Risk Assessment for Digitisation Projects

Last updated: 14 November 2008
Published in: Managing a project | Digitising analogue media |
Tags: analogue collections | digital collections | digitisation | outsourcing | quality assurance | risk assessment |

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This paper identifies some of the more common risks associated with a digitisation project. It is intended to be of use to the management team of time limited digitisation projects or to permanent collection management staff planning to digitise.

Contents

• Introduction
• Types of risk
• Areas of potential risk

Introduction

Undertaking a risk assessment for a digitisation project is now usually expected as part of an application for funding. However, if it is not required for these formal procedures, it is still a very useful exercise to undertake and should be considered an essential part of the project planning phase.

The undertaking of a risk analysis will allow project staff to identify the processes within the project's workflow that are weak areas and potential pitfalls. Such pitfalls are commonly found to play a significant part in the non-successful completion of the project.

The risk assessment will allow the project staff to pre-plan strategies for coping, should an evaluated risk actually happen. In this way the project staff will be fully prepared just in case the worst does happen. Knowing and understanding all risks to the project, can help the project team to avoid or mitigate the problems thus ensuring the project runs without difficulty.

Undertaking a risk assessment for the project will normally be a consultative and iterative process involving many stakeholders e.g. the project team, the project's funders, user groups, curators and conservators.

Some common approaches to mitigating risk include building in contingencies: for example in the budget, allowing extra time for undertaking work and having more than one person trained in the use of equipment.

Types of risk

Risks to the digitisation project can be placed into two groups:

1. Those that are internal to the project and so are directly under the control of the project manager and/or project staff
2. Those that are external to the project, for example risks associated with using an external digitisation service, working in a consortium project or dealing with 'external' project partners

It is important to categorise the risks as either internal or external so that responsibility for appraising and dealing with each risk can be appointed to the most suitable person within the team or with the most suitable project partner. It is important that everyone on the project knows which potential risk they have responsibility for and understands how the potential risk can be mitigated or rectified.

A table should be drawn up detailing the risk, the potential for failure (e.g. high, intermediate, low) together with the name of the person/project partner who takes responsibility for it. This table will be a key piece of project documentation and should be revisited, updated and discussed as a team or with project partners, especially when there are changes within the project e.g. staff leaving or joining.

Areas of potential risk

Project management

1. Lack of realistic scheduling for individual activities – digitisation, metadata record creation, optimisation, quality assurance checking (digital file and metadata) and general admin/project duties (email correspondence, team meetings, training).
2. Project 'scope creep' where further project goals or deliverables are added to the project after the project has started e.g. finding more materials which require digitisation after the original estimation.
3. Collaborative contracts - defining a contract that all partners are happy with, managing responsibility within each partner, defining quality standards between partners. Who takes overall responsibility for the project?

Staff

1. Keys skills in existing staff - have they got the right skills to undertake the project's activities? If not, can they be trained?
2. Appointing new staff - because specialist skills are required there may be a skills shortage making it hard to recruit. Naive budget planning and unrealistic costing for staff may make it hard to attract people with the necessary skills to the post.
3. Loss of key personnel during the project due either to long-term sickness or resignation - this will almost certainly slow or delay the project if the staff are highly skilled and the project is unable to fund their replacement (to e.g. cover sick leave) or recruit new staff.
4. Insufficient documentation of workflow and methodology - work activities may be badly recorded or even undocumented so new staff have no idea of current working practice or the progress made to date.
5. De-motivated staff - some tasks within digitisation projects are highly repetitive despite requiring a high knowledge and skill level to undertake them e.g. cataloguing/metadata creation. This can lead to a lack of motivation and enthusiasm which could affect project and task schedules.
6. Continuing professional development - if there is no budget for ongoing training then the project may not be able to take advantage of newer/better systems and processes.

Equipment/systems

1. Suppliers - is the equipment available? Can it be delivered for when you need it? How reputable is the supplier: can they provide in-house training if needed and/or are they likely to go bankrupt?
2. Equipment failure - building in time, establishing warranties, estimating time to repair or replace failed equipment and holding funds to replace equipment (if out of warranty).
3. Operation - do the staff know how to operate the systems and equipment? Do you have technical support? Can time and training be provided for staff to familiarise themselves with new equipment and systems before beginning work?
4. Institutional support for the project - will it be able to provide the necessary infrastructure to deliver, manage and store the electronic resources, guaranteeing their future sustainability?
5. Does your project have full IT support?
6. Changes in technology - have you got the funds to upgrade? Are all software, media and file types established open source solutions that will be able to provide future sustainability?
7. Problems with commissioning a bespoke system – what is the ability of the developers to keep to timeframes and deliverables (including documentation)? Have you established clear communication and reporting procedures? Are there appropriate stages in development for evaluation and user testing?

Digitisation

1. Copyright - are the materials copyright free or do you have permission to digitise? Have you got the time and money to gain copyright permission?
2. Clear workflow is defined - has a full and reliable set of workflow manuals been created to document all workflow and QA processes?
3. External digitisation services - can they schedule the project work for when you require it?
4. Unclear standards have been set for digitisation - have appropriate standards been identified and put into operation? Has the digitisation process undergone benchmarking for quality assurance?
5. Digital files fail the QA - if time has not been built into the project plan for re-digitisation activities then this affects the workflow and timetable of the project.

Metadata

1. Schema and vocabularies are being developed as you go along - have you firmly established your metadata framework at the beginning of the project?
2. Metadata entry workflow not well defined - have you developed metadata entry guidelines and timed the workflow to get a realistic estimate of timings?
3. Insufficient attention paid to importing legacy metadata - have you tested how easily and accurately you can import existing metadata into your new system?
4. Little thought to quality assurance - have you built in time for checking and correcting metadata?

Delivery and managment

1. Theft - people use your digital resources as their own without any permission or acknowledgement. Are you going to implement policies and/or technologies for dealing with this issue?
2. Digital preservation - are the archival master files 'preservable' (i.e. in a format suitable for long-term storage and to facilitate long-term use)?
3. Post project sustainability - is there an established funding source to provide for the future sustainability of the digital resource and will this be able to provide for the digital preservation of the collection and regular migration to new formats in the future?
4. Is there an established methodology to test the archive once in use and monitor its reliability and accuracy?

Conclusion

The idea of carrying out high-quality digitisation work can seems daunting, but through careful planning many of the potential risks can be identified and mitigated. The identification of precedent projects can be a great help, by emulating their successes and learning from their failures the tasks involved in digitising a collection can be broken down and made much simpler. For more information see Learning Lessons from Other Digitisation Projects.

If you require further guidance, JISC Digital Media operate a helpdesk service, produce a range of advice documents and offer training tailored to the needs of the digitisation project.

You may also be interested in our sister service JISC InfoNet's Risk Management infoKit.

Last updated: 14 November 2008
Published in: Managing a project | Digitising analogue media |
Tags: analogue collections | digital collections | digitisation | outsourcing | quality assurance | risk assessment |

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