Okay, let's get started. I'm allowed to start now. It's after our initial wrong start, but that's okay. So my name is Scott Ambler. I'm here to work through how teams, how you as Agilis can choose your wow. How do you choose your way of working and do so in an effective manner? So I've been, one of the things I get to do, I get to go to organizations around the world help them understand this Agil and Lean stuff and improve the way that they work and improve their organization and improve their working environments. And I luckily got involved with Agil right from the very beginning. And I was the thought leader of the person who led the development of the Agil modeling method which at the time was answering some very serious questions. How do we go about modeling and documentation in an Agil manner? And many of these concepts have been adopted and reinvented in some cases over the years now as well as the Agil data method which is finally taking off. I'm seeing more and more Agil data warehousing teams and the data management folks are finally sort of getting into this stuff. And probably more pertinent is, along with Mark Lyons is in the back there, the co-creator of the Disponential Toolkit and which is what we're gonna be talking about the application of today. So what I wanna talk about, I wanna talk about three steps or three steps to choosing your way of working. First, to understand the situation that you're in and accept that. This is a major step in many cases. There's a lot of people in denial about the actual complexity of the situation that they face. The next step is how do we adopt what we call a guided continuous improvement strategy or a guided kaizen loop depending on the way you like to call that. And then finally, how do we go about choosing and evolving our wow. So let's get into it. So how do we remove our heads from the sand? How do we actually accept our situation? So one of the things we've noticed which I think is pretty harmful is many organizations will call themselves I'm a scrum shop, I'm a safe shop, we're a safe shop, we're a can band shop, we're a less shop or whatever. I hope that nobody, and unfortunately people do, but we really hope that nobody's calling themselves a dispensable shop because it's really, it limits you. When you call yourself an XYZ shop, whatever it happens to be, it limits you to that sort of environment and you really want to pick and choose the strategies that make sense for you. So although if you had to call yourself one type of shop, I guess, dispensable shop is your best bet. Anyways, one of the principles in Dispens Agile is that context counts. And this is one of my favorite diagrams to show to executives in organizations because what happens is when I walk into this diagram and the basic message is that you face multiple, when you talk about scaling Agile and scaling your approach or scaling your way of working, there's multiple factors, there's multiple issues that you're probably dealing with. Because when people think about scaling, they often think about how do we do this on large teams and certainly some of the scaling frameworks like less and safe and arguably Nexus deal with the large team situation and that's important, but there's more to scaling than that. How do you address regulatory situations? How do you address geographic distributed teams? What do you do when you've got a very complex situation? What do you do when you have great technical complexity? And so when I walk people through this slide and particularly executives, the only response I've ever gotten from this slide, from executives and organizations is oh my Lord, we've got all of these problems. We're all over the board and in workshops I'll often ask teams to rate yourself. Where is your team right now and all these scaling factors? And I've done workshops where I've given out this on a piece of paper and asked people to draw the radar chart and then we put them on the wall and it's amazing. Even in people in the same organization and the teams will be all over the board. There'll be some where the situation is very simple. There'll be some where they're all over the place. And we have to come to the conclusion that yes, the occasional team is in these very straightforward situations where we're a small reasonably co-located team taking on a reasonably straightforward problem and some of the simpler methods are geared for those situations but we also have to accept the fact and observe that we have teams that aren't. We have teams that are globally distributed and teams that are large and teams that are medium sized and so on.  A team in a regulatory environment work differently than a team in a non-regulatory environment. A team taking on a hard problem will work in a different way than a team taking on a simple problem. This is basic fundamental concepts. So one process size does not fit all. One way of working will not work for you. Unless all your teams are the same types of people in the same situation taking in the same sorts of problems, one process, one method, one framework will not work for you. So we need to understand that context counts. So there's no easy button. If you're from North America, you probably recognize this ad, one of the, I think it's Staples or Business Depot. You've got a hard problem. You hit the easy button and they can solve it as their message and there is no easy button for this agile stuff. There is no easy button for this organization structure stuff, which is why we get paid what we get paid. It was an easy problem. They'd be hiring people with no skills to do this job. Another thing that I ask people to observe is your organization, and this came out in the keynote today, it sort of came out in the keynote today, is your organization is what's called a complex adaptive system. And we like to look at organizations as teams that are working on this was very clearly coming out in holocracy where we have these teams and every team should be allowed to and should be enabled to figure out their own way of working, to figure out here's what we do. And so when you look at these team bubbles, that's the inner bubble, our internal way of working. But there's also a boundary. There's also this interface to the team, the external way of working. How do I interact with this other team? And I will work with your team in a different manner than your team because you're different people in different teams and you've got different ways of working. And when my team collaborates with your team, we will probably learn something from you. You will probably learn something from us. We will, I hope, internalize that and change the way that we work as we picked up some tips and techniques from you and vice versa. So not only do we have these collections of teams interacting with each other, but all the teams are constantly evolving and constantly changing their way of working. And this is exactly what we're hearing about this morning in the keynote. So we need to embrace this concept as well. And this is a very interesting thing in a lot of organizations because management will often cringe at this concept of, well, what do you mean that all these teams will work in different ways? And I would invite you to actually observe what really happens. Even in organizations where you have a repeatable process and CMMI and whatever it is that you're doing, the teams are still working in completely different ways. And they might be faking the process, they'll be faking the process in similar ways and making it look as if they're working in the same way, but they're really working in their own ways because they're unique people taking on a unique problem. So let's embrace this and let's enable this. Let's help teams be the best they can in the situation they face. Let's help them improve and get better and let's make this easy and make this desirable to do. Why wouldn't we want people to learn and improve and get better and become more effective at whatever it is that they're trying to do? So in the toolkit, we look at the overall picture. So one of the things we see in many agile transformations and Mark and I are gonna talk about this tomorrow in another talk is that a common mistake that organizations make is that the only focus on software development, they'll only focus on adopting Scrum or adopting Combon and then applying it in their software development teams, which is great. But we need to observe the fact that there's other parts of the organization and that these other parts of the organization are working in very different ways. So if my team is trying to be agile, but their procurement folks are very non-agile or the finance folks are very non-agile, it pretty much shoots us in the foot, right? So we all need to be working and learning and getting better and working in this flexible learning approach. So the overall, so today, my focus is on the bottom layer of dismantling agile delivery, but the principles and the strategies all apply at these other organizational layers or organizational process areas, call them whatever you want. So one of the things we like to, one of the ideas that we like to promote is this concept called guided continuous improvement. So how can we up our game? How can we help teams learn and improve and get better? So a lot of things that we hear about a lot, like teams should own their own process. Well, how do we enable a team to own its own process? I think is a very, other than just saying, you're empowered, Phil was talking, but this earlier, you walk in, you talk, tell a team, congratulations, you're empowered. Well, that's meaningless, right? You've got to help them become empowered, give them the tools to help them do that. So I'm Ivar Jacobson, and many of you might know him, he's one of the three amigos that gave us the UML and he promoted use cases and unified process and many, many good things and sometimes not so some good things, but he's recently been writing about this concept called method prison. And what he's observing, and what's certainly what we've been observing and it's wonderful that he's given a term to it is that teams and organizations are finding themselves in framework, this framework or method prison where they're constrained by the methodology, by the mindset that they've adopted from whoever it is that's promoting that framework or that method. So maybe it's time to break out. So, although having said that, to be fair, adopting a prescriptive method makes sense. I'm sure many of you have seen this curve where what happens is when you adopt this new idea, you take a productivity hit at the very beginning. So you'll adopt scrum, you'll adopt safe, adopt combine, you'll adopt whatever and there's a