OK. Hopefully you can see that slide OK there. Yes. It's really not about any particular technical discussion or challenges that we've faced. It's also aimed at those who are not aimed at those who are already publishing or close to publishing

because you've already overcome lots of the challenges that we would have faced. But it's really just an encouragement for those of you who are facing project challenges and some tips on how you can maximize your project value. Hopefully it's not too much of a thick jam presentation. Our hands keep telling us we're doing well. But sometimes it's hard to assess when you're actually doing it yourself.

The time frame for our project is nine months. It started in September last year and is scheduled to finish in May this year. The team, I just introduced my team here. We've got Lynn Davies. Lynn's a metadata manager. She's got a strong university background. Lynn, do you want to just quickly say hello?

Hello everyone. My background is librarianship. I've worked on and off at UTAS as a librarian since the late 80s in a range of positions. So I was brought in as the person who had the bibliographic background and the liaison role between the librarians and also the researchers.

And on my right here is Suli. Suli is our technical officer. Suli joined in November, so one, two, three months into the project. And she's a bit of a workhorse. She's really good technically. And she's also got a good background in repositories already, haven't you?

Yes, as a library, that's all about library. So it's actually really useful having a technical officer who has an understanding of library systems already.

And that was helpful for us in the project. As Simon's already mentioned, there have been four project managers on the project in the first four months. That's really not the project about a bit. The reason for those four project managers are quite varied. The first one was in the process of seeking work elsewhere

while he was in the process of writing up the initial project plan, so I guess his heart wasn't really in it. We then had a project manager who really got stuck into it for a month, but unfortunately there was a restructure at work, and she was taken off and put on different projects. Her manager took on, and because of that restructure within a month,

his position was made redundant as well. So at that point, Lynn was jumping up and down, so we've got to get this fixed. So I was brought in to try and get the project back on track, and I joined in the week before Christmas, which is not a good week to be handing over your existing projects or to take on new stuff, because when you come back in the new year,

you've pretty much forgotten everything that would be told you about the new project you were starting. So effectively, we were starting from scratch as of the start of this year. We did have a project plan, but it was unfinished. We had no sustainability plan, which is a key deliverable for hands. We had no work breakdown schedule either, which was some really...

The guys today who had been working on the project had just tackled each issue one by one without any key viewers to what they were aiming for, what they were trying to get to at the end of the project. It has been very reactive. So we've reacted to problems without having any sort of proactive plan.

At the point we came on board at the end of December, the start of January, our phase two deliverables were also due as well. And our budget had effectively been spent. We were four months into a project after our phase one initial funding had been given. So I guess you can see it was a bit of a challenge.

And the other thing was, as a project manager, I was located in a completely different area of the campus. And that was going to be challenging as well. So from that respect, as you can see, the challenges were there. On the positives, we've got a good team. I think we're all hardworking, at least we're told we are.

We're all trustworthy. And that's not just trustworthy. I'll be filing somebody to be back. It's more trustworthy in delegation of tasks. If I say, Lynn, I need this done, or if I say, can you solve that technical problem? They go away and they solve it. And if they've got problems, they come back and they talk with me. So we understand each other, what our capabilities are. I guess we're all accountable and responsible in what we do.

And that is a really positive thing, but for the team as well. And we've had an excellent ENDS liaison officer who's been very responsive to our needs. That's Lewis. We can highly recommend him. His knowledge about the project and what we're trying to do is second to none in our experience.

If he doesn't know, particularly if he knows somebody who knows. So he says, oh, you need to go and talk to JCU. They've had that problem. They can help you in that aspect. Or you need to go and talk to UniSA. They're doing things in the way that you're doing things. They can help you in that aspect. That's, again, proved invaluable for us.

And the team at Box Accusive, Duncan and Andrew, have been fantastic help as well. They're really responsive to Google groups. If you're going to work them through the Google groups, that's the way they work better. They've obviously got a very high workload in terms of trying to deal with a number of different customers they're trying to support.

So Accusive is there. The Google groups is their preferred methodology. Use those guys. They're fantastic. And also the great user community. As I mentioned, Lewis says you need to talk to so and so. You can talk to this university or that university. It's so useful to have other people who have gone through problems or are experiencing the same problems.

If you share your issues with them, you put two heads up better than one in effect. So having that knowledge available to us in UTAS has been really good. And you guys, you know who you are.

I won't mention names. Yes, we have a lot of thank yous. We have a lot of thank yous. There's about four or five universities who we've been leading on and they've been coming forward. So my recommendation to anybody who's still feeling their way is what I did when I was going through that process with changing project managers

is I literally sent emails to a couple of people that I've seen or met through these webinars and they were fantastic. I had phone calls from people where they just went through problems over the phone. We had Skype communication. And I had one where the librarian organized the technical person and another library person to come along

and the three of them spent an hour on the phone just talking to me about different issues. So we'd love to reciprocate if anybody has any questions from UTAS. We found that the communication... Ben, can I interrupt for a moment?

Yes. People having a lot of trouble hearing you because of the best straight effect, can you just move as close to the mic as possible? Can you hear me now? Yes, that's better.

Did you want me to repeat that? All I wanted to say was that during the period when I was effectively on my own, apart from having Louisa Dan's, I often sent an email to people that I'd met through these webinars asking questions. And I've had fantastic feedback. A lot of them Skyped me or organized phone calls and just rang me out of the blue to assist.

And so if there's anybody that is still feeling their way, I'd like to suggest that more than happy if we can assist. I found the user community nationally, everybody's going through the same problems and we're all at a range of stages.

