Workflow Assessment
These are a summary of notes from a guided discussion about workflow and workload assessment from the UNT Library Assessment Committee on March 24, 2025.
What is workflow assessment? It is reviewing processes and processes.
- It is reviewing processes or procedures.
- It is auditing or mapping out your time.
- This can be the number of minutes it takes to do a task or it can be looking at larger blocks of time.
- It focuses on the order of work, its inputs and outputs, and the connections between things.
- It can also be looking at patron services.
- What is the process that a student goes through to request an item through ILL or check something out?
- It can be for big picture things or it can be very specific. It can be library- or university-wide or it can be personal.
Why would you do workflow assessment?
- It helps make sure that things get done on time.
- It can improve the quality, consistency, and efficiency of a task.
- A well-mapped process can help employees better understand a process.
- It can be used to remove stumbling blocks and bottlenecks in a process.
- To see how much it is reasonable to get done with the time you have.
- It can help map out what is part of a work process and what isn’t. Sometimes workflows are very fragmented and are dependent on a variety of people.
- It can help map out what people are part of the work process and inform systems to track progress.
Workflow and Workload Analyses at UNT Libraries
Merging Two Departments
- Sycamore public services and government documents departments were merging, and there was a need to find what overlapped and redistribute work.
- Over the course of a month, each person created an outline of the work that they did.
- The department head then read through and asked questions about workflows that they didn't understand.
- There wasn’t a lot of overlap (only desk coordination, stacks management, and student supervision).
- The department head talked with people and tried to equitably distribute work, focusing on what they felt they were good at and what they liked to do.
- This was a mixture of workflow and workload analysis.
Cataloging and Metadata Services (CMS) did a large workload analysis
- Link to presentation: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2285362/
- Over the course of a month, looked at what people did and categorized these tasks into buckets.
- Purpose was to see who was doing what, what efficiencies could be achieved, and make sure that the work was distributed equitably.
- Found that people were mostly doing cataloging, but there was a lot of time spent on meetings, Teams, and emails. Worked to cut down on how many meetings, emails, etc. were needed.
McNaughton Lease Program
- CMS has a workflow documentation for specific processes and resources. Simply reviewing them can add efficiencies and fill in what we are doing but not writing down.
- The McNaughton popular book lease program is an example of a complicated process with a lot of people involved and has a lot of moving parts that needed to be streamlined.
- Again, it is important to know what you do and what others do and how those things interact.
- These processes need to be reviewed periodically to see what has changed and what can be improved upon.
Digital Libraries Book Digitization
- Federal guidelines around copyright of digitized books changed, so Digital Libraries needed to review their existing workflow and its existing documentation and alter it to comply with the new federal guidelines.
Administration Student Work
- Student workers do a lot of unseen work that helps the department function smoothly.
- The student supervisor used workload analysis to determine how many student workers that they needed and justify the extra hours over break periods.
Email or Meeting?
Who should be involved in a workflow assessment?
- The people who actually do the work
- Those who the work affects and are involved in the process
- It can be good to have the analysis done by an outsider. They have a different perspective and can see other connections. This could be as simple as another department head reviewing your work or can be an outside consultant.
What makes a workflow assessment successful?
- Communicate the results of the study, particularly the benefits.
- If you make big changes, have a celebration for completing the project.
- Ask questions about things you are not sure of.
- Let people know that the changes are not set in stone, and if they do not work, we can try again.
- Set a time after the project to check in and see how people were impacted by the changes.
- Have a process that is improved in some way – it takes less time, less effort, increase how comfortable people are with the work, improve quality and consistency.
- Get feedback on how the assessment process itself went.
What challenges have you faced?
- It is really important to reassure people that this isn't about getting them in trouble and that we are not trying to eliminate their job.