little bit of learning curve and you're not quite as effective at the very beginning so you take, there's a dip in productivity and if things work out well, then everything gets better and you improve but then you hit the limit. So scrum takes, tells you about whatever it tells you about it's saying and combine, it's got it's advice. So it solves the problem that it solves and then you sort of peek out. And this is a very common pattern. But to be fair, things have gotten better. So this is probably good. So one of the things we've noticed is that there's a lot of interesting promises. Now this is a great book. I don't know if this is Jeff Southerland's latest book and I don't know if you haven't read it, you should, you might want to take a look at it. It's pretty good. But look at the cover. He's promising, he's effectively promising four times productivity. Do twice the amount of work and half the time. Two divided by one half, it's four. Four times productivity. That's a wonderful promise and a lot of people buy into it and that's great. And I've certainly seen improvements like that. If there's a phenomenally dysfunctional team, then yes, almost any type of change will help them improve. I've literally, a couple of years ago, I worked with a team. We improved, we changed the coffee that they had and I would swear there was like almost a 20% productivity increase almost instantly by getting rid of the crappy coffee and producing and replacing with something drinkable. So certainly, if you've got a phenomenally dysfunctional team, you can get pretty good productivity improvements. But I'm also a firm believer in numbers and there's a fellow by the name of Don Reifer. I don't know if you know him or not. If you don't, you should get familiar with some of his work. He did his PhD in Agile Transformations and he basically asked the question, how effective is this Agile stuff? What types of productivity improvements are we actually getting? And what I find interesting about Don is that once he finished his PhD, he turned it into a business and he now, he coaches and he works with organizations around the world and he's also continuing his studies. So he's got data from, what is it, 3,500 teams? I think it's 3,500 now, this data's a little bit old, but certainly over 3,000 teams. So this is statistically significant and what he's seeing is that he's seeing a 7% to 12% productivity increase. So he's seeing a line that looks like this, the type of line that we've been talking about for years and he's actually got data. Now, 7% to 12% improvement, that's good. That's a good thing. I'm not gonna, you can't sneeze at that, but it's not the 300% productivity improvement that we've heard about, right? So, and at scale, his numbers are showing three to 5% improvement, still okay, but certainly maybe not quite as good as we would hope. So I think there's some, a little bit of room for improvement here on the improvement side is good. And what's also interesting is that when you read some of the DevOps case studies, you read about Amazon and eBay and Google and all these companies, they're seeing significant productivity increases and you read some of these DevOps case studies and it's like rocket science, like it's unbelievable. Some of the thing, you talk about releasing into production many, many times an hour and or the Amazon releases into production every few seconds now. And you talk about these sorts of ideas to banks and insurance companies and they can't even conceive it. They can't even conceive that and yet it's nothing for the Amazons of the world. So the, how do they do that? And the DevOps case studies are all the same. They're all, at some point in the distant past, we realized that we were gonna get wiped out if by another competitor, if we didn't get our act together. So they decided to improve and they, sometimes the study, the case study is all about, they thought it was a transformation project. Sometimes they were a little more advanced than that but they very quickly realized that it's a transformation journey and that they, the way that you improve is you make small improvements over time. Exactly what the lean folks have been talking about for decades, you do this kaizen type, small improvements over time add up. So they talk about constantly improving and exactly what Richard was talking about this morning where you feel the tensions, you come up with an idea and you try it out and you experiment and you see if it works. So this, and there's different, there's OODA loops and PDSA, PDCA and all good sort of stuff but there's different, they all boil down in the same sort of thing.  So just because something worked for some, TDD works for somebody else doesn't mean it's gonna work for you. You don't know, you gotta try it out because there's no such thing as the best practice. All practices are contextual in nature. So just because something works well for this team down the hall doesn't mean it's gonna work for you at all. You gotta give it a try, see what happens. So you give it a try, you gotta give it any long enough to actually assess fairly. So then you make an assessment, how well did this work for us? Did TDD work or what aspects of TDD works for us, what aspects don't? And if you're smart, you adopt the stuff that works well and you avoid the stuff that doesn't work so well. And if you're really smart, you're like, hey, we got another tension, so let's figure out what new problem we need to solve. And if you're nice, you share your learnings with others. You say, hey, TDD worked for us and this is really cool when you offer to coach or help other teams learn this thing that you just did. So this is all wonderful, this is lean one-on-one type stuff, improvement one-on-one type stuff. Now, the issue though is the very first step. And Rich was talking about this morning.  Well, how do you know what to try? Because there's hundreds if not thousands of practices out there. So this is where the toolkit comes into play. So the issue is we're not process experts. The very few of us are process experts. So how do you own your own process when you don't even know what's for sale? Like if you don't know, if you're in method prison and you've only been told about the 12 practices of this method or the 15 practices of this framework and you're now a certified master in it, how do you learn about these other potential techniques that might work better for you? So this is what we talked about in the toolkit. So where we see improvement, where we see continuous improvement, like the DevOps case studies and good stuff like that, where we see these improvement lines, the dashed one, and it's not never this smooth, right? It's up and down, it's sort of this bouncy thing, but it trends over time, it turns upwards. You can improve this through making better decisions to begin with. So instead of just coming up, hey, why don't we try this technique and see what happens? Well, wait a minute, we've got this problem, we detect this tension. Here's five or six good strategies that might work for us. Here's the trade-offs involved with them. So let's talk about, hey, we've got five different options. This option sounds like it's more likely gonna work for us. So let's try it. So we can have fewer failures, because we're always talking about failing fast in Agile, which is a good thing. I would rather succeed early. I would rather succeed faster. So if I can have fewer failed experiments, fewer learning, we always spin out it's a learning opportunity if the experiment failed. Well, you know what? I would rather have had the experiment succeed to begin with, and so we can improve the angle of our improvement by making better decisions to begin with. So that's basically what we're talking about with the toolkit. And you can get your way out of method prison by doing this. So if you've adopted Scrum, you've adopted Save for Laster, whatever it is that you've adopted is great. You've achieved some benefit, whatever that level of benefit is. But if you've hit the barriers, if you're sort of struggling to how do we get better now? Well, let's get on this curve. Let's start doing this more of this guided continuous improvement thing.  So we can get out of jail with just a little bit of guidance. So how do we keep this lightweight? How do we make this simple and easy for you? So how do we choose our way of working is I think the fundamental question here. Another way to look at it is how do we be a better agile chef? So when, from an agile point of view, we have all these ingredients. Maybe a tester of development and planning poker and user stories and mob programming and pair programming and continuous integration. There's hundreds, maybe thousands of practice. At this conference this week, there will be hundreds of good ideas presented by the various speakers. I guarantee that. I guarantee that. And they'll contradict each other, of course, but it's all good stuff. But how the heck do you choose between all those things? How do you even know about them? Because you can't possibly sit in it, even though we're at this conference, there's four or five other talks going on right now. So you can't hear everything, you can't hear all this good advice from everybody. So we've got to, luckily they're being filmed, so you can look at them later, I guess. But still, we've got an issue. So how do we detect? So the point is there's lots of great practices and ideas out there. And of course we've got recipes. So just going to the market and buying a bunch of ingredients doesn't make dinner. We have to, either you've got to be a chef, you've got to be a cook, you've got to know how to put these ingredients together to make a great meal, or you've got to have a recipe book to follow, which is what these methods and frameworks are all about.  So for example, my daughter, I've got an eight-year-old daughter, she could live on mac and cheese. This would be an ideal environment if we were willing to feed her mac and cheese for every single meal, she'd be a happy kid, probably at least for a few weeks until she got sick of it. But anyways, you're not always in a mac and cheese situation. Sometimes you want to have different meals, I'm sure. Does anybody have the same dinner every single night? No, of course, every so often there's some weird person that does that.  Variety is the spice of life. So the challenge with these recipes, with these methods, with these frameworks, they're great, but they give you one answer.  So for example, this is the scrumbock. I don't know if you're familiar with the scrumb guide. I don't know if you're familiar with this. And this is great. This is like eight, 16, or 18 pages, depending on how you count, of awesomeness. There's some great ideas here, but it's a little bit thin, right?  