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Academic and research libraries have made many efforts to diversify their workforces; however, today the profession remains largely homogenous. We recognize that diversification cannot be achieved without creating inclusive and more equitable workspaces and workplaces. This requires rethinking our assumptions and behaviors as individuals and as a profession, questioning entrenched structures that maintain the status quo, and developing practices that keep these critical questions in the forefront as we do the difficult work of redefining our infrastructure in order to create equitable and socially just workplaces. To inspire a different type of dialogue, we offer actionable information and tools – strategies, ideas, and concepts from outside our profession. In this chapter, the authors present strategies used by corporations, industries, organizations, or fields outside of academia that have contributed to substantially diversifying their workforces and discuss how they could be integrated into our own workplaces. While these efforts are imperfect, incomplete, or have mixed results, we focus on strategies that demonstrate outside-the-box thinking for our profession, practices that will require academic and research libraries to rethink their operations, the behaviors and structures that support them, and thus the way library management and leadership are practiced. We are hoping that providing strategies outside our profession, as well as guidance on applying these strategies, will create reflection, dialogue, and innovative ideas for our own institutions.

This chapter describes and explores the relationship between formal and semi-formal systems of programme and project management and broader strategic programmes and leadership approaches in the academic and research library context.

The leadership perspective of this chapter allows assessment of the contribution of programme and project management techniques to the strategic development of the library. A case study approach is taken, and the methods used for programme and project management arise mainly from the UK’s Office of Government Commerce.

The chapter provides insight into how a variety of practical project management techniques can be bound together within strategic programmes, together with appropriate governance structures for monitoring and judging successful outcomes.

The chapter describes the application of programme and project methods in two research libraries, but the techniques used have been used widely in many organizational settings and so should be transferable to other research library contexts.

The cases in the chapter reveal the social world of the academic and research library, illuminating the real-life experience of project work within the library and its broader institutional context.

The chapter presents an original typology for differentiating projects in the research library. The chapter is unique both in describing 30 years of continuous application and development of programme and project methodologies and frameworks, and also in its leadership perspective.