The CMC Needs Assessment,
Part I: Context

A. Background

Collection Maintenance and Circulation (CMC) is a work team of the larger Materials Access Team (MAT). Members work at all Main and branch library locations.

CMC is charged with accurately shelving library materials to ensure their accessibility to users, and with providing accurate, friendly and efficient circulation processes. Most members also work at an Information Desk service site. The team recognized early on the importance of having customer input when planning services.

MAT charged a new team -- the CMC Needs Assessment Project Team -- with the task of finding out what customers needed. The input would be used in MAT's strategic planning, and would be used to answer such questions as: Which services are most important to our customers? Which services are in need of improvement, from our customers' perspective? Which services need attention first -- which projects should we tackle this year?

B. Purpose of the project

Four members of MAT's CMC work team were chosen to serve as the project team. They were charged with:

(1) Performing needs assessment on CMC's customers
(2) Determining the feasibility of performing needs assessment on potential customers
(3) Acting upon the findings and changing services as necessary

Parameters included addressing CMC services only and the expectation that their work and results will be recorded and handed off to a cross-functional team within MAT. The project team was also asked to look at how to integrate needs assessment into MAT's ongoing work. A potential difficulty was that the team lacked previous experience in needs assessment. See the complete charge to the project team, which they developed themselves.

Let's continue.