It gives you the scrum recipe. And they wave their hands.  So here in this mac and cheese, there's some spice on there. Ooh, you know, big, huge improvement. And yeah, so you can have spicy mac and cheese or change up the cheese. Well, you can tailor the recipe a bit, but for the most part, you end up with mac and cheese. So how do you expand your horizons? Say we're not university students anymore and we're not living on mac and cheese. So how do we do that? So Disponagill is based on seven principles. And they're all, I hope they're fairly common. One of them is the lean concept. We want to delight our customers, not just satisfy, we want to delight them. We want to make them happy. Because if we don't delight our customers, somebody else will, and we'll steal that customer away from us. We want to have awesome teams. We want to have awesome people working on awesome teams doing awesome things. This is straight out of modern, the modern agile stuff. We want to be pragmatic. We need to get away from the purism. It's not about being agile, it's about being better. It's about delighting our customers and being awesome and good stuff like that. So let's do the best we can in the situation that we face. And sometimes that means we work in a traditional manner and that's okay. Context counts, different teams and different situations will work in different ways. And choice is good. So I can't make different types of things for dinner for my daughter if I don't have access to a market. If my market only sells macaroni and only sells cheese and only sells that spice that was on top of the mac and cheese, then I'm still only gonna be able to make mac and cheese. I need to have a range of ingredients that I can then combine in an intelligent manner into something that's editable. We want to optimize our flow. We want to make sure it all works together. Like I was saying earlier, it's no good if we have an agile software development team, but our finance team is still forcing us to do big estimates up front. Or the procurement team takes six months to order a chair for us, for our team room, that type of stuff, let alone other nastiness. And we want to be enterprise aware. We want to do what's right for the company, not just what's convenient for us. We want to look at the bigger picture. So how does this all play out? So I've been talking about a toolkit. So what does this toolkit look like? So how do we provide choice? So first of all, you want to initially figure out what situation you're in, and initially tell your approach to meet the reality of your team and the situation that you face.  And then of course over time we want to reflect, we want to improve, identify attention, let's try to improve on it and solve the problem. So one of the things that we do in Dismantial is we support multiple life cycles. So it's observable in most organizations that you have some teams doing scrum, some teams doing combine, some teams doing other things. So a large team will be following a program type of a life cycle, you'll have some teams doing projects. Many people here work in organizations where you still have projects. How many teams, how many also work in organizations where you also have long standing teams or no longer a project team? And how many have both? Yeah, both, and fair enough, right? And those teams work in a different way. You'll have some teams doing more of a continuous delivery type of a thing versus the project, the scrum project teams. And that's okay. Different teams, different situation, we'll do different things. And of course they might improve over time. We very often see a team start with one method or one framework or one approach and then as they learn, as they evolve over time, the life cycle changes as well because they adopt different practices. So you start adopting practices like continuous integration, continuous deployment, you start moving away from a scrum type approach into more of a CD type of approach and that's fine, this is normal. Nothing wrong with that. Now, what we also do is because in many organizations, management freaks out at this concept of, well, what do you mean all these teams are gonna be working in different ways? Well, we support a consistent level of governance across teams, risk-based as opposed to documentation-based. So let's allow the teams to work in their own way to have their own way of working and yet still have consistent lightweight governance as about motivation and enablement as opposed to command and control. So we can allow the teams to learn and to improve and to change, have this respect, this reality of being a complex adaptive system and still allow them to do their own thing. So we can still have consistent governance so we can still lead, we can still guide yet allow the teams to work in their own way. So we've addressed that issue as well because that's important because if you don't have a coherent governance strategy, your organization's not gonna go for this, allow the teams to do their own thing, message and nor should they. So how do we do this? So when we put the toolkit together, we started noticing, so this is all based from practice and from observation because we've got the privilege of working in dozens of organizations around the world and adopting and working with others as well. So these observations are effective based on hundreds of peoples of experience and even though it's easy to observe that these teams work in different ways, at a high level they're all achieving the same basic process goals, the same basic outcomes. So at some point you had to do something like to put the team together, for example. You have to do some initial scoping and continuous scoping. You've gotta think about architecture issues. I hope you wanna grow your team members and help them learn and get better and improve. I hope you're governing your teams. I hope that you're doing risk management, addressing risk throughout the life cycle or throughout the effort. I'm sure you deploy into production every so often. So all of our teams are doing these things and more at a high level, but they're all doing it in different ways. So my team deploys into production differently than your team. My team explores scope differently than your team because we're different people in different situations. So a team building a data warehouse will explore scope in a much different way than a team building a mobile app. Pretty basic concept. So one, you know, scoping size does not fit all. So to dive down into the details, so this is wonderful advice at a high level, but not a lot of good low level advice. So how do we actually choose our wow? So what we do, we have this to simplify things to make it straightforward. We have these things called goal diagrams and it takes about five, 10 minutes to learn notation. It's not so, this is the, this complicated as it gets. And it's a little bit fuzzy, sorry about that. But the idea is that when we're forming a team, there's a bunch of process decisions that we need to make.  Where are these people coming from? How available are they? Are they 100% on the team? Are they part time on the team? How distributed is the team gonna be and so on? So there's a bunch of important decisions that we need to make. And we will make these at least implicitly if not explicitly. For each of these issues, there's options. There's different ways that we can geographically distribute the team. It's not just about co-location, it's not just about global. So, and then behind all this, we work through what are the, so not only do we describe the options, we say here's the trade-offs that you're making. So now you can make intelligent process decisions. You can identify ways to address the tensions that you face and choose better, make better choices. This is another example of a gold diagram. So in behind all those bubbles were diagrams like this. So how do you use this? So when we go to explore scope, it's not just enough to have a list of options. We also need to understand what these options are. So say for example, we decide that we wanna do personas. And we don't know anything about personas. So we can look it up, here's what our persona is all about and here's the trade-offs that you're making. So now you've got a better idea of will personas work for us? And then if this is not enough detail, it might not be. Then you can follow the link and read more about personas. And because there's wonderful articles and books out there about personas if you wanna learn more. So you can start making better decisions. So we can use the toolkit to look up these practices to help us understand what our options are what trade-offs are we making. So that way we can make better choices. We can do this in retrospectives. We can do this in initial tailoring sessions when we're identifying our process to begin with. And certainly then we want to run experiments and find out does this actually work for us? So we can move away from just having mac and cheese to at least now if we're gonna eat pasta because my daughter loves pasta nothing I can do about that at least we can change the pasta up and have something a little better for date night. My wife certainly won't tolerate having mac and cheese for date night. It's gotta be some sort of fancy thing at least. So we can have different meals on different days and that's okay. You have the right meal, have the right process for the situation that you face. So just to wrap up here before I go to Q and A. I wanna leave it, it's not about just about dispensable, it's not about dad. So it's not about dad or safe or dad or scrum. It's really about dad and scrum or scrum and dad or safe and dad. So this is the way we can evolve our way out of method prison, how we can improve our ways of working. So instead of having all this rhetoric around yeah, if you're doing this method, yes, of course you can improve and tailor to meet your own needs but then getting no advice. This is a good source of advice. So anyways, there's a lot of great stuff in the toolkit if you're interested. So just to wrap up here, any questions or any answers? Answers are good too. That gentleman there. But in the proposal, you might have to give some visibility and transparency not only to the end goal but also to the way your strategy is for the transformation. So how do you foresee what your strategy might be for the transformation? Okay, so to repeat for the film, the question was, so you're doing a proposal or you're at the beginning of a project or beginning of a team, how do you guess? How do you know what to do? So you've got to ask what the situation is and this is a bit