Project Management in Technical Services: Practical Tips and Case Studies. Eds. Elizabeth German and John Ballestro. Chicago: ALA Editions, 2022. 244 p. $69.99 softcover (ISBN 978-0-8389-4991-7).

While library literature and conference programs abound with project management guidance, relatively little has been published on adapting these techniques for technical services. Project Management in Technical Services: Practical Tips and Case Studies helps fill this gap with a compilation of instruction and case studies in various approaches to project management ranging from individual techniques for managing workloads to coordinating institutional and consortial projects. According to the preface, the goal of the book is to “help technical services professionals build their own ‘project management toolkit’” and “right-size” an approach that will work for any type of project (viii). With this mission in mind, the book’s two parts are further outlined in the preface. Part I: Implementation Perspectives is divided into chapters on personal project management and departmental implementation and Part II: Case Studies is divided into chapters on technology, space, and collection maintenance. While the majority of the cases discussed in the book focus on one-off projects, several chapters (especially chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7) also address how project management techniques can be useful for the cyclical, individual work common in technical services. The benefits of adapting project management in technical services are discussed throughout the book, including increased productivity and organization, improved evaluation of projects (both while they are ongoing and following completion), facilitating communication, increasing transparency, encouraging collaboration, and avoiding burnout. Other common themes include tool recommendations, agile project management methods, and adapting to change.

Chapters 1–3 focus on personal project management. Each chapter centers around a particular type of task and provides techniques and tools for implementing project management in that area. In chapter 1, the author discusses project planning and goes into detail about the steps involved in creating a formal project plan with an example of applying those steps in a book shifting project. Beyond simply completing tasks associated with a project, the chapter also addresses communication and assessment best practices. Chapter 2 details several techniques and tools for improving time management that are based in project management frameworks. The approaches outlined are practical and can be applied to just about any type of work, including time-bound projects and daily, repetitive tasks. Detailed tips and examples for applying project management tools to personal projects follow in chapter 3, which concludes with a template for a personal project management spreadsheet. This chapter situates itself within existing literature on personal project management (PPM) and personal information management (PIM) and gives a strong overview of the benefits of practicing PPM.

Chapters 4–6 outline implementations of project management techniques for department-level projects. The main themes of these chapters are coordinating work among multiple staff, overcoming challenges in personnel management and organizational culture, adapting to changes in technical services work as a whole and those forced by the COVID-19 pandemic, and creating a project management infrastructure. There is a useful list of techniques for breaking up large projects into smaller deliverables with deadlines and clear objectives in chapter 4. The chapter also addresses reframing recurring tasks as quarterly deliverables and training and equipping staff with the tools they need to complete their work. Chapter 5 details a series of lightweight project management adaptations, particularly from the agile project management framework, that have proven helpful in the library’s technical services workflows which have drastically changed over the last several years. Because of its emphasis on what it terms “lowercase ‘p’” project management (i.e., adapting and scaling down commonly used project management tools), this chapter would be particularly helpful for professionals who are concerned that project management frameworks require too much overhead to implement. Chapter 6’s authors discuss project management in terms of change management and organizational culture and illustrates the importance of both with a case study on a library services platform (LSP) migration. The case study in particular is helpful in identifying potential organizational hurdles to implementing a project management framework.

Moving into Part II: Case Studies, chapters 7-9 focus on technology-intensive projects. While previous chapters often included examples of project management implementation, the chapters in part II are almost entirely detailed project overviews. Chapter 7 addresses electronic resources management, and chapters 8 and 9 concern digital asset management system (DAMS) and LSP migrations. Other themes in this section include adapting the agile project management framework, internal and external communication, and project planning. Chapters 7 and 9 provide overviews of several tools that were critical to project success; chapter 9 further includes examples of templates used during the project described. Unique within the book, chapter 8 concerns consortial projects and includes two brief case studies for the purpose of comparing different approaches—centralized vs. decentralized—to project management.

Chapters 10–11 provide case studies for large-scale space projects; chapter 10 discusses building renovation projects and chapter 11 a library closure. While chapter 10 is less of a case study and more a general overview of what to expect during a renovation project, it still provides a thorough breakdown of the process while remaining general enough to be applicable to a wide range of technical services contexts. Chapter 11’s recounting of a library closure provides a detailed overview of project management frameworks used in such a situation and a guide to managing personnel during a time of extreme uncertainty and rapid change.

Finally, chapters 12–14 provide case studies on collection maintenance projects, specifically relating to moving the contents of a collection storage facility to a new location (chapter 12), managing high-density storage (chapter 13), and a large weeding project (chapter 14). All three chapters reiterate themes that were introduced earlier in the book, particularly the importance of planning and choosing project management tools, communication strategies, and adapting to change. Like chapter 11, chapter 12 also details managing a project with changing and uncertain timelines and expectations. In chapter 13, the authors provide a high-level overview of managing a high-density storage facility and how project management techniques, namely planning and evaluation, led to successes such as participation in what is now known as the Google Books project. The volume concludes with chapter 14, which gives an incremental overview of a weeding project from planning through reporting stages and very helpfully includes project documents in appendixes.

Project Management in Technical Services serves as an excellent overview of the possibilities in implementing project management techniques in technical services. Readers who are new to project management and hoping to learn what options exist for their particular work would benefit from adding this to their reading list alongside sources that provide a broader overview of different project management frameworks. Technical services professionals who have already committed to implementing project management in their work would likely benefit the most from closely reading the particular chapters or sections that most closely resemble their context. Ultimately, anyone working in technical services who wants to make improvements to their own work or their team’s work will find something of value in this book.—Lisa Lorenzo (lorenzo7@msu.edu), Michigan State University Libraries