When time is a libraries' scarcest resources and there is always a laundry list of tasks to be done, it can be challenging to justify taking a step back to talk through, map, and evaluate workflows. However, investing the time to look at the bigger picture can create better and more sustainable processes that actually save time in the end. With the arrival of a new department head, we have recently successfully undertaken this work at our academic library. In this presentation, we will share our experience prioritizing this work and the expected and surprising outcomes we achieved. We'll share how we facilitated workflow conversations to focus on clarity as well as improvements and how we utilized these discussions to create easily readable process maps. We'll also highlight how we used the final products more broadly to build understanding with others in the organization about the scope and complexity of the depicted work. Finally, we will provide recommendations for tools to make this work easier.