of an experience thing but it's also, worst case you can look it up I guess but you've got to understand what the problem that they face so you've got to understand this is a globally distributed team, it's regulatory, they're taking on this sort of a problem and you do an initial tailoring and make an initial guess of this is the approach we think is gonna work but I would assume that we will learn and we will improve as we go and that the process has got to change. So the process is not carved in stone. So part of what we pitch is that we're taking, we're gonna start off with the best guess we can knowing the situation as it stands today. We also know the situation will change. The requirements will change, the technology will change, the people involved will change, the priorities will change, we will learn as we go and so on so there's all these changes so it's a complexity adaptive system so we assume the process is gonna change as well, the approach will change and that's what we pitch. So then we're not, because we wanna do the best we can in the situation that we face and always try to get better. So that's how we sell it, how we pitch it. Some people like that, some people don't. It is what it is. Sorry, oh yeah, another question. Matt, gentlemen there, actually just wait for the mic because you know. Hello. Hi. So my question is here like when we expand our team from one sprint to different, different stream. So how this wow factor can be achieved if we are on one particular sprint, the pressure is there. We're expanding the source to handle the pressure. At the same time how this wow factor can be achieved inside a sprint or also in a particular, on all project basis. Okay, say that again. Make it concise. So basically how this wow factor can be achieved if we have more pressure on the team to achieve delivers, then this wow factor, how we can deliver any. So yeah, so if I understand your question, so there's pressure on the team to deliver whatever they're delivering. So how can they take time to improve their process? I would turn that around. How can we not afford to not improve our process? We want to get better. So it's a little bit of investment to, certainly a little bit of investment to do a retro or to do some sort of learning and to say, hey, we've got this problem, let's run this experiment to see, we think this other way of working will help, it will help make us better. So there's certainly an investment there of several days or several weeks, whatever fair amount of time it takes. But at the end of that we'll know either it didn't hope it worked and if it did then we've improved. So we've gotten faster, we've gotten more effective, we've gotten better. So it's a maturity thing in some ways but you've got to go at risk, you've got to go on trust that this is good and what happens once you've had several successes like that, then it isn't really an issue. It's that first few times that you do it that sort of freaks everybody out. Got to make our schedule, meet the budget and it's well, yes, but if we continue to work in this slow manner, it's gonna be a lot harder than if we choose to try to speed up or try to get better. So yeah, it's a bit of an investment. Thank you. That gentleman over there. Hi, you talked about the improvement that Scrum and Safe brings in seven percent and five percent, how does that helps? Is there a comparative study where in the same organization, a part used DAD and the other one used Safe, how did it go? Is there anything like that? Yeah, so I'll go back about 50 slides. Yeah, so the idea is that there's no magic here, right? So there's, we choose to observe what's worked. So we've seen in all these organizations doing DevOps, what actually worked and what actually helped them get better was this continuous improvement over time. All the case studies are the same and I would invite you to read them. They're all the same. The message is always continuous improvement. We've been doing this for years. This is why we're doing all these awesome things now and then, so let's get on that path. So the challenge with these prescriptive frameworks, these prescriptive methods, they're great stuff but you hit their limits, right? So once you've exhausted the 18 pages of Scrum, it got you the improvement it's gonna get you but now you gotta look at something else. And same with safe, same with less. They're all great at what they do but once you hit the limit of that, then how do you get beyond the limit, right? And their advice is always the same. It's always, well, fit your smart, you can figure it out and yes, you are smart and yes, you can figure it out but when you do it on your own, you end up on this sort of a curve and most of the DevOps case studies are on that sort of a curve. Still good, you're still improving. That's awesome but we can do it faster by having the humility to understand that other people have solved these problems before us. We don't need to reinvent the wheel. We don't need to figure these things out. This is why we have conferences like this to share all this knowledge, share all these great ideas. So all we're doing in DA is sharing those ideas and we're saying, hey, you know what? Instead of the 12 or 15 practices of Scrum, here's the 500 practices of DA. You choose the ones that make sense for you. So let's get on, at least get on this path, break out of method prison that way but we would suggest, you know what? It's worth your while to pick up a book and maybe see that you've got some options and hopefully get on this path because like I said, the challenge is this first step.  I see this all the time and they once, because once you're in method jail, you've got the terminology of that method and that framework. Well, what about all the knowledge that's outside of that framework? If you only use Scrum terminology, you'll only find Scrum information, which is fine but we could have the humility to understand, you know what, there's other sources of information that might have solved some very common problems. Like last night, some of the, you know, at a speaker party, some of the speakers were discussing architecture and agile and why people are still struggling with a basic concept that got solved 20 years ago now and yet we're still struggling with it because often people don't even know how to go search or if they do, they might not even have the terminology anymore to search for the wealth of information out there about lean and agile techniques for architecture. So anyway, so it's worth looking at I think. Do we have time for any more questions? Maybe one more. Any other questions? Okay, well thank you very much. Hopefully this was of value to you. Thank you.


Oh, okay. Hello everyone and welcome to Encompass Live. This is the Library Commission's weekly show at 10 a.m. Central Time or roughly 10 a.m. I'm Sally Snyder and I'm your host this morning and I'm really excited because we're hosting Natalie Bazan, director of the River Valley District Library in Port Byron, Illinois and she's going to talk about what is your library worth and this looks like a great topic. I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say, Natalie, and when you're ready we'll get started with your slides and I'll take mine down. Okay, go right ahead anytime. Okay, let's see. Where are you? Oh, here you are. Okay, now I just have my screensaver up there. You have to go back into the go-to webinar and click Change Presenter. Oh, yeah, okay. Although I love the diver. I'm so jealous. It's so cold here right now. Take control. Oh, that's it. Life is fun. I'm in there and I'm trying to click on you and say take control. I've made you a presenter. There we go. There's a little window. Hello everyone. You should see my screen now I'm guessing. I believe so. Alright, so if anybody can chime in in the chat window and let me know if you're seeing a screen that says what is your what is a library worth? We're using the questions window, not the chat window. Questions window. Yep. Okay, we're seeing your screens. Fantastic. Alright, so I often get, especially at the library that I'm at now, the River Valley District Library, I get a lot of questions from my board and the community. What does our money go towards? You know, what is the library actually worth? Why should we bother to fund this? What's the point? I get a lot less of these questions in Michigan. So quite honestly, I was kind of surprised to get these questions when I was working at a library. How does everyone not know what a library is worth? How do they not understand what good we do for the community and what comes out of their money? But apparently they don't. I actually have a couple of board members who had run to make sure that the taxes to the library never increased because they didn't think that the library ever needed any more money or anything else. Oh my. Yes. Thankfully, they have gone from we really shouldn't be funding the library to yeah, you're right, the library really does need more space in the matter of about six months of me working there, which I am extremely proud of. I realize it's just the start, but it's a good start. That's amazing. It was it was definitely something. Unfortunately, today is actually my last day at the River Valley District Library, but on the plus side, I set it up for the next person. So they should have a little bit easier time than I did. So I kind of started coming up with ideas on how do I quantify something that how do I break down what we do into numbers? How do I make this so they can understand it so they can see what we're actually worth in the dollars and cents? And how do I make sure that they understand and our community understand what we offer? What makes this special and unique? You know, library marketing has been a big topic for a couple of years, and we're not we're going to touch on library marketing a little bit, but that's not really where I'm going. I'm more interested in let's talk about the dollars and cents. So everything that you're going to see here is based on the River Valley District Library. So let me tell you a little bit about it. We serve a population of 5176 people. Port Byron, Illinois is a village about well, the village of Point Byron is about 1500 people, give or take. And then we have surrounding farmland and small towns and communities right in that area. We're not a huge district in Michigan. I served it was 100 square miles and I had 4600 people, so it was more rural than this. But we are in a picturesque right on the Mississippi River, a little town right across from Leclerc, Iowa, which is where the American Pickers are. So it's really cute. It's really fun.  