by Ian PP | 10 Jun, 2015 | Pricing |
Katie, a 12 year-old girl, decides to make and sell lemonade in her local neighbourhood, with the proceeds going to some well-meaning charity. Business is good, but Katie is not using up all her spare time, and thinks she can make more money for her chosen charity.
Katie buys cup-cakes from a local independent cafe, run by Debbie and her sister, Pat. On one of her regular visits, Katie tells Debbie of her lemonade business. Debbie’s cafe doesn’t sell homemade lemonade, and thinks it would help her to sell other items in the cafe, as well as helping out Katie’s chosen charity. Katie and Debbie decide to make a deal.
However, just before they can shake hands, Pat comes along with her calculator and starts asking Debbie whether they have the best price for the lemonade and is there a volume discount, what add-ons Katie can offer (free plastic cups with each gallon ordered) and what Katie’s previous experience is of providing lemonade to cafes. In despair, Katie goes home and spends the next few evenings with her dad working out the deal and setting it in PowerPoint.
What went from a friendly encounter based on a good relationship, turned into a clumsy and time-consuming process, benefitting none of the parties.
Such is the way of business in our times, the RFP (Request for Proposal) is one of the most popular methods of deciding which business we should employ. For the uninitiated, an RFP usually states, in may different forms, the business problem that needs solving, what work they want doing, and how that will solve their problem. They also, often, include a list of information they need, and sometimes give an exact proforma to complete. Some businesses, who have ‘mature’ procurement processes, request you to complete your response in an online system.
It is a process which takes a great deal of effort on both sides.
For the business who is procuring services or goods, there is a high initial investment in obtaining the work. Already busy people have to spend time thinking about the work they need doing, and if this is rushed an often incomplete or ill-thought out version is produced. The legal team probably already know, like Debbie, who they want to hire, so they may not be fully engaged into the procurement process.
The provider has challenges over use of information. They need to find an efficient way of preparing the proposals. This includes having a store of previous submissions, whether won or lost, which can be easily interrogated, to use in the new response. Each time a proposal is done for a particular client and/or type of work, they should get better and quicker. If it feels like you are starting from scratch each time then you need to think about improving your previous proposals record keeping.
However, ill-thought out requirements can make most of this effort redundant. It is common for responses to be wildly different to the other law firms, which means that the requirements of the process weren’t detailed enough to be understood. Just like in project management, badly defined scope will result in badly defined prices.
Overall, whether the business and provider have a long-standing relationship, the RFP process is generally conducted at arms-length, which is never a good way of conducting business. If law firm and business relationships are supposed to be a partnership, then starting them with an RFP is not a good step to start with.
by Ian PP | 17 Apr, 2015 | LEAN |
On a whiteboard behind my desk I have listed the seven categories of waste as described by Mr Toyoda in developing the LEAN process improvement methodology. LEAN is great, because even though it was created for a manufacturing process, with a little thought it can be applied to pretty much any repeatable process you can think of, legal practice included.
I will probably end up blogging about all seven over the next few weeks, but today’s topic is “motion”, as that is the one that most frustrates me as a project manager. Probably even more so for lawyers managing projects as motion increases non-billable time, and reduces time to do billable work. Non-billable time needs to be reduced as much as possible.
“Motion” in a manufacturing context means time spent moving to obtain the tools, materials etc to do the next stage of the process, rather than them being at hand. A conveyor belt on a production line is probably the most well-known solution that manufacturing uses – materials are pushed to the worker, the worker does not have to fetch the materials.
The same applies in a legal practice.
A quick aside: a common theme throughout my posts will be “terminology” – I think it is key to use words and phrases that lawyers understand. I don’t mean everyday words that might be the subject of a plain English campaign. I mean using words that are familiar concepts. It is the principles that count – so long as you are doing the right things, it really doesn’t matter what you call them so long as people know what you’re talking about.
An example of “motion”, and terminology, is project names. Can anyone tell what Projects Athena, Gilet, etc etc are about? No. All this does is make me have to perform a search, make a phone call, or send an email, to find out what the project is about. A big waste of time and a result of someone searching Google or Wikipedia to find a Greek God who at some point had to outsource his deity duties. Or not. Even if a project is confidential with a client, and this needs a codename, in a law firm we can call it something like: Renegotiation of x contract with y supplier. Boring, but useful.
Another example of “motion” is trying to find emails relating to a particular matter. Various e-filing systems are used by firms to minimise the waste caused by finding emails. However, each lawyer has to take some responsibility for organising their own emails, and maybe even reducing them. Cue Harvard Business Review blog for that…
by Ian PP | 16 Apr, 2015 | General |
I have spent the last couple of years working in law firms, having been out of the profession for over ten years. I returned as a legal project manager; the profession has moved on, I thought.
But what I have found is, well, pretty much the same as I left it. Lawyers are doing the same things as before, pitching for work in the same way as before, reporting to clients in the same way as before. They’re doing it with newer technology, on iPads, mobile phones, cleaner and more user friendly software. But take away this newer technology and you could be sat in the late 1990s.
There are a number of eminent commentators on the subject, but many who are professors of this, or directors of that. I work on the coalface, in a small team of top quality lawyers, and I want to describe, share, and generally put forward my own thoughts and experiences of implementing legal project management, and probably law firm management as a whole.
I will clearly be anonymising everything, and will state here, as well as everywhere else I can, that these views are my own, and not of any current or previous employer.
