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Technological Catalyst: Embracing Technology for Books and Journals in Scholarly Publishing
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Technological Catalyst: Embracing Technology for Books and Journals in Scholarly Publishing
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Segment:0 .
Thank you so much. Hi, everyone. Thank you for your patience and welcome to our session. My name is Rodney elder. I'm the Executive Vice President of virtue sales North America, and I've been working in the publishing industry for over 20 years. Sitting here beside me is EMF, the MIT Press director of business systems and operations.
Welcome. Thank you. Thanks for joining me. Mf has worked at MIT Press for over 20 years in various roles, including business analysis and data services. Suffice to say, she knows everything about the press from start to finish. This session is going to look at technology as a catalyst for change, and how the MIT Press are embracing technology for managing articles, assets, books, journals to increase efficiencies, streamline workflows, and to simplify their technology landscape.
Let's move disprove this before we kick off and get right into the session. For those who may not have heard of virtuosos before. I'd like to give you a brief introduction of who virtuosos is, who we work with, and what the software actually does. Virtual sales are the developers of the biblio suite, and we provide development implementation consulting services. What's a little bit different is we have a very rapid development cycle of releasing new functionality into the base package.
So all our customers are actually on the same software code, but we have some publishers who are two users up to 2,500 users. And so if people have got questions of how we actually do that, I'm happy to walk you through that later on. We have very close relationships with our customers, so we don't have 1,000 customers. We have probably like 120 customers, but we are very close with them.
And so MF is going to share today what it's like to work with us and how we approach a project. So we work with many of the world's leading academic and scholarly trade education professional publishers, including Elsevier, Sage, Oxford, the MIT Press, Bloomsbury academic, the World Health organization, iLO, an array of many others.
These publishers use biblio suite to streamline workflows and bring efficiencies to their business processes. Now, what exactly is biblio suite. Let me just see. No matter what the product is, whether it's content chunks, journals, books e-platforms events. Biblio has a way for you to manage your publishing program. Biblio suite provides an end to end solution for the product life cycle from ideation, putting in your concepts for new products, articles, acquisitions, whatever it may be.
Panels through to production management and asset workflows. We also do contributor management. And we heard in the previous session about orcid IDs being able to store those and share those product metadata management, including PACs platforms with integrated onix distribution in and out. So if you need to receive data back in, we're able to do that as well. Now the biblio suite also manages things like third party rights, contracts, rights permissions for outbound sales, along with Royalty processing and author portals.
In addition, things that we didn't think would be as cool and in Vogue is things like paper and inventory management, which have come back into Vogue. And so in the last few years, everyone's been scrambling for paper. So we actually manage the storage and distribution of paper. To note, biblio suite also integrates to many upstream systems such as emissions, peer review and content creation systems.
So now that a little bit about what we do, let's hear from the Star of the presentation. Mf perhaps you'd like to say a word or two about the MIT Press. Sure Thank you. And Thanks to everybody for being here today. MIT Press, which is up the road and a little up the river, was established in 1962. Each year we publish about 350 books, 40 journals, and we have about 100 staff.
We are in the top 10% of University presses in the up world, and one of the few that still have our own bookstore. That's us. All right. Thanks for that, IMF. So we're here to talk about a project that you're currently undertaking in changing your technology stack at the press.
Let's kick off with a simple question of why. What motivated the press to begin this ambitious technology project. Because this isn't a small piece of work you're undertaking. No it isn't. We've grown over the years. Our businesses have shifted, and as some of the software has been replaced, we've created this scattered and disconnected infrastructure.
Asset storage is in various locations, supported internally by MIT or externally by third party vendors. We have a completely separate Royalty system. Metadata distribution is being handled internally and by 2 separate vendors. We have a lack of data and asset visibility and accessibility, and all of this is requiring multiple data entry, numerous APIs.
And a lot of manual intervention to get data in and out of our various systems. Our reporting requires a lot of vlookups between two system exports. And Additionally, our in-house management system relies on one developer. So if he is on vacation and the system goes down, which it never does except when he is on vacation. We actually have to call him so that he can get it back up and running.
So to summarize, our current infrastructure is a drain on resources and time. Thanks, MF. So in summary, you're consolidating six different systems and databases plus a few other spreadsheets and other systems that aren't included in this into a single platform that you're looking to then increase your technology, increase your visibility, and reduce your technology stack that you need to manage.