And so you can feel quite panicky and isolated. And I think that's been a fantastic support, not only Anne's, but also other librarians or other technical managers or project managers that are experiencing the same thing. So that's just what I want to comment on.

Okay. Other strategies? Other strategies are co-location. So if you're four months into a five-month project and you feel like you're starting from scratch, you've really got to get the communication flowing. Co-location does that. So we're basically working out the same building now. And for the first two or three weeks, I was actually sitting next to Sue,

getting my head into the red box space, the mint space. It's the only way you're going to break down those barriers to communication, is to work in the same area. The communication becomes more organic. You get quicker fixing of miscommunications. You get cross-pollination of ideas when you're working together out of the same place.

If somebody else is having a phone call, you can hook into that. Oh yeah, I understand what you're saying. Perhaps we can solve it in another way. We have formal once-a-week meetings where we document everything we do, just so that we keep that record going and we can refer back to issues as well.

And being co-located also builds your team. I think you build up interpersonal relationships. And that, again, is invaluable when you're under pressure, when you're under stress and you need to try and solve problems. Everything we do goes on the wiki,

so we use that same confluence for information sharing outside the project, which is also forward-looking as well, so that at some point the team will be disbanded as a project and will go into operational mode. At least everything we've discovered is available to the new team as they take operational control of the product.

It also makes things more discoverable and accessible, which is pretty much like a repository anyway. Communication. I didn't refer to this already. Work here as a liaison officer. Work the weekly clicks.

Work your product support team up in Q-SIF. Talk to your business stakeholders and talk to your business users as well. That's probably a good segue to hand over to what you've been doing as a metadata manager. Okay. Can you hear me okay, Simon? Yeah, that's good. Keep up the volume and closeness to the mic.

Where's the microphone? Just talking. Just call it out if you can't hear, and I'll try and go slowly. I've built all my slides, so pretty much everything I'm going to say hopefully will be on the slide. My number one aim was to try and develop positive relationships,

which could be built on after the project. That included everyone from researchers, data managers, the research office, and even librarians within the library. That was my number one aim, to field any negativity and to just start shifting the culture. John probably didn't mention,

because we're in a short time frame here, but UTAS came on board with this nine-month project that has been compressed basically to six months without having done any earlier ANDS projects. So there is a big cultural shift that we have to, you know, we didn't do setting the commons or data capture.

So because of the limited time, my approach was to look at quality, quality in everything I did over quantity in terms of how I approached the libraries and the librarians, who I saw as researchers, and the number of published records. So I'm just going to touch on the three main areas,

which is the library, the researchers, and the published records. You'll have to do it quickly, Lynn. You'll have to be relatively quick, because this is your first wind-up call. It's now 10-16. Okay. From the library, we have about 16 liaison librarians. So I actually, rather than doing one PowerPoint,

I did individual to small group upskill sessions, and then I did refreshes. So I decided to work at the coalface and work with them like that, and I found that worked really well. Then to all the library, I did internal newsletters, so everybody knew what was happening once a quarter,

and I attended as many library meetings as I could. So in terms of researchers, my data interview approach was to look for champions, and also we received a spreadsheet that had all current and completed grants, which included beyond ARC and NHMRC.

So the liaison librarians could choose who they want to go and see. We also met, as John pointed out, we met with research office, the RDSI infrastructure staff, and all data managers to inform them about the project and also learn. And then we also visited the Antarctic Division, because they've got a world's best practice data center,

just to be inspired about where we want to go for in the future. And then finally, the aim for published records was the liaison librarians are going to try and go out and do data interviews with all the schools and centers that they represent to get sort of a sample record, and we're also looking at trying to get two imports

from two different subject areas to just try and get people thinking about automatic imports as well as manual records. Okay. Thanks, Lynn. I'll skip Sue, because she's a bit nervous and we're short on time. So we'll just go on to some other project value ads. You okay with that, Sue?

Yeah, yes. She's very happy. For us, Institute of Marine and Aquatic Sciences, they've come on board and are very keen to start using our service. They've got some huge data sets. And once we get one of our big customers like IMAS on board, and that encourages the other institutes and schools to get on board as well.

I know Minsk Institute have got some large data sets which we're keen to get into the red box system, and also the Central Science Laboratory have got a lot of stuff as well. Hooks into RDSI, Research Data Storage Infrastructure. And this has really come through from IMAS as well. They're big users, or they're going to be big users of RDSI, so they're very keen to get links in that respect.

There's a couple of visions they've got there in terms of researchers depositing data and our project getting an automatic note that the data's there, and perhaps there needs to be some description of that data going up to RDSI. One of the key things that we're trying to get going with this project is strategic renewal.

Senior management become aware of the trends and some ideas and how this project can be used to further research a support initiative. So the library, in fact, has now started talking with our research office. They're saying, hey, there's some things happening out there. We're getting a little bit behind. Our current infrastructure's looking a bit stale.

Let's use this particular project as a springboard onto something bigger. Let's get some serious governance in place with the icon services, the library. So that's a key thing we're going to take out of this project. Just summing up, four key points there. Don't just focus on the details or the deliverables.

Look for some big picture stuff to bail you out and raise your project profile. Ask lots of questions as per Lynne. She says, get out there, talk to people. It's far easier to get things from somebody else than to work it out for yourself sometimes. Document and communicate. And finally, get up from your desk and go and talk to someone

because basically it's people who do projects, not project plans. And that's, we're done. Hopefully we managed to get that all done in your time. So I'll hand back to you, Simon.