Software Upgrade Testing

A little while back I went to the launch of the latest version of Testpro’s TAF product suite.

Testpro are an Australian company that specialise in testing solutions using some of the automated testing tools that are in the market place, principally IBM’s Rational software.

Unlike other testing companies they are not simply a supplier of services but have also developed software solutions that add value to the entire approach to lessen the investment necessary to establish an automated testing regime. Most notable is their Testpro Automation Framework or TAF. Apparently it just won an IBM international product award which is quiet prestigious however I don’t really play in that space so am not entirely sure what that means. In any case, we have partnered with Testpro using TAF on a few projects for law firms now and hence the invite to the function.

What TAF provides is an environment to easily build tests that utilise the power of the Rational product as the automation engine. If you have seen any of these tools you will know that there is a fair investment in developing the test cases and linking them to the applicable application to be tested.

Most importantly, TAF is data driven so you simply feed the same script a number of different data sets, to ‘execute’ different scenarios. If you think about it, when someone is testing an application – say creation of a bill – the human tester will start the application and basically execute the same or similar steps, but enter different data to test different scenarios. So you might have to select a range of different types of matters, or add a discount for example. But ultimately, the nature of practice management system transactions means that you are visiting the same screens over and over to enter different data to test different scenarios.

This is where the power of the Testpro solution comes to the fore – because it is data driven. So by ‘feeding’ the testing scripts a different set of ‘data scenarios’ you are testing different parts of the system.

The data driven nature also allows you to use the testing scripts to create the data scenarios that you need to test. So, for example, say you wanted to test a billing situation where there was certain types of time items for a given set of timekeepers in a given department. And additionally you want to test a certain billing of certain types of disbursements. With this solution, you can populate the datasheets for the time and disbursement entry script to create those items (which in itself is a testing stream), and then as the next step, create a bill which includes those items. So you never have to worry about ‘finding the right data’ to execute a specific test, nor having to laboriously enter the individual data items to ‘create’ the test scenarios – the testing framework can be used to save that manual labour.

The last project we were involved with was with one of Australia’s largest law firms, working on a version upgrade of the Aderant product. The main difficulty with this client is that the system has been highly customised and the processes have multiple and varied information flows that delivered varied output as a result. Of course this is an issue with all firms but the larger the firm the more customisation and tailoring that occurs.

The traditional approach to answering these questions has been to engage internal testing resources to manually test that the system is functioning correctly. The perennial challenge with manual testing is that it is slow, error prone, rarely thorough enough and constrained by the availability of business resources. The business impact of sub-optimum testing ranges from loss of time and productivity from minor system errors, through to disruption to clients and ultimately financial losses from major system issues.

Additionally, as you get closer to the ‘go live’ date, i.e. where you have less and less time, the testing window starts to shorten, so you have to make value judgements on which parts to the system you will and won’t test when you “just put in that one minor, last minute change”! The result being that, at the time when you want the most thorough testing coverage – i.e. just before you pull the trigger to go live, you start to narrow the coverage instead because you just haven’t got enough time to assemble all the testers to retest all of the scenarios.

The beauty of automated data driven testing is that you can kick off the process and let it run all the test scenarios that are available at the time, as it’s infinitely faster to run than manual testing. So your coverage actually increases as the project gets closer to go live – because you can add new data scenarios to the test suite to cover the changes.

That’s not to diminish the roles of the test management team. Analysis and thought needs to go into the definition of the  data scenarios that will be used to drive the testing suite. And additionally, there will be some areas of the system that require manual testing because they don’t lend themselves to automation. But being able to provide extensive coverage of the repetitive and mundane testing areas not only saves time, but also the sanity of the testing team – they will definitely thank you for it!

But it’s not just in new implementations and upgrades of systems that automated testing provides value, consider when you need to apply service packs to Microsoft server and desktop environments. Sure, you would hope that the vendors involved have performed their compatibility testing but they can’t hope to cover the myriad of combinations of software that may reside within a large organisation. Being able to kick off several thousand test scenarios without having to worry about gathering a testing team and using up valuable resources or worse, deciding to trust the vendors implicitly and only doing rudimentary testing, is like playing Russian roulette……

Legal Application Software vs Software for Other Industries

I did a job at the start of the year that was a bit of fun. It was helping a listed company (small cap) select an ERP system to replace MYOB and a range of Excel spreadsheets that had evolved as the business had grown.

The company however was not a legal firm. Fundamentally they had a simple manufacturing process that recycled damaged oil feedstock into crude oil that could be used again. A fascinating business opportunity in today’s market in my view.

Now it had been many years since I had been involved with computer systems for distribution and manufacturing businesses but it all came back pretty easily. FIFO, bill of materials, inventory, picking lists, bill of lading, despatch, all terms that are completely foreign when working with a law firm’s systems. In the end a nice blast from the past but accounting is accounting and the process of making something and then selling it is not that hard, albeit MRP can stretch your brain at times.

In any case, my role was mainly to facilitate the selection process. Gather requirements, structure them in a manner that was understandable to vendors, liaise with the vendors regarding their responses to get to a shortlist for the client’s management team and then coordinating demonstrations with the client’s staff and assist negotiating the final contract.

We sent the RFI out to the major players: SAP, Sage, Pronto, Sun, Dynamics, NetSuite … and received details responses from all.