And can you tell us a little bit more about what you're actually trying to achieve from this project. Everything OK. MIT Press is fortunate to have many long term staff at the press. At 20 years of experience, I'm actually considered young in terms of press staff, but that also means we have incredible institutional knowledge and have become too reliant on the workflows that were established in the 80s and 90s, which seemed ingenious at the time but are now outdated.
So the opportunities we have with this comprehensive biblio migration are profound in terms of unlocking new avenues for growth, optimizing workflows, flexibility for future proofing the press, transformation of our operations from a full publishing cycle, bringing data and assets together for both books and journals. Synchronisation to automatically update across editions, increasing efficiency, productivity and collaboration.
Press wide. OK I mean, that's quite a lot to achieve. And actually even yesterday when we were doing some workshops, I guess things that you weren't even thinking about would be valuable popping out of the woodwork, so to speak. There were things like people are currently manually creating documents, copying and pasting their moving things from one system, creating AP and L in one system, then keying it into the publishing system and things like this that maybe weren't there in your Roi in terms of looking at what benefits.
But there's things that seem to keep popping out of benefits that you may not have been aware of. There were a few light bulb moments yesterday. Yeah all right. That's great. So let's dive into logistics. Not everyone is. How do I go from doing where I am with six systems, which can be very daunting to how do I get started on the journey for implementing this change.
We had done some research and a few years ago actually, and the research that we had done indicated that any project of this scope was going to be financially out of the ballpark for us. We were very, very lucky this year to receive a grant, to be able to do the type of system integration and infrastructure change that we felt was necessary to future proof the press. So we expanded our initial scope.
In fact, just even after contacting you when we contacted you originally, it was just for one or two systems. And then as we started talking, we realized we could really do a whole major overhaul here and get more bang for our buck in terms of. Communicating to people and what our communication plan was like. We started small and then grew, kept a tight circle, kept it very tight.
In fact, it was just me and the Systems Manager when we first talked. And then we slowly brought people into the fold. We sent an all staff email the night before we made. I made a presentation. And then we did a lot work with you to talk about ways that we could show demonstrations and have people participate in discovery phases to get more and more buy in.
Yeah and so in terms of looking at that and getting buy in, what was the thought process for not including more people at the start. Change is difficult. Change is difficult for everybody. And our staff is very comfortable, as any staff would be on the processes that they have and the workflows that they have and the systems that they know. And in order to be able to get help, people feel comfortable. I wanted the communication to be as thoughtful as possible.
And when I presented it to staff, I spent a lot of time explaining why this change needed to take place at this time. The current systems that we have, our current books title management system came about at MIT Press in 2006. So that's almost coming up on 20 years. And then our journal system never really achieved. My friends here and journals never really achieved what we had hoped it would achieve.
And so the real hope here is that we can help both the book side of the house and the journal side of the house move forward with integrated workflows. And it is interesting that when we first started talking were looking at a part of the project. And often that happens is when you see an integrated workflow, you people might say to me, we need a new Royalty system.
And I say, OK, well, royalties is at the end of the line. But the royalties is connected to a contract. The contract is connected to a product and the product is connected to a contract. And so we need to process your royalties. We need to rebuild everything else in between. And so often that that's a realization where people go Oh, I thought I just need a Royalty system. Well, actually, no, it's the start of the process and how you want it to flow through to the end.
And so while you don't have to do everything at one time. There is certain parts. If you're trying to improve workflows, that you really do need, sort of a base level of data. So yeah, there's so many exciting things that are going to be able to review with this. So do you want to tell us a little bit and share with the people here about the implementation process.
So far and how you've gone about that. Sure so we have a core team of people on the press side who are working with a core team of people on your side. I think one element that's key is that there's a project manager that's identified on each side who are running both systems parallel both in parallel. Exactly Thank you. Another benefit is that all of your people are former publishing experts.
And that has been really key for us because, as I said, we have some old workflows here. And to have somebody not only tell us what a best practice is, that we might want to think about changing at this point, but also understand what our pain points are. That's been huge. Really huge. Yeah, I think it's interesting for change management, especially in companies that have a very solid staff base that don't change very often in terms of turnover, that getting change can be difficult.