And the library is right on Main Street. Main Street in Port Byron is on our side of the street. We have the library, our parking lot, the road, the railroad and the Mississippi River. So we have a fantastic view of the river and everything that goes on in it. But our library wasn't really built to take advantage of that. So that was something that we couldn't do a whole lot about. So we did add some outdoor seating and some nice little outdoor areas that people can hang out and watch the river and watch everything that goes on there. But that doesn't really give us a dollar value. So our annual budget is just under half a million. Really with what I have to play for, it's more like 4 or what I have to play with, it's more like 480,000. But we pro in 498,000 every year. And some of that goes to the state of Illinois has an I am a rough plan. So we have a retirement plan for our full-time employees and various other things that I can't change. But there are a lot of things that we could change. And we found out just taking our rough numbers, our raw data that everybody collects, right? You all know how many of you keep track of how many books you check out and DVDs and reference questions, all of those things that PLA and IMLF always want to know from us. If you could respond, either raise your hand or respond in the chat window, what you keep track of. We took that and we took that data, we put it into the ALA, well, it's the ALA's value calculator, the return on investment calculator. And I produced the first annual report for River Valley. And it showed that we had a return on investment of about $1.4 million. And I got a huge amount of flak for that. I thought everybody would be excited. You know, they're getting lots of lots of return on investment. But they didn't understand how I got that number. They didn't understand where that came from. They wanted to know exactly how many people are using the library, what was going into that and break it down for them. They wanted a breakdown. I could do a breakdown. That's easy enough. We have one responder who says we keep track of all these reports. I think she's talking about the ones you have listed here. Fantastic. Sorry to interrupt. No, you're good. That's great. If you're not keeping track of these things, these are really important statistics that you can use. I mean, not just for yourself to understand, okay, how are trends going? Are more books being checked out? Are more DVDs being checked out? Should we invest more in different things? Are people using our databases more? Or are they using the library itself? Are they coming in more? We keep track of a lot of those statistics. And I'll show you more on the next slide. But we took our book. All of our numbers are from last year, the 16, 17, fifth of the year. And I had been there one month when that fifth of the year ended. So a lot of these were all of these numbers are before the I came. And I took those and I plugged them into the value calculator and let people know, okay, so this the 41,000 books that people checked out would have cost them over a million dollars if they had purchased them. And you need to know if those are adult books, if those are teen books, if those are kids books, so that you can put them in and get the correct values for them. The DVDs, the value calculator for some fun reason decides that they, and I understand why, but they give you a value based on if you had rented those DVDs. I don't know a whole lot of places you can go to rent DVDs anymore. Most of those have shut down. So if you are checking out DVDs, you may want to change that number or you may want to explain that number to people better because they're looking at it's a whole lot more than $4 to buy a DVD. Reference questions get a value. People attending your programs get a value. People coming in and reading magazines and checking out a movie. I don't know if you have museum passes. Do any of you rent out museum passes or loan out museum passes? Oh, that's a nice idea. I didn't think of that. We partner up with a botanical center, a zoo. We have an art museum and up until this past year there was a zoo zium pass. So we had the museum and the children's or the zoo and the children's museum had gotten together and had a pass that we could get and we could loan it out to people. We only loaned it out for a couple of days and they have to bring it back otherwise they say they have to be fine but it has been really really helpful for us. And people just love it. You know it gives them something where they can take their kids and still be learning and still be experiencing new things and then they come back and their kids are curious and interested and they want to know more about all of the animals that they saw or the plants they saw or the things they experience. And that increases our circulation too. And that can work for the zoo or the museum because the family might decide to get a membership after they've been there and the kids have been all excited. So they they have that possibility too. Now the downside that we found with our museum well our zoo actually the museum is okay but the zoo the zoo now charges for parking so this doesn't cover parking it just covers entrance fees. So you know you're if your families are borrowing something like this they're not having to pay for entrance fees so maybe they're more likely to take that money and use it for concession or yes getting their own membership. So it's a really good way to bargain with museums to get them to do things like this. Great idea. You can see that you know the Massachusetts Library Association put this together and ALA has it on their website. I actually have it pulled off if we want to play with it a little bit later if people want to give me some numbers. But the link is right there for you. If you put in your numbers and you keep track of your number you keep track of what you do you can put these numbers together and in seconds you have what your library is worth. I've done this I started doing this on a monthly basis for my board members. It helped I have several business people on who like I said they got on the board because they wanted taxes for the library to either go down stop entirely or they wanted a really good reason why we wanted money to fund a library. So being able to provide them with those numbers really helped. Being able to show them that they are getting three dollars back for every dollar they spend at the library is huge. I don't know if any of you have board members or community members who are very much tea party members or are watching well any of the many different political parties that are really curious and starting to get back involved in civics and trying to understand what this money is going towards and how it's benefiting the community. But this gives them concrete information. And so you know when we save this presentation to be viewed in the future by other people we also will have these these slides for people to refer to and then we pull out things like that URL that you saw there so you don't have to write it down and then you can we'll put that in another box for people to click on to go see how that calculator works so don't worry about writing down all those words in the url and most importantly it's free. I don't know about you. Yes I might have a half a million dollar budget but in michigan when I was director of libraries they're at a hundred thousand dollars and I was using this to its fullest extent because I didn't have money to buy any of the many softwares out there that will do things like this for you and keep track of things like this for you. So let's go to the value calculator. Is there anybody out there who would be willing to throw out some numbers so we can give you an idea using your numbers of what you would be worth? If you have a microphone just type in there I have a microphone and I'll I'll make your microphone active or type it into the question slot. They can be rough numbers they don't have to be your exact numbers but I'd love to be able to show you what you guys are worth and just in case your board members or anybody else are interested in where you know how much money is being is being allocated for one adult book instead of just putting one in each category to see what comes up you can click on the value of your youth and it will come up and it will tell you and it will tell you why so you'll know that the average price for adult books is 17 kids books is around 17 young adult audible is doing a download for 9.95 and these are the amounts that they tend to put on there. Oh that's great to be able to see that and know then you can tell your board well here's how they determined that because I would ask that question. Right and that is a big question that comes up a lot you know they're curious okay so the museum passes that I talked about I know to get into say the Brookfield Zoo in Illinois I know that I can get passes at my local library it's going to cost a whole heck of a lot more than $20 to get in there but that's what they're estimating it and averaging it out to be because the museum denies you over by Port Byron where we have our zoo pass is a lot less than $20 to get in well it's actually probably just a little bit less and I think our yeah our museum pass actually covers four but it gives you a good basis and you can tell people okay so it might say that it'd be about $15 to go to one of your programs what if you're doing how to make cheese or how to make soap at your library I've done both of these soap making if I went to a class elsewhere could cost upwards of $100 per person so yeah that should average out with something like we're doing a talk on homeschooling at the library that didn't cost library anything and may have just been community members getting together to discuss things that would average out nicely so no not every program is going to be that much or not getting any numbers yet or any volunteers yet all right well if you guys want to try this on your own feel free it is fun I really enjoy doing it I think it my circulation staff actually really like that program because and this next one I'm going to show you because it gives them a reason why they're keeping track of some of the statistics that they do so the PLA every year sends out an email asking for people to put in their statistics so that they can keep track of things so that they know how things are going and in return for doing that they send you a link to a tri-fold brochure that you can use I didn't do any edits whatsoever this is exactly what they sent me and it shows you this is the well this would be the front cover and this is the back cover and then this is the inside flap and it gives you just the general information so