As noted in Chapter 1: Teamwork Makes the Dream Work: Building the Right Team, when creating new processes for work that crosses institutional boundaries, such as copyright review for archival collections, it is critical to make it a collaborative process. When possible, include members who have archival processing or scholarly communications expertise or both. Each perspective will be necessary to adequately identify the pain points in the current workflow and establish a new workflow that will incorporate rights review and satisfy the needs of both teams. Establish an official leader of the working group (or task force or committee) to keep the group on track, but set up guardrails that ensure equal participation and investment from everyone, including rotating note-taking during meetings and assigning tasks equitably to each member.

Conduct a gap analysis to properly evaluate and revise your workflows. A gap analysis is a process by which an organization can compare current performance to aspirational performance and set a strategy for removing barriers and improving processes/procedures to achieve stated goals (Leonard & Bottorff, 2022). Though more often used in the business sector, it’s a useful tool that can be deployed in most instances where an improvement needs to be made. It will help crystalize the current state from an ideal future state and identify what changes need to be made to get there.

Step 1. Identify the current state and define the problem you want to solve. Look at the processing workflows and the copyright analysis workflows. Think of them together as dependent and complementary processes. Map them both if that’s helpful (see below for visualization tools). Locate in the workflows where pain points occur, for example, bottlenecks from lack of staffing or loss of knowledge due to incomplete handoffs.

Step 2. Define the ideal state or the goal you wish to achieve. Identify the needs that are not currently being met and the functional requirements that a new workflow would support.

Step 3. Analyze the gaps. What about your current workflows prevents you from achieving the goals outlined in step 2? What needs to be added? What needs to be reassigned to better leverage existing expertise? What might be removed to increase efficiency? Where are redundancies causing work to be duplicated?

Step 4. Make a new plan and revise the workflows. Identify the best home for responsibilities, potentially using a RACI chart (Miranda & Watts, 2022). RACI stands for “responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed” and will help you clarify the involvement of both stakeholders and team members at different points in the process. Identify new tasks that need to be added to achieve the goals set in step 2. Remap using visualization tools (Leonard & Bottorff, 2022).

Once the new workflows are designed, solicit feedback from stakeholders. We asked for review from the leaders who had charged us with our work in the beginning. We asked if the workflows made sense to them and satisfied what they had been looking for in initiating this project. We also needed them to sign off on proposed approval workflows for digitization projects based on fair use, which we anticipated would be more complicated than approval workflows for digitization projects where rights or licenses had been secured from rightsholders or where the materials were all in the public domain. We also asked for feedback from the Digital Strategy Team in the Rose Library, the group primarily responsible for setting digitization priorities and internally vetting project proposals. Once we received their questions and feedback, we revised the workflows again, refining some elements and simplifying others.

One important feature of this work is treating the workflows as a living document. You won’t be able to anticipate all of the places where questions or problems might arise before you deploy the workflow. Remain flexible and be willing to incorporate feedback as the workflow is used in real time. You may wish to do a pilot project using the new workflows before you implement them fully. This is a good way to identify bugs and may give you the opportunity to identify situations where the workflow fails. However, it’s not necessary to conduct a pilot before implementation as long as you remember that this work is iterative and may need adjustments as staff use the workflows with different collections.

Visually representing your workflows can be helpful for documentation, training, and communication purposes. A visual representation of the workflow will help decision makers who need to approve processes but are not necessarily involved in doing the work governed by the policies. There are numerous tools available for workflow design. We used Lucidchart, which offers a free trial. Microsoft Office includes Visio, which may be easily accessible if your institution provides access to Office 365 products.

Once the new workflow is deployed, the work of your team may be concluded. It will be important to have a postimplementation check-in to discuss potential revisions. Once the new workflows are in place and running smoothly, consider how often any future check-ins need to occur or whether you can consider your project successfully completed. Congratulations on a job well-done!

Exercise: Prototype and Test Your Rights-Review Workflow

1. Sketch out the specific tasks.
2. What is step 1? Step 2? etc.
3. What are the hand-offs?
   1. Are the hand-offs critical hand-offs?
   2. Are there any decision points? – Refer back to Chapter 1: Teamwork Makes the Dream Work to identify decision makers.
   3. What tasks can/will happen concurrently?
4. Where does the documentation you’ve created come into play?
5. Use a mapping tool of your choice to create a prototype workflow
6. Test the workflow.
   1. Select pilot collections.
   2. Conduct a feedback session with relevant stakeholders.
   3. Test a faux collection.
   4. Assess and revise your workflow.
      1. Debrief on the workflow – discuss with your project team and stakeholders what went right, what went wrong, what could be improved.
      2. Revise workflow based on that feedback.
      3. Note that testing should be done by someone else who did not develop the workflow but is likely to be involved in the work, for example, a processing archivist who will need to use this workflow if/when it is operationalized.