And so I think change management is a really important part. And we're going to touch a little bit on that later on. But it's more about having our staff being able to help your staff in understanding why a change is done. So often people say, I've been doing this for 10 years, and there's not a chance in hell I am going to change my process for anyone. And then you're like, well, actually at these companies, they do sorry.
They do this process at this company. They do that process. And these are the optimal ways for the publishing house. And so having the management at the top level buy in to say, look, we want to get the most out of the software and have industry best practice, not your personal best practice, because that's really why we're doing this, is to get what's going to be best for the publishing company, not just an individual person within it.
Exactly and the why, going back to what you said with the why, I think the why is really important because as the why is explained or as your team asks us, why are you doing it a certain way. We're able to look at processes in a way that we've never been able to look at them before and really start to think about, why are we doing it this way. Yeah Yeah. And some other things came up yesterday about the pod discussion, didn't it, about hey, we've got an addition.
We're now switching it to pod. What does that mean. How do we organize our assets. So that now the people to go and find the right pod assets managing the production schedules for those sorts of things. So it's really interesting to see all these things that people are doing, which is amazing. Like this is the publishing can look at it two ways.
It's not that complicated or it's pretty complicated when you get into the nuts and bolts of every piece of the puzzle third party rights, inventory tracking it gets a lot. And people are managing this often offline with just processes that they've developed themselves because they didn't have something. Also back to what you were saying. One of the other reasons that we love working with you guys is at the very beginning of the process.
Our project manager explained that this whole process was going to be somewhat of a trust fall, and that really resonated with my team specifically is a bunch of programmers, and they went about this thinking they knew exactly how this whole migration process was going to work, and how this implementation process was going to work. Your process is very different from what they expected. There was a little bit of apprehension at first, but it has turned out to be cool.
Well, we caught you. We caught you. Yeah Yeah. And I think that comes down to there's a point up there about timelines and phase go live and things like that. And a lot of that comes down to what systems you have currently, what resources you have available to migrate from legacy systems.
And also, understanding what parts go together, what parts can't be untangled. And they literally have to go together. You and I think we're going to be talking a little bit about this as well. But also there was an interesting thing about when we started were wanting to go into a contract phase a little bit earlier and I said, no, we can't do that. We have to hold hands first and we have to walk.
We have to walk along together and do a discovery. And so what were your thoughts on that. It's a bit weird to say you don't want a contract. It was weird. It was one of the first things of how this is not what we were used to but it really made sense because the discovery phase allowed you to be able to come back to us and say, a project of your scope can go run from this amount of money and hours to this amount of money and hours.
Based on what we've learned, we think you're going to fall about here. And here are the seven things that you have asked for that are not part of our original plan. And so we were able to actually identify and look at each one of those seven. Get a rough estimate in terms of t-shirt sizes small, medium, large and extra large, and figure out how important this was for us.
And that was a really important point of the whole process to that's right to be able to look and say, are we as a business, so reliant on this one thing that we are willing to spend this extra large amount of dollars and hours to get this, or is this in our opportunity now to abandon some old practices and embrace some new ones. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I think the workshops.
So this is the thing is sometimes people say to us. We do agile, we do waterfall implementations in terms of our customers. And what we say is that we do the best way to implement our software at any size publisher. This is how you do it. And so we have to work with publishers to help them come along to the path. But this is our goal is to do it in the most optimal way possible.
Because we have limited resources. So we need to move projects along. And so we want people going live generally within 12 months as a minimum, smaller ones can go live much faster. It just depends on the complexity. But it's about being able to get across a line. And also it's not going to finish when you go live. And that's another thing that you stressed.
Yeah it is. Once you go live that's just the first step really. It's like you've left the starting blocks is when you go live. That's not like Oh we've finished. This is now the starting block because this is where the opportunity is. This is the icing on the cake. This is where you really get to have some fun and be able to improve your workflows, your systems, because you actually have the tool there.
It's hard to people do change management and they get change management consultants in before they understand the software that they're actually going to be implementing, which doesn't make any sense in the world. So you should be making changes in mind with the technology stack that you have. Not pie in the sky of Oh, if I could do this, there'd be pink, fluffy elephants around and this would be fabulous.
So being able to do the right things in the right order is important. So the next one is change management. And let's talk a little bit more about that because with the staff have and and I would say this was another element of the partnership is we have somebody on staff whose job was to who was a developer for the title management system that we had, and there was a real risk there that he was going to feel that he was being pushed out, which he did when this announcement was made.