here's my population that's how many books I have that's how many of my 5100 people are actually registered with the library card and then it adds everything up so physical circulation that's everything that I physically let people check out we let them check out about 78,000 items last year and it continues on down obviously we need to work on our electronic circulation because that's kind of low but I didn't put database numbers in there that was only books that were checked out in library use is something that my circulation staff keeps track of so if you happen to come in the library I don't know how many of you keep track of this but do you notice do you note down how many people are reading newspapers at your library if you don't check them out it's really nice to know the statistics on that reference questions that is these numbers are actually all based on this year so far and I estimated out what it's going to be for the rest of the year program attendance or website visits this gives them a little bit of everything that I could think of and that's a PLA asked for on the inside is more detailed information and this is where you may want to make some edits to help people understand what's going on so number the percentage of full-time employees with a librarian title FTEs doesn't mean a whole lot to most people so I realized that I need to change that if I'm going to be handing that out to people because otherwise it's not going to make sense your circulation per staff member that's a huge number letting people know that yeah although you may have walked in and seen our staff chatting or didn't seem to be working on a thing or playing on the computer it really weren't maybe they had a little bit of downtime but in reality our staff are working really hard and this is one of the ways that you can prove that so circulation per capita is a great number to watch if your non-library using people are curious about why why are they paying for this thing that they're not using which comes up so much who has heard that question if you could raise your hand please do I'm not using the library so why should I pay for it that's just like I'm not using school systems so why should I pay for it that's just what I was thinking of yes people say that too isn't that frustrating so you can tell them this is per capita this is not per registered library user this is per your entire population there are 16 items going to every single person in my district if every single person had a library card every time one person walks in they're likely to walk out with two items or having done two having taken out two things circulation per borrower sure you know what you should all be registered library users but the ones of you that are not this is what those the rest of them are using this is what they're saving multiply that out that's what they're saving every year and you're not so this is a good way to be able to tell people who are not using these features pat if you were using these features you could be saving this much every year talk about new year's resolutions there you go there is something that you know there's an easy one forget this whole weight loss thing and everything I can save money by getting a library card that's free yeah i'm all over that so you get the idea we have a collection turnover is always a little bit iffy we have a very high collection turnover unfortunately because we have no space it is really really tight in there forget the whole your shelves are only supposed to be filled to about 70 percent because if everything came back you'd be overwhelmed yeah ours are about 90 all the time because otherwise we would just be weaving well every I think our our weaving is up to every two years now um anything that's been that we've had for more than two years that hasn't checked out is gone because we just honestly can't keep it wow it's sad um but you can see you know holdings per capita we have nine and a half books per or nine and a half materials per person in our district so if they're coming in saying well I don't think you'd have enough books for all of you or for all of us you don't have what I'm looking for so it's fine we might not have what you're looking for but did you know that although we only have nine books per person we're also part of a co-op how many of you are part of co-ops or do interlibrary loan or work with other libraries cooperatively like that I'm not sure what Nebraska has but Illinois has a couple of co-ops that reach across the state and do a fantastic job of providing access to books that I could be ordering I'm on the Mississippi River I could be ordering books from the University of Chicago and have them shipped over not a problem which is a huge thing for us I was I am taking classes at our local Catholic Church and they came in and they said yeah we have this great book it's a text book but it's like 160 dollars if you want to buy it but if any of you want to look at it you know I have one here before you want to buy it and I said well why don't you just interlibrary loan it at the library oh yeah we could do that yeah you could get this at the library and see if you like it before you want to buy it like yes yes you could seriously people I'm a librarian how do you not know this it's a surprise I know you don't know this because obviously we haven't done a good enough job of telling people this and that's kind of humbling and that's kind of worrying because if people if we don't go out there and tell them they don't know it's there that's true so we started printing these out and we print them out for we have a pile of them at our circulation desk our like I said our circulation staff is really happy to know that the numbers that they're putting together matter you know they're not just going on a spreadsheet that no one is ever going to see in their life these numbers actually matter and they can point this out to our patrons who come in and say hey look did you want did you ever wonder how many things are checked out how this actually goes it has actually led to every time I print these out they're gone in like an instant it's it's kind of humbling and it has led to a lot of people coming in and saying hey I know you have some programs coming up do you need volunteers for that do you need donations for that I've got some stuff I think you could use for that or I got a little extra money for Christmas and I would like it to go towards this that's great it has been fantastic so we all know about books and shushing and for some reason my library board still thought we were all books and shushing that was honestly what they thought the library was for the last I've been there almost eight months actually um for the last eight months I have been working on convincing them that we are a very active library we have a focus on learning and connecting people making sure they can connect with each other and making sure they connect with different groups in the community and just bringing everybody together we've been providing meeting spaces for community groups we were talking about um our second story is about half the size of our main story and we've been talking about expanding that out so it's the same size and the board keeps asking me well well they don't keep asking me they don't ask me anymore um but they did they asked us why do we need that extra space what are you going to use it for and I said we need meeting rooms we have our upper story is one big meeting room and that's it we don't have study rooms we don't have quiet nooks we don't have anything else that is the only states we have and they said no no no you don't need that that's silly that's pointless until I pointed out to them on a board meeting night we had the junior rams which is the junior high football group coming in to do a talk with parents and we had to put them at a table downstairs which is in a little tiny nook in our front window so some people got the nice cushy window seat and some people got the hardwood chairs all pulled up from a tiny little eight foot table with all these football player parents and we also had a group that had come in a writer's group that wanted to chat and do some things with their members this was a special board meeting so this was the night that they normally would have had the upstairs and we had to put them in the other bay window so we had three things going on at the same time and they I made them come downstairs and said hey walk around and they were shocked they were very surprised um it's also been a push to teach the library board that creative programming it does allow our patrons to learn new skills you know I don't know about you guys but Port Byron does not have a community center if people want to go and take some classes they're going to have to hike it over to one of the colleges one of the universities if they're lucky maybe some of the high schools do some easing classes but nobody in my area does um I don't know about your communities but we just we're too small we don't do that we don't have enough people to do that we don't have the money laying around to be able to do something like that so the library is the community center we are providing skills for people places for people to learn new skills and that doesn't just translate then to them coming into programs but I've had to make sure my library board understands that also translates into circulation that that brings us in the hard numbers they come to learn a program say they came to learn the soap making program okay they learned soap making now all the sudden they want to check out a whole bunch of soap making books and oh yeah can you teach me a class on learning how to do Etsy because I've been making soap at home and now I kind of want to sell it and do you have any classes on oh I don't know accounting oh good point yeah so we all right I I'm going to admit I am not an accounting major so we uh we subscribe to gale courses and they have accounting classes and small business classes so I can teach them a class on how to use our databases which again it helps people learn what we have to offer it helps our numbers it gets people more involved and then they start talking so we are in the process right now of doing some community betterment projects but this is something that I had done back in Michigan before I moved to Illinois which was only a year ago and brings a whole lot of attention to the library it's not necessarily a marketing thing it is but in some ways it is because it's bringing attention to us how many of you have gardening programs or something spring type related where you do we used to do flowers in February yeah I'm definitely not doing that today knowing as I look out