Challenge

The Library of Congress wanted to increase public awareness of it's extraordinary resources, become a premiere tourist destination in the DC area, and provide relevant, authentic and engaging learning experiences for students, teachers and lifelong learners- all through a new visitors experience.

This required defining and executing a massive project that included integrating cutting edge technology with world-class content, in a historic building, with coordinated contributions from 17 divisions of the Library. Combine those challenges with a fixed time and limited budget and Library staff was overwhelmed.

Solutions

Creating an innovative concept and raising money

The Library's new visitor's experience was to be funded by private dollars instead of Congressional appropriations. In order to raise money, the concept needed to be sold to potential donors in an unique manner. Sapient Corporation was asked to help the Library develop and design a plan that would clearly communicate the unique opportunity to help transform how millions of people interact with the largest repository of knowledge in the history of the world. After working through concepts in various workshops, we created a large format print piece that was mailed to various private donors. I was asked to lead the team that created the business plan. The plan contained objectives, scenarios, conceptual drawings as well as details on how the Library would manage and govern the project. The business case helped generate over 3 million dollars of funding from private donors and software and hosting donations from Microsoft and Terramark corporations.

Pages from the New Visitors Experience Business Plan

Conceptual renderings of the Library's new visitor experience.

Conceptual renderings of the Library's new visitor experience

Reducing risks and ensuring success by rigorous project management

After helping raise funds, I was asked to manage the entire project as apart of a 2-man program management office (PMO) reporting directly to the Chief Operating Officer of the Library. The project had a fixed deadline and fixed budget. We oversaw every aspect of the project from construction and security to exhibition design and marketing. We created a detailed project schedule and a war room where all issues and risks were captured and monitored. We held daily stand-up meetings with key project members. We facilitated weekly issues sessions and produced a weekly report for Library executives.

Part of the NVE War Room

Mid level project schedule for construction aspects of the NVE

Risk and issue captured and reviewed weekly

Project report for the Chief Operating Officer

The results

The Library's new visitor experience opened on time and on budget as the Congress was finishing the new Capitol visitor's center. Total number of visitors from January to April 2009 increased a whopping 47 percent over 2007. The Library experience was critically acclaimed and received several awards including: