As a note, this session will be recorded.

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Hello, my name is Charlotte M. Johnson, and I’m the offsite shelving librarian at the University of Pittsburgh’s University Library System (ULS). Before I start, I want to give a land acknowledgement: I am presenting today on the ancestral territory of the Adena, Hopewell, and Monongahela People, who were later joined by refugees of the Delaware, Shawnee, Haudenosaunee, and other tribes driven here from their homelands by colonizers.

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Intro: This talk is called Managing Remote Storage Remotely: Implementing CaiaSoft During the Pandemic, and it’s about how I successfully and remotely led my team of five at the ULS’s offsite facility through the implementation of our inventory management software, CaiaSoft.

I’m going to discuss specific problems that we were up against, and the strategies I used to make sure we were able to move to this new software as smoothly as possible. And then I’m going to talk about how I was able to secure my team’s buy-in throughout the process.

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Background: The implementation came at an unfortunate time. During this time, we were also in the midst of the ULS’s transition from Voyager to ALMA, and a global pandemic. Not only did my team have to learn a new software on top of CaiaSoft, we were also unable to receive the intended on-site training that Caia staff provide to customers. Also, we only had a little over a month to prepare for the cut-over since there were delays in getting our contract signed. But it was important to me that even while everything else was happening to us and around us, CaiaSoft would be the least disruptive of them. So I did everything I could to make the transition as smooth as possible, even with all of the challenges we faced.

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Problem 1: Ideally, Chris Brennan, the co-founder and operations expert at Caia Solutions would have come onsite to train us, but since the pandemic made that impossible, we had to use online training modules, called Interactive Evaluations. These modules, to be completed onsite, were created in response to Chris being unable to train teams in person. My team were presented with questions or prompts, and they would have to use both the provided documentation and their own self-guided exploration to complete each section. This method of training did not suit many of the teams’ learning styles, and some wished they had more immediate feedback to assure them they were doing things correctly.

Solution: Before anything else, I took the trainings myself to become familiar with the questions being asked, and let my team know ahead of time what they could expect from these training modules. I also provided them with the relevant How To documents from CaiaSoft for each training, so they didn’t have to hunt through the tutorials looking for the correct one. Periodically, I would also request the teams’ responses from Chris so I could provide the feedback the team wanted. 

Another part of the in-person trainings was supposed to be figuring out what our facility’s workflows would look like with the new software. Without this, I re-wrote the workflows suggested by CaiaSoft’s How To documents to be more in line with how our facility already worked. The team really appreciated this, since that allowed them to learn how to use a CaiaSoft specifically tailored to the ULS right off the bat. They wouldn’t have to learn about tools we weren’t going to use. For example, we do all of our digitization in house, so we use the electronic-retrieval jobs a little differently from other institutions. We also don’t barcode our refile carts or our courier bins, so that was a lot of extra information in the tutorials that the team didn’t need to know. My team told me that they actually relied on my documentation much more than CaiaSoft’s to teach them (so that seemed to work out pretty well).

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Problem 2: My team had to be onsite to complete these trainings, since they involved a lot of handling of the materials. Now, they were already onsite in a very limited basis so that they could fulfill requests for scanned articles and chapters, and to be clear that is always our top priority, but doing just that took up the entire time they were allowed to be onsite. I already had to cancel our grand plans of doing stacks auditing and other projects we keep kicking down the road.

Solution: I reached out to Chris to get a rough estimate of how long it would take to complete the modules, then I figured out how many extra hours each person would need to come in to complete their training before the cut-over date, which again was in a little over a month. I brought the new hours to the team, asking if they were comfortable with being on-site more—thankfully our team is small and our workstations are spaced safely— and with their okay, I went to our University Librarian to get permission to allow each team member to come on-site for three extra hours each week for self-guided training.

Since CaiaSoft is a browser-based service, having the training on-site also meant that having solid internet access or a large enough screen at home was no longer the barrier it might have been.

Even though it was difficult having to navigate COVID restrictions to get my team on-site training, it was worth it. Between my teaching documents and CaiaSoft’s training modules, they got to work with our own data and materials and received a more engaging training than they would have otherwise.

