An experience like Boot Camp takes a while to process. The best kind of workshop is the kind that gives you new ideas and insights and renewed enthusiasm for the profession. I feel like my brain has been filled to capacity, but in a good way. I’ll probably be writing about my experience in dribs and drabs for the next few weeks.

Friday’s wrap-up session, with the theme "Just Do It," required us to apply the concepts that we learned this week to a case study at our favorite fictional library, the Elm Branch of the Tree County Public Library. (TCPL’s tagline: You Got Served!; our logo, to be designed by the PLA Blog’s own Nate Hill–and yes, we hope that t-shirts will eventually be available.) Now that we’ve eliminated handcrafted puppets, bulletin boards, and gratuitous dotting from our branch, we’re ready to monitor progress towards our goals. Our final case study asked us to look at one goal and determine how it could best be monitored.

Monitoring is being aware of progress towards the goals on your strategic plan. If you’re serious about implementing your strategic plan and making your library as customer-friendly as possible, you need to monitor your progress to make sure you’re getting to where you want to be. To be completely and 100% as crystal clear as I can be, monitoring is NOT micromanaging. Monitoring does not require you to watch your staff like a vulture watches an especially tasty carcass. It does, however, require you to solicit appropriate information from them, and to get them into the habit of reporting their progress in a usable way on a regular basis. For some goals, this might be weekly progress; it should be at least monthly. At the Champaign Public Library, we use a wiki for our strategic plan monitoring, but our Assistant Director only prepares a full report on the plan for the board every six months.

What’s changed for me after the discussion of monitoring is how often I will monitor my department’s specific objectives and activities. Though I only have to report progress to my supervisor every six months, if I monitor those pieces that "belong" to my department on a more regular basis (some weekly, some monthly), I’ll have some long-term data that can help me tweak processes in my department. We are always trying to work smarter and more efficiently, and monitoring effectively can help us achieve that goal.

There’s still more to discuss, and I have a couple of posts brewing in my text editor, so this won’t be the last time you hear from me about Boot Camp! I’ll probably have even more to say once I start putting some of my new ideas in motion at work over the next few weeks, so watch this space! I know that the blog administrators really want to see the PLA Blog grow into more of a community (complete with discussions in the comments section), and I’m looking forward to seeing that grow and to doing my part to contribute to the conversation.

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A couple of teeny-tiny statements before I wind this post down:

For the record, I don’t think that Sandra feels that staff happiness is completely unimportant. I think she feels that staff happiness shouldn’t be a driving force behind why and how we get things done in our libraries. I do think that staff united behind common goals and service priorities can be happy once they get past some of the uncomfortable changes that will need to be made to get there. I am personally much happier when I don’t feel boxed in by the status quo, and I know there are many others out there like me who feel the same way.

Also for the record, I agree that we were a fantastic group who worked well together and learned as much from each other as we did from our fabulous leaders, June and Sandra. I thoroughly enjoyed both the formal activities and the casual conversations that I shared with my colleagues at Boot Camp, and I feel like I’ve made some good friends who will go beyond mere "conference acquaintances." Anne, Claire, Nate, and Leslie–you are especially awesome, I’m glad I met you, and I look forward to seeing you at Midwinter and beyond!