These past several weeks have been very busy and exciting. One of our sons got married and the other graduated. Everything went off well and we are extremely proud of our children and their accomplishments.

I am planning to keep the next few posts short 🙂

I was talking to a few of my colleagues about why is it that some of the projects take so long. I care a lot about efficiencies. Unfortunately efficiency works against culture, and it is extremely important to find the right balance between the two. Obviously, finding such a balance is non-trivial and takes a lot of practice and time. However, if we don’t keep reminding ourselves of this, more often than not, we will sacrifice efficiencies for the sake of cultural reasons. Which way to tilt the balance depends entirely on what we are trying to do.

Collaboration & consultation are critical to every single thing we do. Library & Technology projects we are engaged in are for the benefit of our students, faculty, staff and alumnae. We cannot succeed if we do these by ourselves. When we collaborate or consult, setting expectations clearly and up front is the key to success. This is where the distinction of informing vs involving becomes important. In general, we need to keep a larger number of people informed than involved. Projects that go too slow tend to have more involvement from certain people than is necessary for the project’s success.

How does one determine who needs to be informed and who needs to be involved? No secret recipe to this either. There are some techniques that I try to practice. I send an FYI email to those who simply need to be informed. If I am sending the same email to all parties, I tend to Cc those who need to simply know what is going on and all the other key “involved” parties will be in To:.

Not having this distinction means, all those who need to be informed are invited all project meetings and sometimes they are wondering “why am I here?” but are afraid to ask. Sometimes, simply because people are invited, they feel the need to be involved. All of these add unnecessary complexity and introduces inefficiencies that eventually increases the project cost and implementation timeline.

This distinction also requires an understanding that the informed parties should feel empowered to raise any questions they may have or point out any issues that they see. For example, a director may see that her staff member’s time may not have been accounted for properly in the resource allocation.

So, let us try to involve only those who need to be involved, but keep a larger and relevant group informed. Make that distinction and see if it helps everyone (both the informed and involved).