the window but you know it was one of those partner up with a greenhouse let the little kids plant some flowers and take them home to mom that type of thing or you know in the spring we did let's learn how to make let's learn about gardening or let's learn about small gardening or let's do our seed library or various other things like that do any of you do something like that or I know Nebraska has a number of libraries that have gardens outside the building that they either have a group that works with them or the kids come and help plant different libraries have different programs but there are a number of libraries in the state that that have a garden where the community is involved in working on it and being involved with that garden that is great so we did we did um pots around our library back in Michigan because we had a very small area and the library here we've plotted off an area next to the library which well I'm not going to plant for a couple months but that's going to be our our community garden area where we can do classes but in addition to that we teamed up with a local greenhouse a wholesaler actually a perennial wholesaler and every year there's a lot of waste we know this right we hear about it all the time in conjunction with grocery stores and with well pretty much every industry but grocery stores have been on the hit list for a little while because food won't be absolutely perfectly pretty or anything like that it gets tossed well plants are the same way if they're not pretty and gorgeous and flowering they're in the clearance section right well if you're a wholesaler you need to produce these plants for the people who are going to grow them up to make them pretty and blah blah blah if those people either cancel an order or maybe the flat of I don't know lavender came up and half of it died and the other half is okay it's a little stunted you know something like that or the Easter lilies went to flower way too early or hydrangeas are looking pretty spindly they can't sell them they can't give them out to their retailers and if they're not they're just not going to make money out of them so generally they toss them so we partnered up with a wholesaler in our area and we ended up with something around $10,000 worth of perennial and yes they weren't absolutely a perfect condition but they were free so yeah no kidding it was really exciting so we put it all over that the library wants to beautify the community this is our summer project and we want you to help come to the library on this particular Sunday and it was in it was late May early June come to the library and pick up some perennials and all we ask is that if anybody asks you tell them where you got it and you send us a picture when you plant them we got great idea we got people who were asking if we could make signs that they could put up in their nice little garden that they just planted let's say from the library which of course we didn't think about at the time and then we were beating our head against the wall why oh why did we not have signs for people but that's one of those next time things right indeed and that brought us a lot more people who were excited who were coming in who might not usually come in but it's a community betterment project and they all want to get behind it especially the three the next one that I hear all the time the library is inconvenient how many people I'm sure everyone has heard this at one point in time or another I can't make it there your hours are inconvenient I just don't feel like going back out after I get home the having to return the book just takes so much time and I always forget and it's always late and and and and right so I don't have the money to open up a branch I know that most small libraries there's no way in the world you're going to afford being able to open up a branch just maintaining a physical location is not realistic maintaining a digital location is and I know especially in smaller rural areas that a lot of our people don't have access to the internet but a lot of them do and this might be more geared towards the ones who do than the ones who don't the ones who don't can always use it when they come into the library or when they go to someplace that has wi-fi but running and creating a digital branch which for us is our website was really important to us it gave us the opportunity to start reaching out to people we put things on there like our databases hey did you know that you can learn how to play a guitar on the library's website you can take a six-week class on how to play a guitar on the library's website you can learn mango languages you're sitting at a restaurant you can learn some pirates before your food comes you can learn that accounting class that you always wanted to do you can check out those ebooks you can check out the audiobooks you can get free music downloads again it's an advertising thing that yeah we still need to work harder on two because we just started doing this so we've just started pushing it but it's out there and it's available and that gives us a good start but when we broached it with our library board they got a website that was actually realistically usable and had information on it maybe six months before i got there so about a year and a half ago give or take they got a usable website that actually has tabs and they can actually put information on there but prior to that it was the one page here's our info click here to get on to our shared library catalog and that was it so this has been a huge change for the library board and again they're looking at it where prove it to me prove that the money that we're spending is actually making a difference so we have them again it's it's keep track of statistics be able to tell them hey this number of people are going to use our gill courses and that brings us to doing classes in the library to show people how to use gill courses that's all well and good if you see it on the library website but if i don't know how to use that eh it's cool but it's it's just out there and i can't do anything with it so come in we'll teach you how to download a book we'll show you how to use it that has been really helpful for us we just replaced our computers and the previous library the previous time that they replaced computers for patrons they had purchased for laptops and we had them hooked up they weren't ones that you could check out and just take around they were actually hooked up and people could work on those instead of a desktop and the idea was you know eventually maybe we could let people walk around with them or different things but that had never happened so we switched out computers and we sold off all the old desktops and the laptops we kept and they're not in the greatest shape they've been beat on for a couple years patrons are not necessarily the nicest to our computers i don't know about you but ours are not um but we threw a sticker on them and let people check them out there we already put the money into it we already got the money back out of it this is nothing for us and if you've got a computer store near you maybe not a best buy but just like a local computer store you might want to talk to them and see if they get trade-ins or they get used laptops that are still decent but are not what the people wanted anymore and then you can do this too and it's not going to cost you anything but you can check those things out to patrons and then they can use computers at home or they can use them around the library and if you do that with mobile hotspots all of a sudden you just gave your patrons a computer and the internet all at once and that's a huge add value add for them it gives them access to your digital branch so you know that they can use more of the things that you have and that has helped us a lot it's still a work in progress it's still a marketing issue but we're working on it we have also been working on expanding our collection and this is something that i have had fun with ever since i started being a library director we've done the e-collection i talked about the website of the branch we've done binge boxes have any of you done this or heard about this not so much okay this idea came up a couple of years ago from a gentleman who worked at a library in i want to say north carolina but i might be crazy this is a distinct possibility today who knows it's a little plastic box with a handle and it has you can put five six dvds in there so if you're say you're home sick or you know it's snowing outside you don't want to go anywhere you go to the library and you check out um let's say my box has star wars and the first six movies right four five and six and then they added in one two and three so now i check them all out i'm just gonna sit home and watch those make some popcorn hopefully i've got a pizza because takeout's not going to make it today and besides that it won't make it to my house because i'm too far away um i don't have to check out movie four and then realize five and six are checked out by somebody else so then i got one and three and i'm waiting for everybody else to return their dvd you can do any topic you like any grouping you like um we stayed away from doing tv series because if you're checking out six seasons of big bang theory and watching those in the week that we let you check this out i'm really worried about you really worried but if you're checking out maybe oh Jurassic park one through i think they're up to four now or if we want to do lord of the rings and the hobbit throw all those together or um maybe i just want to do hallmark christmas movies one of my most popular was always um disney princess movies ah yeah for marble comic yes the disney princess movies are just crazy those go out constantly and you can do classic disney princesses new disney princesses you can do barbie you can do anything you like um that has been really helpful for us maker space kits uh i certainly don't have the room to put in one of those absolutely gorgeous maker spaces that let people you know set out whole sewing tables i have a dozen people doing this at once yeah no um but i do have room for little kits and i put them in little plastic you know those plastic boxes that are heavy duty enough to where they're not going to break immediately um i'll list all the pieces everything that you're putting in there that you want back if you're putting um we have a fidget spinner making kit if you're putting a fidget spinner in there and you want that one back then you better make sure that it's listed on that list but we check those out for about a month and they will take a book they'll have a book in there to tell you how to do whatever you're checking out plus all the