And in talking with him and working with him and then having him work with your team, realizing that this is just a growth opportunity for him, and he has a set of skills that can be transferred to this new arena, and he's really embraced it. And I think had I think it's been working out really well. I mean, look, this is I've actually got another person in the background, John, give a shout out to John Stevenson ex-harvard.
And that was the thing is, he was a developer, as well. And that was one of the things about stressing is that instead of developing them, spending your time doing just the chores of keeping a system going, this is about being able to make real differences, being able to have a tool that's there that you can then own yourself, configure it, make changes, and have it ready for the users on a ready made basis. It's really a different mindset.
Yeah completely completely. And I'm looking at your last bullet there. Communication is key. And this has been constant communication with my team. And then moving forward I realized that after I heard somebody at MIT Press say, well, is this biblio thing even going to happen. So I realized that we will be having frequent updates at all of our staff meetings.
Even if it's to say Yes, it's still happening. And we don't have anything to show yet. But here's what's been worked on behind the scenes. Yeah, I think that's a really important point, is because you make an announcement and then there's crickets for six months, nine months. And people are like, so Yeah, I heard something about that. So you're telling people about how it's going, but also you have a ready made product with your data in it already and you can show people, look, this is where we're at.
You can do a presentation of like, hey, this is what's done so far. And people can get a feeling for it, right. It's really brings it to life. So we had a question come through around on the platform. How many project management titles or positions were there from the vendor and customer. And so I'll just take that. So on our side and the customer side, we've got a project director.
So you're responsible for the contract and the delivery of the project to the contract. So that's why we spend a lot of time in discovery is because expectation management is the most important thing in a project. It is what is someone expecting if they're expecting something that is completely different to what you're prepared to deliver. There's going to be tears. And so what we want to do is manage expectations.
So that's the project directors role. We've got project manager on each side that makes sure that they're working through the project. And both parties have the right resources, the right people available at the right time. We have business analysts, customer has business analysts, technical specialists, people working in the projects. We have super users, consultants.
And the customer also has the equivalent. So whatever we're doing, if we're implementing journals, who's the lead on journals from the customer who's the lead on journals from virtually sales. Same with data management interfaces. Yeah, exactly. So that's how we do that. There was a question also did you engage a change manager. And what's your plans to make adoption stick.
Change management was really led by me. Yeah based on everything else that we've discussed. And to make adoption stick. This is it. There isn't going to be another system at the press after this is implemented. So it will stick. Yeah and so like even doing the Brown box or Brown bag lunch teaching sessions like the book industry study group does and doing those there.
But also having people to have a place. What I found is that if you just train people and you say, here's everything you can do in the system, this is people get overwhelmed. But if you're like, tell me the five things that you need to do this week, and I will organize to show you how to do that in the software. And I won't show you 50 other things that you don't need to do.
This week, we'll focus on the key things. I think that really helps people get adoption, because people don't like learning what they don't need for right here, right now. What I agree, I totally agree, and one of the practices that we had in place with our old title management system was a working, working group among press employees who were considered kind of super users. So people not only having one expert at the press that they can ask, but peers among the press that they can also ask.
The second thing is that because we're doing this major implementation right now, your team has such a vast array of training materials, and we're able to build our own as we go along. So this will be a part of our library moving forward as well. And also recording, having a video library. I mean, you're in a good position where you don't have a high turnover of staff, but that can be a challenge as where you implement with one team at the customer and 12 months later, there's a new team.
And that new team wasn't trained on how to use the software. And so you end up with them half getting the software. And if you don't fix that and optimize it, it can be a problem. So keeping that adoption sticking with this there was the thing is have you lost any people because of biblio or not that I'm aware of. It wouldn't surprise me if some people have made decisions to retire based on the fact that there's a new system and they just don't want to.
But I have not heard of any person in an exit interview saying, I'm leaving because of biblio. OK, so we are right on time. This is good. We do have time. If there's any other questions from anyone. Crickets crickets. Crickets OK, perfect.
So Thanks for attending. If you do want to get wrong thing, get in contact with MF or myself. Here is my contact email at MFS. And Mark and myself will be also around for the next couple of days, so please don't be shy. We love to have a chat and if you've got any questions, let us know. So I appreciate your time.
