The History About The New London Library

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Introduction

The new London Public Library’s CEO is facing many challenges and asked for our recommendation, as the managerial accounting students, on LPL future plans which should be related on the available data. The enigma of this performance measurement strategy is to align overall performance of LPL in line with the public strategic objectives to attain maximum output. This report covers not only the financial measures which are considered to be the most important key aspect, but on the contrary it introduces a new approach by tracking record of non-financial aspects. These aspects comprise of customer satisfaction, employee contribution as well as job awareness and operations of the organization in general. The key perspectives of the balanced score card are inter-linked to each other making a chain of processes each encompasses its own objectives and contribute eventually to the overall strategic goal of the company. This is in fact the balance between the internal perspectives and external ones to maximize the output with optimum input by sticking with the strategic objectives. This report is prepared as a class assignment due to delivered data and has no other functions.

Statement of Problem

LPL is facing many challenges; first of all, catching the eye of LPL users is not an easy job, since lots of other opponents are providing some of similar competitive services such as the internet and Google surf facilities. Therefore following up and maintaining a premium service quality is a continuous concern for LPL’s chief and staff in order to keep on satisfying the needs and expectations of London residents. Financial pressure is other addressable field of study: While the income means are limited to donation, small public and provincial fund, and small other sources of revenue (such as fine revenue for late returns of material or workshops), the expectation on delivering the best service level possible is high. Thus assigning several costs into a relevant cost pool, finding cost drivers for many activities, and presenting cost of programs per dollar spent was difficult to quantify.

On the other hand, LPL labour force is about 200 employees where most of them are unionized. The majority of these employees witnessed lots of improvements and changes that took place in the library. In addition to that, the employees are working hard within their maximum power to cover all the needs of the library that is enlarging with time. Thus the availability of the staff per square footage is falling as not much employment opportunities are taking place. On the other hand, due to the internet LPL customers are not approaching the traditional way of customer service with the librarians that are still acquainted to the old fashion of work process. Thus LPL employees hold the concern of this problem. Developing a strategy for a successful working plan is Becker’s biggest challenge, as the sole existence of the strategy is not enough without an effective and useful implementation of it. Thus measuring its performance and success is a must for the excellent execution of the key strategic priorities such as: service superiority, staff, culture, technology, collecting, and managing the needs of the system within a very limited budget.

Data Analysis

The prime idea that followed implementation of balanced score card in London public library was to make it operate better in all aspects. As being a non-profit organization, the purpose was to enhance its functionality with optimize resources by keeping high community satisfaction. The bona fide purpose of balanced score card is the translation of mission and vision statements into a series of comprehensive objectives and performance measures. The initiative behind this strategy is to identify the areas and aspects which are lacking and require close attention for future planning keeping in view the limited finances and best utilization of the staff.

Effective Use of Balanced Scorecard

The main perspectives effectively contributing towards balanced score card of London public library illustrated as under:

Financial Perspective:

The foremost objectives of financial perspectives for London Public Library are fund raising and Revenue development as being not for profit organization. At the same time the emphasis was also on the optimization of operating costs which is accountable in accordance to the number of visits by the cardholder/new members and costs involving energy management.

The adoption of balanced score card strategy enlightens the areas which require immediate focus and attention. Subsequently, corresponding plans and strategies were formulated in order to work in close liaison with the objectives to attain fruitful results. The fundraising strategy was one of the effective utilization of balanced score card in London Public Library. This not only identified the importance of this particular area but also provided direction for the action plan required to achieve best output. As a result, a project team was specifically formulated to primarily focus on this vicinity and accomplish the objectives.

The statistics are the comparison of financial objectives with the bench mark and the targeted values. This facilitate in identification of revenue generation areas such as fund development, fee & rental revenue and grants; to be focused as of prime income source in order to meet the operational expense and subsidiary requirements. (Appendix A)

Community Perspective:

This portion of balanced score card contain areas related to the customer perspective, being prior and considerable portion of overall performance. Among other objectives coming under the umbrella of community perspective the significant and foremost concern was related to customer awareness and satisfaction level. As per requirement several surveys and feedback sessions were conducted to have feedback regarding different perspectives from the users. Moreover, a web-based survey was also formulated to encourage the users to give feedback easily. This response helped in focusing areas which require immediate attention and consequently systems were modified as per ease in accordance with the customer satisfaction. The vision to gain customer satisfaction not only fulfilled community objectives of the balanced score card but also gave hike to the increase in donations, helping the financial perspective.

