2018 Charleston Library Conference

At George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida, employees are increasingly utilizing project management (PM) tools to accomplish their daily work. After being introduced to Agile Project Management and its methodologies, members of the Accounting and Serials (A&S) Unit realized that many of their daily practices for materials budget management mirrored those of the Scrum framework of Agile, such as time boxing, incremental releases, ceremonies, and core principles.

The A&S Unit within the Acquisitions and Collections Services Department is responsible for managing the libraries’ materials budgets. Developing the annual materials budget allocation is an extensive process that begins in November/December with a rough estimate derived from prior-year final expenditure figures. As the year progresses and expenditure commitments increase, the allocations estimate becomes more precise and it culminates after a successful completion of the budget rollover.

This poster describes the methodology used last year by the A&S Unit to derive the annual materials budget allocation, and the serendipitous realization that their practices matched many of the project management elements of the Scrum framework. A visual comparison of the A&S Unit practices and the Scrum framework will be presented.