A View Into the Consultancy Process - A project with CLOCKSS and LOCKSS

At Preserve Together, we believe the foundation of any successful consultancy project is ensuring that the process operates as partnership between ourselves and the client. Our aim is to understand their needs and challenges and to offer practical advice, guidance, and support, not suggest changes purely for the sake of change itself.

To help guide us in achieving that aim we adhere to some key principles. The first relates to the understanding that the clients are the experts in relation to their context and collections and, as such, should be active participants in the consultancy process. A good consultant will be open to learning from their clients and will value and encourage their opinions and input. Linked to this there is also the acknowledgement that people are fundamental to digital preservation, and that a person-focused approach should be taken in relation to information gathering and decision-making. Finally, clarity of purpose and communication is essential throughout the process, from project proposal to delivery of the final outputs to ensure the consultancy project goals are achieved.

These principles were at the forefront of our minds as we embarked on our first major consultancy project since founding Preserve Together: an assessment of the ingest and egress workflows of CLOCKSS as provided by the LOCKSS Program team.

CLOCKSS:

Stepping back to periodically review processes, workflows, and tools is a core practice in healthy organizations and effective teams. Over time, even well-designed systems can accumulate extra steps or workarounds that no longer make sense. Organizational goals, user expectations, and technology all evolve. A process that worked well last year or in the last decade may not be optimized for today.

This was an excellent time for a bit of a spring clean as we are also looking ahead excitedly to, and planning for, our transition to the new LOCKSS 2.0 software. This award-winning open-source software developed at Stanford University by the LOCKSS program team underpins the trusted CLOCKSS preservation service.

Preserve Together:

From the moment we entered into discussions with Alicia about the potential project we were eager to get started! Not only was it a really interesting opportunity that matched well with our skills and experience, but it provided the chance to work with a really great group of people. The first steps involved discussions about key goals of the project and the work required to achieve them. We worked collaboratively on a proposal - including clear phases of work, deliverables, effort estimates, and costings - and this was ultimately approved. We then discussed and agreed on contract terms, and it was time to get started.

The project was split into three phases with the first phase focusing on an examination of the overall requirements and goals for CLOCKSS operations, independent from existing technologies and approaches. Having a solid understanding of an organization or program’s internal and external context and motivations is essential to any assessment exercise, from strategy creation (as covered in our recently released Strategy Development course), through risk management, to workflow analysis. Phase 1 included review of CLOCKSS policy and strategy documents, interviews with senior staff from CLOCKSS and LOCKSS, and a brainstorming session with those team members based on findings from the desktop research and interviews. All of the information was then synthesized into a SWOT analysis and a summary of future development objectives.

Phase 2 moved from the big picture focus of Phase 1 to a more detailed investigation of current workflows to gather information on key processes and identify bottlenecks and time/effort pain points, as well as potential constraints on and opportunities for change. This included examination of documentation as well as several interviews with LOCKSS team members who walked us through their workflows and patiently answered our numerous questions! The opportunity to delve so deeply into a service’s processes was fascinating and those we talked to said it was an interesting challenge explaining workflows they were so familiar with to newcomers. As is often the case, we can become laser focused on what we need to get done every day and the chance to take a step back and look at things from a different perspective can be refreshing and enlightening. This activity provided us with lots of material for consideration, which was worked up into a deliverable to provide a high-level description of processes, identify key pain points, and our preliminary analysis.

The aim of the final phase was to produce a set of recommendations that could be implemented by CLOCKSS and LOCKSS. This included investigations of alternative ingest and egress tooling options, more questions for CLOCKSS and LOCKSS staff, and consideration of current good practice in the digital preservation community. Open communication continued throughout the phase, and this included the provision of a draft of the recommendation report for comments and feedback before submission of the final work product. When drafting the final report we had two main goals in mind, firstly to ensure that recommendations were clear, actionable, and based on good practice.

The second aim was to make sure that the report would be understandable and useful to all stakeholders who might read it. In this case, that meant not only CLOCKSS and LOCKSS staff, but also the CLOCKSS Board, who might have less familiarity with the intricacies of the day-to-day workflows. The report, therefore, needed to include enough contextual and descriptive information to make it understandable without becoming cumbersome, and jargon was avoided where possible. A good consultancy report can not only provide guidance and support but also have the potential to act as an advocacy and communication tool.

CLOCKSS:

From start to finish the Preserve Together team – Paul and Sharon – have been terrific to work with: kind, knowledgeable, proactive, and thoughtful. They quickly responded to my initial approach, listened to our requirements, crafted a project brief, and then refined this in dialogue with key stakeholders. The project management was smooth: meetings were scheduled, well-run, and well-documented. The whole team reported feeling positive and involved in the process. We’ve learned useful things about our workflows and policies. Highly recommended!

Preserve Together:

As we suspected when the project first came to us, we thoroughly enjoyed this chance to work with the CLOCKSS and LOCKSS teams. It was a privilege to have the opportunity to look under the hood of these well-respected services, and we learned plenty ourselves! In particular, seeing the dedication, hard work and commitment of everyone we spoke to was inspiring.

Finally, a significant benefit of a consultancy project is the opportunity to bring fresh eyes and new perspectives to a situation, whilst also allowing existing staff the chance to take a step back and look at things from a strategic perspective they don’t often get the chance to take. From our perspective, it felt like this benefit was realized during this project.

If you have a project or issue you think we can help with, please do get in touch via info@preservetogether.com or our Contact Form. We offer a wide range of services across digital preservation and can tailor the scale and approach to your context and needs. We look forward to hearing from you!

Find out more about CLOCKSS and their preservation services for e-journals and e-books.

Find out more about the LOCKSS program.