Thank you.
Segment:0 .
Thank you so much. Hi, everyone. Thank you for your patience and welcome to our session. My name is Rodney elder. I'm the Executive Vice President of virtue sales North America, and I've been working in the publishing industry for over 20 years. Sitting here beside me is EMF, the MIT Press director of business systems and operations.
Welcome. Thank you. Thanks for joining me. Mf has worked at MIT Press for over 20 years in various roles, including business analysis and data services. Suffice to say, she knows everything about the press from start to finish. This session is going to look at technology as a catalyst for change, and how the MIT Press are embracing technology for managing articles, assets, books, journals to increase efficiencies, streamline workflows, and to simplify their technology landscape.
Let's move disprove this before we kick off and get right into the session. For those who may not have heard of virtuosos before. I'd like to give you a brief introduction of who virtuosos is, who we work with, and what the software actually does. Virtual sales are the developers of the biblio suite, and we provide development implementation consulting services. What's a little bit different is we have a very rapid development cycle of releasing new functionality into the base package.
So all our customers are actually on the same software code, but we have some publishers who are two users up to 2,500 users. And so if people have got questions of how we actually do that, I'm happy to walk you through that later on. We have very close relationships with our customers, so we don't have 1,000 customers. We have probably like 120 customers, but we are very close with them.
And so MF is going to share today what it's like to work with us and how we approach a project. So we work with many of the world's leading academic and scholarly trade education professional publishers, including Elsevier, Sage, Oxford, the MIT Press, Bloomsbury academic, the World Health organization, iLO, an array of many others.
These publishers use biblio suite to streamline workflows and bring efficiencies to their business processes. Now, what exactly is biblio suite. Let me just see. No matter what the product is, whether it's content chunks, journals, books e-platforms events. Biblio has a way for you to manage your publishing program. Biblio suite provides an end to end solution for the product life cycle from ideation, putting in your concepts for new products, articles, acquisitions, whatever it may be.
Panels through to production management and asset workflows. We also do contributor management. And we heard in the previous session about orcid IDs being able to store those and share those product metadata management, including PACs platforms with integrated onix distribution in and out. So if you need to receive data back in, we're able to do that as well. Now the biblio suite also manages things like third party rights, contracts, rights permissions for outbound sales, along with Royalty processing and author portals.
In addition, things that we didn't think would be as cool and in Vogue is things like paper and inventory management, which have come back into Vogue. And so in the last few years, everyone's been scrambling for paper. So we actually manage the storage and distribution of paper. To note, biblio suite also integrates to many upstream systems such as emissions, peer review and content creation systems.
So now that a little bit about what we do, let's hear from the Star of the presentation. Mf perhaps you'd like to say a word or two about the MIT Press. Sure Thank you. And Thanks to everybody for being here today. MIT Press, which is up the road and a little up the river, was established in 1962. Each year we publish about 350 books, 40 journals, and we have about 100 staff.
We are in the top 10% of University presses in the up world, and one of the few that still have our own bookstore. That's us. All right. Thanks for that, IMF. So we're here to talk about a project that you're currently undertaking in changing your technology stack at the press.
Let's kick off with a simple question of why. What motivated the press to begin this ambitious technology project. Because this isn't a small piece of work you're undertaking. No it isn't. We've grown over the years. Our businesses have shifted, and as some of the software has been replaced, we've created this scattered and disconnected infrastructure.
Asset storage is in various locations, supported internally by MIT or externally by third party vendors. We have a completely separate Royalty system. Metadata distribution is being handled internally and by 2 separate vendors. We have a lack of data and asset visibility and accessibility, and all of this is requiring multiple data entry, numerous APIs.
And a lot of manual intervention to get data in and out of our various systems. Our reporting requires a lot of vlookups between two system exports. And Additionally, our in-house management system relies on one developer. So if he is on vacation and the system goes down, which it never does except when he is on vacation. We actually have to call him so that he can get it back up and running.
So to summarize, our current infrastructure is a drain on resources and time. Thanks, MF. So in summary, you're consolidating six different systems and databases plus a few other spreadsheets and other systems that aren't included in this into a single platform that you're looking to then increase your technology, increase your visibility, and reduce your technology stack that you need to manage.
