Planning
I really enjoy planning, especially strategic planning, because it is a chance to be creative and optimistic about the future of the library and to have some input into what it might look like.

What 3 things do you want to know or be able to do at the end of this planning course? What will make this course particularly useful for you?

One of the challenging things about planning for me is creating ways to measure our success (or our failure). Planning always brings with it the need to create ways to see if you have met your goals and how you are progressing. Without a concrete way to see if we are "where we want to be", strategic planning cannot be as successful. Its easy enough to measure circulation or walkin traffic but these don't necessarily completely reflect the success or failure of our new directions.

Another major challenge with strategic planning, is defining and deciding what activity or service to let go. This often means realocating budget resources. It seems that we are always pulled in two (or more) directions. We want to move forward and make the library a better, more relevant community place but there are expectations from our current (and very supportive) clients to continue to provide the services that we have always provided. In between we have staff who are trying to do more with the same (or sometime fewer) resources. The ability to effectively "sunset" services at the right time (with the least pain) is something I struggle with.

I also struggle with public input and its role in strategic planning. One of the articles pointed out that loyal clients most often don't usually envision a "different" library (just a "better" one). I find this statement to be true but struggle with the amount and type of client input that we need to solicit in order to make our strategic plan the best it can be.