tools to make whatever it is and maybe we get some raw materials donated like um we have a fly tying kit in hopkins back in michigan and we did a fly tying class to pick up the tools to do fly tying is about 50 bucks give or take you can find them cheaper if you get them on sale but realistically if you just took a class and you don't really know if you want to try it if you want to do this at home yeah don't know if i want to spend 50 bucks on it but i can check out the tools it's got a book on telling me how to use it how to do things and somebody had donated some yarn and random fishing hooks and stuff because we get weird stuff donated at the library why we had fishing hooks let's not go there but we can throw those in there and on the list i'm going to make sure that my circulation staff knows that there's a book that there's tools and that it includes these tools i don't care about the yarn i don't care about the hooks if they come back great if they don't somebody use them that's also great the library of things i have a great picture here from the american library magazine if you check out stuff you've got a collection of stuff at your library maybe you've got santa suits like louisiana does or i don't know the fondue is kind of hurry me the taxidermy animals i think is kind of cool but a little bit weird too but anything that you've got that you think that your patrons would like if you have an art collection that rotates out and you check those out it's something that's fun that is something that they would never expected the library and it's going to bring you more people and then they're going to see what else you've got to offer games we've been checking out games everywhere i go it is really easy to convince my library board to go that direction by telling them hey these are multi-generational events that were encouraging even when they're not at the library so we checked out yeah we check out monopoly okay yes there are a million pieces of monopoly you're probably not going to get all that money back i'm just telling you right now but on the flow side copying monopoly money totally legal legal is good um but you know that it's not just kids who are playing that right parents are going to sit down with their kids grandparents are going to sit down with their grandkids or the whole family is going to sit down together and somebody's going to be the shoe and somebody's going to lose it's going to happen but they're learning lots of stuff they're playing together as a family they're getting together and we're encouraging that and we need to be visible um you know it's great we've got all of our staff together we've got all our numbers put together we've got all of our things all of our little trifle brochures that i was talking about we put our value add info on our website on our facebook you know what you're getting but if we're not getting that info to our people doesn't really make any difference what we do this brings up a little bit of the marketing i've gone through a whole bunch of marketing classes and talked to a whole bunch of people and they always say well don't bother to do posters don't do mailings to your people that's silly it's just a waste of money nobody looks at it honestly that depends on your your demographic it depends on your people it depends on your area my area people love posters people love to see our posters up in the bar they like to see our stuff up in the post office they like to see it up in the bank and they stop and they read it and then they ask us about it we get called from that we did our first mailing to everybody in our district that i think it's the first one in maybe 10 years a couple months ago every class every program that we had on there was full within like two weeks it was i i had stuff on there for February and March and we mailed this out in October and they were full wow it was crazy to the point where we started having to add additional programs and let people know hey um yeah it maybe you're going to have to come into the library more often and check out what we've got or watch our website or watch our facebook and we'll let you know if we add additional classes for that program um that has been huge that i am crediting with increasing our online numbers a huge amount because we did big focus features on what types of databases we have about learning how to play the guitar about learning how to use how to learn pirate or hey you're going on a trip and you want to learn some new language just a little bit of it there you go you want to be able to download audio books hey you don't have to go to audible and pay your 10 bucks a piece you can do it on the library of website for free that was all on our mailings along with our museum passes the fact that we check out puppets all different things like that but that's my community i don't know if your community likes mailings or if they're the people who just take them and toss them they see it as junk mail and they're never going to look at it um partner with some businesses and groups and organizations that gets you an immediate uh audience you know they are going to talk to their people and you're not going to have to they're going to do some of the advertising for you they know that they're doing this program for you hey they want it to be successful because their names on it too and it comes down to be focused on your community if your community hates posters nobody ever looks at posters it's way too expensive to print them out or produce them or you don't want to do i don't know maybe you like to cut out the shapes and put them on the poster board and everything else i use canva because it's free and it's pretty and i have no artistic talent either that or publisher i use that one a lot too but you you know maybe your community hates those things and couldn't care less then do something different do the coaster or the trivia night at a bar where people see you out there do different programs outside of your your space or start talking to people and presenting at schools or make sure that you can get in maybe you can get into the school newsletter once in a while or different things like that where people actually do care about those things even if they're not looking at your mailings because they're just junk mail try different things you're going to get it wrong at some point in time but at least if you're trying you're getting out there and i'm just going to end with i found this lovely infographic of the 21st century library um that i showed it to my board members and they stared at it and read it and said oh my gosh i can't believe the library is doing these things why does nobody know about that i don't know you're doing these things granted my library is not doing all of this like i said we don't have a maker space i don't have place for that but i do have kits i may not be helping well i might actually be helping people publish stuff a little bit but i may not be actively publishing content on our website but we do have a writers group that meets and they do work on things like that you know it's it's trying to make sure that we are a little bit of everything for everyone does anyone have any questions i should have brought water that's a pretty amazing graphic there isn't it i love it while we wait to see if there are any questions i just want to mention that you can go to the library commission web page and click on calendar and look down on wednesdays to see what different programs are coming we have quite a few lined up now i think it's through april if i remember right or you can search encompass live in the search box and go to the page that has more information and about how to register if you want to register for it if you register then you'll get an email and even if you can't attend you'll still get an email that says we have this now on our archives and so you can watch it at your convenience so that's another reason to to sign up we have a couple of people who say thank you so much thanks for the webinar great information people are saying well thank you guys all for being here and listening thank you so much natalie this was great information and i love the idea of of using some of the web pages you mentioned that are helpful the one that ala has about the value of your library i had heard of it before but i hadn't really looked at how it operated so wendy says great info i will use many of these ideas so thanks wendy and at the um you said today's your last day at the library so today is my last day yes if people have questions for you is there a way we could get in touch with you or maybe you can send us a link let me see here i know christa has my escape there we go um i know christa has my email address but okay right here i did not um i will give me a second because i think i sent you guys a link to this so if anybody has any um questions feel free to email me um that's my personal email you can email anytime i will definitely find it eventually sorry switching jobs like i said today is my last day at river valley and on monday i start up at north riverside public library district so wow well best wishes for you and in your in your new endeavor and sounds like things are going great oh beth says best best wishes for your future and thank you very much and thank you for spending the time putting this together this was terrific information and you get a star because you took exactly an hour how'd you do that i am uh well i've got my phone right here that i kept staring at for the time i may have cheated well thank you so much and um we invite everyone to come back next week when we'll have another program which if i just looked on our web page here a minute i can tell you what that is um encompass live it's um more than a library a positive change agent so that's something to think about for next week and susan mclellan from pennsylvania will be presenting that for us so sometimes we have local people and sometimes have people from other states and it's terrific so thank you again and i'm going to stop recording now and


On behalf of the entire Yankees organization I want to congratulate Aaron on winning the American League MVP award He was incredible in every facet of the game in 2022 and put up a season that ranks with the very best of all time Aaron's success was especially meaningful for our organization as we've been able to watch him grow throughout his professional career Into the player and leader he has become an offensive force to the batter's box a run preventer Wherever we've put him in the field and somebody sets the tone in the clubhouse with his relentless commitment to winning He's been our MVP for quite some time now and this honor couldn't be more deserved