And can you tell us a little bit more about what you're actually trying to achieve from this project. Everything OK. MIT Press is fortunate to have many long term staff at the press. At 20 years of experience, I'm actually considered young in terms of press staff, but that also means we have incredible institutional knowledge and have become too reliant on the workflows that were established in the 80s and 90s, which seemed ingenious at the time but are now outdated.
So the opportunities we have with this comprehensive biblio migration are profound in terms of unlocking new avenues for growth, optimizing workflows, flexibility for future proofing the press, transformation of our operations from a full publishing cycle, bringing data and assets together for both books and journals. Synchronisation to automatically update across editions, increasing efficiency, productivity and collaboration.
Press wide. OK I mean, that's quite a lot to achieve. And actually even yesterday when we were doing some workshops, I guess things that you weren't even thinking about would be valuable popping out of the woodwork, so to speak. There were things like people are currently manually creating documents, copying and pasting their moving things from one system, creating AP and L in one system, then keying it into the publishing system and things like this that maybe weren't there in your Roi in terms of looking at what benefits.
But there's things that seem to keep popping out of benefits that you may not have been aware of. There were a few light bulb moments yesterday. Yeah all right. That's great. So let's dive into logistics. Not everyone is. How do I go from doing where I am with six systems, which can be very daunting to how do I get started on the journey for implementing this change.
We had done some research and a few years ago actually, and the research that we had done indicated that any project of this scope was going to be financially out of the ballpark for us. We were very, very lucky this year to receive a grant, to be able to do the type of system integration and infrastructure change that we felt was necessary to future proof the press. So we expanded our initial scope.
In fact, just even after contacting you when we contacted you originally, it was just for one or two systems. And then as we started talking, we realized we could really do a whole major overhaul here and get more bang for our buck in terms of. Communicating to people and what our communication plan was like. We started small and then grew, kept a tight circle, kept it very tight.
In fact, it was just me and the Systems Manager when we first talked. And then we slowly brought people into the fold. We sent an all staff email the night before we made. I made a presentation. And then we did a lot work with you to talk about ways that we could show demonstrations and have people participate in discovery phases to get more and more buy in.
Yeah and so in terms of looking at that and getting buy in, what was the thought process for not including more people at the start. Change is difficult. Change is difficult for everybody. And our staff is very comfortable, as any staff would be on the processes that they have and the workflows that they have and the systems that they know. And in order to be able to get help, people feel comfortable. I wanted the communication to be as thoughtful as possible.
And when I presented it to staff, I spent a lot of time explaining why this change needed to take place at this time. The current systems that we have, our current books title management system came about at MIT Press in 2006. So that's almost coming up on 20 years. And then our journal system never really achieved. My friends here and journals never really achieved what we had hoped it would achieve.
And so the real hope here is that we can help both the book side of the house and the journal side of the house move forward with integrated workflows. And it is interesting that when we first started talking were looking at a part of the project. And often that happens is when you see an integrated workflow, you people might say to me, we need a new Royalty system.
And I say, OK, well, royalties is at the end of the line. But the royalties is connected to a contract. The contract is connected to a product and the product is connected to a contract. And so we need to process your royalties. We need to rebuild everything else in between. And so often that that's a realization where people go Oh, I thought I just need a Royalty system. Well, actually, no, it's the start of the process and how you want it to flow through to the end.
And so while you don't have to do everything at one time. There is certain parts. If you're trying to improve workflows, that you really do need, sort of a base level of data. So yeah, there's so many exciting things that are going to be able to review with this. So do you want to tell us a little bit and share with the people here about the implementation process.
So far and how you've gone about that. Sure so we have a core team of people on the press side who are working with a core team of people on your side. I think one element that's key is that there's a project manager that's identified on each side who are running both systems parallel both in parallel. Exactly Thank you. Another benefit is that all of your people are former publishing experts.
And that has been really key for us because, as I said, we have some old workflows here. And to have somebody not only tell us what a best practice is, that we might want to think about changing at this point, but also understand what our pain points are. That's been huge. Really huge. Yeah, I think it's interesting for change management, especially in companies that have a very solid staff base that don't change very often in terms of turnover, that getting change can be difficult.