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Problem 3: Due to my job duties, I’m the one who is most able to work from home, so most of the time I wasn’t available on site to help my team with their training in person. In order to keep up open lines of communication, it was crucial that those lines be intentional and effective.

Solution: So anyone would tell you, the solution is communicating, but how do you know you’re communicating well enough? At the start of this pandemic, I asked the team whether they preferred that I share every single little detail of an issue, or prevent information overload by sharing only information I thought was relevant to them. They definitely preferred oversharing, which I did at our weekly check-in meetings. I shared every step of progress we were making toward the implementation and everything I knew about the training modules, which were being released on a gradual basis.

I also let them know about any changes as early as possible, since some people needed the time to mentally prepare for the change. And to return to the ULS specific documentation I mentioned earlier—we ran into several obstacles on the back end of things (Alma and CaiaSoft weren’t always communicating well themselves), so I had to continually tweak the details of our workflows based on what Alma would or would not allow us to do. This continued well after the cut-over date, and because we were now using the system live, I was sure to let the team know via email every time I made an update to our documentation.

Because of how the team and I work together, weekly check-ins weren’t something I did with the team before the pandemic started. But afterwards, they were invaluable--allowing us to have a time set aside each week to have discussions and updates when we couldn’t be together. Infrequent enough that they could still get their work done, but frequent enough that there weren’t long stretches of silence from me. Having these check-ins already in place when implementation of CaiaSoft started provided me with a great communication tool.

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Buy-In: As I mentioned earlier, the shift from a homebrew inventory system to CaiaSoft occurred simultaneously with the libraries’ shift from Voyager to Alma, and for that matter we also shifted from Skype to Microsoft Teams. So it's natural there were several growing pains.  I tried to stave off too much negativity by pointing out the benefits of using CaiaSoft wherever I could to underscore that our work will indeed be much easier after the growing pains. But I did allow space for some negativity. It was a big change after all, and I was sympathetic! In our weekly check-ins I made sure to make time for my team to talk about what their thoughts were—letting them vent, letting *them* identify the cool new things we’d be able to do with the new software, and providing space for them to think through how things would change. Sometimes the venting was just in response to something new, and sometimes it was a good suggestion in disguise, so I tried to listen to everything compassionately and non-dismissively.

In order to get buy-in from the team, I involved them in the new workflows I was writing. Since they were going to be the ones doing this work on a daily basis, they needed to have ownership of their tasks. If I wrote a suggestion for a workflow, I let them test it and see how that worked for them, tweaking if necessary. If I didn’t have the time to write out a custom workflow, I let one of the team do it and had them teach the rest of us. It helped me out by providing a different view point, catching aspects I wouldn’t have. I think letting the team learn from each other was also valuable, either from asking for help when they were on-site or discussing it in our weekly check-ins. After all, as the old saying goes, the best way to learn is to teach.

Lastly, transparency is a value of mine, and I let the team know every time there was a set-back or an extended conversation I was having with Caia and other members of the implementation team. I hope this helped them feel like CaiaSoft wasn’t just *happening* to them, but that they were stakeholders and were entitled not only to stay apprised of everything going on, but to have input into how we transitioned to this software. They’re the ones who have to use this new software after all. When we had delays getting our contract signed, I thought it was important to let them know the status of that so they wouldn’t be taken by surprise when the implementation actually began. Throughout this whole process, I was working for them as much as I was leading them.

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Conclusion:
Overall, the team thought the transition went as well as could be expected. They didn’t necessarily like the remote training modules, but as one team member put it, they still felt better prepared for using CaiaSoft than they felt after hours of training videos for our other software. I will say that helped, having something much more unpopular to compare it to. 

These strategies I employed to lead my team through a software transition are useful even outside a pandemic. Create a concrete training plan, allowing for accommodations for people’s learning styles and making it as easy as possible to get trained. Take a collaborative approach with your team when making new workflows by getting their ideas and feedback. Allow them to be human when faced with change and make sure you do everything you can to support them through it.

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Thank you for letting me share my thoughts with you today. I hope this was helpful, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the presentations today. Here is my contact info for anyone who wants to reach out.