buildings. There is potentially funding out there for programmes, projects and activities that are entirely compatible with the traditional aims and purposes of public libraries and I think this is what is meant by "income generation" in this context. I think it would be more useful for the Taskforce to be talking about "maximising the take-up of funding opportunities" instead.

We've until 3rd June to contribute to the discussion. If you haven't already, please do so.