And so I think change management is a really important part. And we're going to touch a little bit on that later on. But it's more about having our staff being able to help your staff in understanding why a change is done. So often people say, I've been doing this for 10 years, and there's not a chance in hell I am going to change my process for anyone. And then you're like, well, actually at these companies, they do sorry.
They do this process at this company. They do that process. And these are the optimal ways for the publishing house. And so having the management at the top level buy in to say, look, we want to get the most out of the software and have industry best practice, not your personal best practice, because that's really why we're doing this, is to get what's going to be best for the publishing company, not just an individual person within it.
Exactly and the why, going back to what you said with the why, I think the why is really important because as the why is explained or as your team asks us, why are you doing it a certain way. We're able to look at processes in a way that we've never been able to look at them before and really start to think about, why are we doing it this way. Yeah Yeah. And some other things came up yesterday about the pod discussion, didn't it, about hey, we've got an addition.
We're now switching it to pod. What does that mean. How do we organize our assets. So that now the people to go and find the right pod assets managing the production schedules for those sorts of things. So it's really interesting to see all these things that people are doing, which is amazing. Like this is the publishing can look at it two ways.
It's not that complicated or it's pretty complicated when you get into the nuts and bolts of every piece of the puzzle third party rights, inventory tracking it gets a lot. And people are managing this often offline with just processes that they've developed themselves because they didn't have something. Also back to what you were saying. One of the other reasons that we love working with you guys is at the very beginning of the process.
Our project manager explained that this whole process was going to be somewhat of a trust fall, and that really resonated with my team specifically is a bunch of programmers, and they went about this thinking they knew exactly how this whole migration process was going to work, and how this implementation process was going to work. Your process is very different from what they expected. There was a little bit of apprehension at first, but it has turned out to be cool.
Well, we caught you. We caught you. Yeah Yeah. And I think that comes down to there's a point up there about timelines and phase go live and things like that. And a lot of that comes down to what systems you have currently, what resources you have available to migrate from legacy systems.
And also, understanding what parts go together, what parts can't be untangled. And they literally have to go together. You and I think we're going to be talking a little bit about this as well. But also there was an interesting thing about when we started were wanting to go into a contract phase a little bit earlier and I said, no, we can't do that. We have to hold hands first and we have to walk.
We have to walk along together and do a discovery. And so what were your thoughts on that. It's a bit weird to say you don't want a contract. It was weird. It was one of the first things of how this is not what we were used to but it really made sense because the discovery phase allowed you to be able to come back to us and say, a project of your scope can go run from this amount of money and hours to this amount of money and hours.
Based on what we've learned, we think you're going to fall about here. And here are the seven things that you have asked for that are not part of our original plan. And so we were able to actually identify and look at each one of those seven. Get a rough estimate in terms of t-shirt sizes small, medium, large and extra large, and figure out how important this was for us.
And that was a really important point of the whole process to that's right to be able to look and say, are we as a business, so reliant on this one thing that we are willing to spend this extra large amount of dollars and hours to get this, or is this in our opportunity now to abandon some old practices and embrace some new ones. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I think the workshops.
So this is the thing is sometimes people say to us. We do agile, we do waterfall implementations in terms of our customers. And what we say is that we do the best way to implement our software at any size publisher. This is how you do it. And so we have to work with publishers to help them come along to the path. But this is our goal is to do it in the most optimal way possible.
Because we have limited resources. So we need to move projects along. And so we want people going live generally within 12 months as a minimum, smaller ones can go live much faster. It just depends on the complexity. But it's about being able to get across a line. And also it's not going to finish when you go live. And that's another thing that you stressed.
Yeah it is. Once you go live that's just the first step really. It's like you've left the starting blocks is when you go live. That's not like Oh we've finished. This is now the starting block because this is where the opportunity is. This is the icing on the cake. This is where you really get to have some fun and be able to improve your workflows, your systems, because you actually have the tool there.
It's hard to people do change management and they get change management consultants in before they understand the software that they're actually going to be implementing, which doesn't make any sense in the world. So you should be making changes in mind with the technology stack that you have. Not pie in the sky of Oh, if I could do this, there'd be pink, fluffy elephants around and this would be fabulous.
So being able to do the right things in the right order is important. So the next one is change management. And let's talk a little bit more about that because with the staff have and and I would say this was another element of the partnership is we have somebody on staff whose job was to who was a developer for the title management system that we had, and there was a real risk there that he was going to feel that he was being pushed out, which he did when this announcement was made.
