Waterfall Project Manager Simulation — Toronto Public Library

The scenario

Toronto Public Library runs one of the busiest urban library systems in North America — 100 branches and roughly ten million visits a year — on a public catalogue that has aged badly. Patrons search the way they did a decade ago: brittle keyword matching, a confusing holds process, no real relevance ranking, and an interface that falls short of the accessibility standard the Province now requires. The Board has funded a $1M, sixteen-week pilot to replace the public-facing catalogue at five branches with BiblioCommons' BiblioCore discovery layer — a modern search-and-discovery front end that sits on top of the library's existing SirsiDynix Symphony system, which stays the system of record. This is a pilot with a purpose: prove it works, or the modernization stops at five branches. The money for a network-wide rollout does not exist yet — the Board will only fund it if the pilot shows patrons are genuinely better served. That makes every gate a piece of evidence, not just a checkpoint. And the evidence has to survive three audiences who can each stall you: frontline staff who watched the last head-office system get rolled back and assume this one will fail too; the City's technology division, which controls the security and privacy sign-off that gates the public launch; and an accessibility audit that could surface defects the moment the catalogue goes live to the public. Your job: prove, in five branches and sixteen weeks, that a new catalogue earns its keep at the front desk — before anyone will fund it everywhere.

What you'll do as the project manager

• →Deploy the BiblioCommons BiblioCore discovery layer across all five pilot branches within the sixteen-week window.
• →Migrate and validate bibliographic, holdings, and real-time availability data from SirsiDynix Symphony with under a 2% record-error rate at go-live.
• →Achieve WCAG 2.0 Level AA conformance on the public catalogue and clear the AODA accessibility audit with no outstanding Level A or AA defects.
• →Reach 60% frontline-staff adoption — staff using the new catalogue for patron lookups and holds — within four weeks of each branch go-live.
• →Deliver a Board-ready benefits case (patron task-completion, search-success, and adoption metrics) that supports the network-wide rollout funding decision.

Project management skills you'll build

The challenges you'll navigate

• •Frontline staff resistance — the last branch-service change (a self-service and workflow pilot two years ago) was rolled back after staff and patron complaints, and staff distrust 'another head-office system.'
• •City security and privacy review could gate the public launch — patron data flows between vendor-hosted BiblioCore and on-premise Symphony must clear the City's assessment, and Derek Vandermeer's team has not yet seen a design.
• •AODA exposure — the current catalogue has known WCAG gaps; an accessibility audit during the pilot could surface defects that block public launch.
• •Data quality — years of inconsistent cataloguing in Symphony may surface as mismatched records, duplicates, and stale availability once exposed in a modern discovery layer.
• •Funding contingency — the network rollout is unfunded; a weak pilot benefits case means the modernization stops at five branches.

Technology & stakeholders

You'll manage 7 stakeholders, including Della Okwuosa (Director, Digital Strategy & Chief Information Officer), Trevor Halsey (Senior Manager, Digital Experiences), Maureen Stavros (Branch Head, S. Walter Stewart Branch), and more.

What you'll walk away with

A verified, shareable record of a completed enterprise project — plus the PMO deliverables you produced along the way (charter, project plan, SteerCo deck, closure document). It's real, demonstrable project management experience you can put on your resume and speak to in interviews.

Frequently asked questions

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