In addition to that, balanced score card also enlightened the areas in which performance were not satisfactory. In order to improve these areas work out was deemed necessary. It mainly consists of slight decrease in number of visits by the customers to the library and a drastic decrease was observed in usage of library website. The action plans were formulated as a result to increase the performance in the lagging areas. The main projects to boost up these were literacy and youth service projects for the community.

Furthermore, London public Library value promise mainly focuses on the community perspective of the balanced score card, highlighting the main points. The purpose was to enhance customer’s awareness and satisfaction towards library usage. The slogan "choose, connect, discover, learn, relax, simplify" describes the library as a best place to seek what you are looking for.

The outcome of the balanced score card and how efficiently it helped in streamlining the lagging areas in community perspective is also explained in Appendix B.

Internal Processes Perspective

This perspective measures efficiency and effectiveness of their internal operations for meeting the needs of their customers, internal and/or external. This included total operating cost per employee, keeping track of the annual acquisitions of the titles and volumes per cardholder, collection / distribution timing, program development, IT support, partnership development, external communications. As per requirement subsequent project teams were made for successful implementation of tasks related to each area.

Organizational Readiness Perspective

The main focus of this perspective is to demonstrate what their strategic plan and initiatives they developed. The focus was to retain well trained employees by contributing to their creativity and energy equipped with leadership and growth opportunities. This included analysis like Top Box employee satisfaction, internet utilization, Patrons served per employee, employee development / turnover rate and new innovations or ideas per employee. Please see Appendix C for some more in-depth measures.

Future Strategic Plan

Based on Becker’s strategic plan to move LPL forward within the existing tight budget, she needs to measure the success of the key strategic priorities. Firstly, number of users’ visit to the library website did not meet the expectation which is a red signal for the library. Users tend to search the online materials through search engines more than library website which might be addressed by factors such as convenient, comprehension, and successful attainment. On the other hand, the statistics on use of electronic database and computers in library suggest that LPL successfully satisfied public the demand. The significant increase in the number of e-reference transactions express the public tendency to use electronic database even more in future. It seems that LPL administrators need to focus immediately on the library website and search engine.

From the human resource perspective, the balanced scorecard shows that the service excellence is not clearly reflected in it, due to the missed information about the customer satisfaction survey, but we can still infer that the service excellence is improved than before due to the increase in actual numbers of several sectors like the number of borrowed items, use of electronic database, number of new library registrations, number of programs, number of program attendees, etc. Therefore a recommendation for improving service excellence is suggested through allowing library users and staff to suggest ways to improve and simplify LPL services. Then these suggestions will be filtered and took into consideration in order to implement it. Moreover, this intrinsic motivator will be reinforced with an intrinsic reward system that will implement the idea through a recognition program that will quote the added service by the name of the person who suggested it.

Scorecards also show that a great number of users are following technology through the ability to access LPL’s website to reserve books online and use the electronic databases. This is inversely affecting the number of library visitors as due to technology most of LPL users are doing 2/3 of their work from home. On the other hand, technology is very important for the reduction of the total cost of the library. This will reduce the labor hour as well as the material and overhead cost of LPL. Therefore the increase in transforming into electronic services in the library will be a highly effective recommendation that will for sure positively affect the service excellence too, due to reducing the time to seek information, ability to remotely access the database, reducing the queue lines, and so on.

As for the employees, one recommendation is about creating the conditions for authentic motivation. This means that changing the way workers are treated may boost productivity more than changing the way they are paid. For instance, helping employees and training them rather than putting them under surveillance, listening to employees concerns and thinking about problems from their viewpoint, and providing plenty of feedback so they have done right and what they need to improve. Another recommendation is to provide choice for employees, as we are most likely to become enthusiastic about what we are doing -and do it well- when we are free to make decisions about the way we carry out a task. Moreover, we can still improve the involvement of the employees in the workplace and then increase their satisfaction. The major forms of employee involvement are participative management and representative participation. In participative management programs, subordinates share a significant degree of decision-making power with their immediate superiors. Representative participation is a system in which employees participate in organizational decision making through a small group of representative employees. Employee involvement programs can increase employee intrinsic motivation in the work. Appendix D is the summery of our recommendation for LPL future projects.

Conclusion

[To be added after project priority negotiations]

It is apparent that the implementation and effective usage of balanced score card is not only describing the successful performance in line with the organization objectives but also provides vision to make future decisions to enhance overall output in respective areas. The balanced score card of London public Library provides detailed comparison on several financial and non-financial objectives on the other hand it also brings management attention towards Ponds Mill library branch which was seemed to be lost in oblivion. The areas of improvement were identified and several measures were taken consisting of restructuring library building followed by massive renovation. In addition to that, new idea generation places were formulated for children and all other age group members.