And in talking with him and working with him and then having him work with your team, realizing that this is just a growth opportunity for him, and he has a set of skills that can be transferred to this new arena, and he's really embraced it. And I think had I think it's been working out really well. I mean, look, this is I've actually got another person in the background, John, give a shout out to John Stevenson ex-harvard.
And that was the thing is, he was a developer, as well. And that was one of the things about stressing is that instead of developing them, spending your time doing just the chores of keeping a system going, this is about being able to make real differences, being able to have a tool that's there that you can then own yourself, configure it, make changes, and have it ready for the users on a ready made basis. It's really a different mindset.
Yeah completely completely. And I'm looking at your last bullet there. Communication is key. And this has been constant communication with my team. And then moving forward I realized that after I heard somebody at MIT Press say, well, is this biblio thing even going to happen. So I realized that we will be having frequent updates at all of our staff meetings.
Even if it's to say Yes, it's still happening. And we don't have anything to show yet. But here's what's been worked on behind the scenes. Yeah, I think that's a really important point, is because you make an announcement and then there's crickets for six months, nine months. And people are like, so Yeah, I heard something about that. So you're telling people about how it's going, but also you have a ready made product with your data in it already and you can show people, look, this is where we're at.
You can do a presentation of like, hey, this is what's done so far. And people can get a feeling for it, right. It's really brings it to life. So we had a question come through around on the platform. How many project management titles or positions were there from the vendor and customer. And so I'll just take that. So on our side and the customer side, we've got a project director.
So you're responsible for the contract and the delivery of the project to the contract. So that's why we spend a lot of time in discovery is because expectation management is the most important thing in a project. It is what is someone expecting if they're expecting something that is completely different to what you're prepared to deliver. There's going to be tears. And so what we want to do is manage expectations.
So that's the project directors role. We've got project manager on each side that makes sure that they're working through the project. And both parties have the right resources, the right people available at the right time. We have business analysts, customer has business analysts, technical specialists, people working in the projects. We have super users, consultants.
And the customer also has the equivalent. So whatever we're doing, if we're implementing journals, who's the lead on journals from the customer who's the lead on journals from virtually sales. Same with data management interfaces. Yeah, exactly. So that's how we do that. There was a question also did you engage a change manager. And what's your plans to make adoption stick.
Change management was really led by me. Yeah based on everything else that we've discussed. And to make adoption stick. This is it. There isn't going to be another system at the press after this is implemented. So it will stick. Yeah and so like even doing the Brown box or Brown bag lunch teaching sessions like the book industry study group does and doing those there.
But also having people to have a place. What I found is that if you just train people and you say, here's everything you can do in the system, this is people get overwhelmed. But if you're like, tell me the five things that you need to do this week, and I will organize to show you how to do that in the software. And I won't show you 50 other things that you don't need to do.
This week, we'll focus on the key things. I think that really helps people get adoption, because people don't like learning what they don't need for right here, right now. What I agree, I totally agree, and one of the practices that we had in place with our old title management system was a working, working group among press employees who were considered kind of super users. So people not only having one expert at the press that they can ask, but peers among the press that they can also ask.
The second thing is that because we're doing this major implementation right now, your team has such a vast array of training materials, and we're able to build our own as we go along. So this will be a part of our library moving forward as well. And also recording, having a video library. I mean, you're in a good position where you don't have a high turnover of staff, but that can be a challenge as where you implement with one team at the customer and 12 months later, there's a new team.
And that new team wasn't trained on how to use the software. And so you end up with them half getting the software. And if you don't fix that and optimize it, it can be a problem. So keeping that adoption sticking with this there was the thing is have you lost any people because of biblio or not that I'm aware of. It wouldn't surprise me if some people have made decisions to retire based on the fact that there's a new system and they just don't want to.
But I have not heard of any person in an exit interview saying, I'm leaving because of biblio. OK, so we are right on time. This is good. We do have time. If there's any other questions from anyone. Crickets crickets. Crickets OK, perfect.
So Thanks for attending. If you do want to get wrong thing, get in contact with MF or myself. Here is my contact email at MFS. And Mark and myself will be also around for the next couple of days, so please don't be shy. We love to have a chat and if you've got any questions, let us know. So I appreciate your time.
Thank you.
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