Assign responsibilities for Operational Decisions
The final task for the Strategic Planning Partners is to assign responsibilities for researching and completing the next steps of the project. We call this phase of the project, Operational Planning, and suggest a team structure to research, recommend, or create the policies, guidelines, and processes, and the technical, budgetary, and administrative structures needed to implement the repository and to achieve its strategic goals. We have provided aids to help with this process: a worksheet [PDF] of possible Operational Planning Teams and of questions and tasks the teams should consider.
You may assign some responsibilities to existing groups or departments. For example, you may wish to give the task of hardware planning to an existing technology group. In preparation for issuing and reviewing a Request for Proposals [PDF] (RFP) for their repository’s software provider, the North Carolina Community College System drew upon existing technology teams to develop RFP criteria and to review specific areas of submitted proposals. Each group created evaluation criteria for their RFP section, generating and fine-tuning evaluation questions, attributing appropriate weights to each, and ultimately using the questions and criteria to reviewing their assigned sections of proposal submitted in response to the RFP. This approach ensured each area of a proposal was evaluated by individuals with enough knowledge to make informed judgments. The project group felt it also helped to reduce evaluation bias by distributing the review process over a larger number of people.
North Carolina’s approach may be used in other planning situations as well. As we suggested earlier, when you involve those who have specific knowledge of each repository area at the beginning, you instill a sense of investment that generates interest, and allows buy in to the project and its goals.
Each task in the Operational Planning section of this document requires people with different skills and areas of expertise. Be sure to carefully review this section to ensure that all of the following areas are assigned to appropriate groups or individuals:
- Policies and procedures (including users, content, metadata, quality review, DRM and copyright, and maintenance)
- Technical Infrastructure (including software, hardware, hosting and facilities, and bandwidth)
- Project schedule, budget, and staffing
- Fiscal tasks
- Change management
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