Well that’s great but why is all this relevant to a legal technology blog, I hear you ask. Well, for me it was interesting to see how the differences in approach that these systems are taking to generic system issues. Three items in particular were significant to me.

The first item was the user experience, or UX, as the term is now. Every single product that we looked at had a “dashboard” approach to the user interaction. This was role based and allowed different components to be presented depending upon that role. For example, a purchasing clerk has a different set of common tasks, reports and information requirements from a sales clerk or, indeed, a manager, or a Director. All of the systems allowed each role to have tailored task lists, information that was summarised at a higher and more manageable level but allowing drill down into the details as required. For managers, this included the graphical representation of information and the subsequent drill downs required, right down the specification transaction and GL journal lines if necessary.

From what I have seen of the legal products none have them have thought through the dashboard approach to the same level that these ERP systems have. I have to admit that I know Elite 3E espouses this approach but I haven’t had a lot of personal experience with the product but from what I have heard from our staff with hands on experience, it’s not that easy to do. At least the thinking is there though.

Overall the approach that has been taken with all systems that we looked at is simple, elegant and intuitive. I have grabbed two screen shots from one of the products below to show the approach. I have purposely chosen one without a high level of graphics to highlight that this is the employee’s one stop shop for working with the system, not simply a reporting system.

You will also note embedded integration with Outlook and this was the second item of interest to me. Clearly automated workflow is a hot technology topic for a law firm and the same applies for a manufacturing/distribution business. Documents need to be created and moved around for approval and processing by various departments and managers. Similarly with documents received.

Now obviously a law firm has a higher volume and greater variability of documents but what I liked about the workflow approach of the above systems is that a) it is closely embedded with Outlook and email so that the interaction with the user occurs through the use of this tool and b) while a more powerful workflow engine under pinned the approach (either WWF or a proprietary environment), the set up of the rules and the flow had a very simple and understandable user interface that made setting up basic workflows something that could be done by the everyday user.

The third item was that every proposal we received offered an externally hosted option. Whether this was through a relationship with a data centre, through their own facility or, with NetSuite, a true cloud based system, the client could choose to not have to manage the infrastructure for the application. This is what the company wanted because they only had a small IT team and had offices in Australia and the US.

All of this led me to wonder why some of these fundamental differences were in place and my take is that the general ERP market is significantly bigger than the legal market and, as a result, more competitive. Market forces therefore drive more innovative approaches to problem solving to win market share and retain customers.

Of course there are different drivers with a legal application but, to my mind, it will be interesting to see how the systems evolve in some of the areas above. Most interesting development to me is the Lexis Nexis partnership with Microsoft to produce a legal system based on Dynamics AX. I wonder how that is going?

For those that got this far, the client selected the Dynamics product.

I would love to hear other’s opinions on the above.

Resource & Capacity Planning for Lawyers – Herding Cats??

I just finished a small job for a 25 lawyer law firm. The problem the managing partner had was that his team were always overloaded and requesting more staff to handle the excess workload. You would normally think of this as a growth opportunity but unfortunately the fees billed at the end of the month didn’t reflect this overload. There are lots of potential implications here but without any information to base decisions upon it was difficult to isolate what the issue is.

The firm had started to formalise its management procedures and had recently instituted a weekly task list for lawyers that required tasks to be prioritised and reviewed by their supervisor. They had looked at a number of software systems to collate this information (or alternatively define the planning process) ranging from very expensive to very basic. In fact, none of them really fitted the bill so there is a little bit of a market opportunity here. The expensive ones were a massive overkill or addressed a different problem. The cheaper ones had approaches that didn’t really work for a law firm and required the use of a different and non-integrated timesheet. Then again, maybe there are other reasons that there is no simple solution.

In the end I built them a “mini-system” in an Excel spreadsheet. It maps out the weeks going forward for all staff and the lawyer is now required to estimate the effort required on their task list as well. We then categorised the priority to be either “must be to be done this week” or “could be done later than this week”.

All the estimated hours from the task lists are then entered by the receptionist into the spreadsheet based upon priorities, just the total hours though. Future leave, booked CLE commitments and seminars are also entered into the spreadsheet for the week that they were to occur. This process was already in place with the firm’s receptionist in terms of updating the absentee calendar so it was a simple step to also update the resource planning spreadsheet.

The “report” aspect of the tool then applies agreed standards on non-chargeable business development and management effort to map out planned utilisations based upon available time. It also looks after non-full time employees with lesser capacity for the week. Nothing too complicated, just calculating the capacity and highlighting in red when a week exceeds 100% and orange if it exceeds 80%.

The spreadsheet is then available on line in read only mode for all staff and is reviewed at the weekly management meeting. The idea is that the team can quickly see which lawyers are over capacity and which are under capacity. They can then look to use people that have available time for the week on tasks rather than having some people super busy and others idle, balancing the load so to speak. A snapshot of some of the report is below.

Now before all you systems guys out there say “this should be a software application to ensure data integrity and validations and ease of entry”, I know it should. The fact of the matter is that the firm didn’t want to spend a lot of money on this process and I fully agree with that stance. It was difficult to work out how well the process would work and what value would be obtained hence the goal was to keep the investment low until we learnt a bit more about what was possible. Basically, the above took a bit over two days of consulting effort.

But how good would it be to have a distributed entry approach with the tasks stored in a database and linked to the actual matters. Information could be rolled forward, compared to actuals and collated in a whole range of different ways for management information. Imagine also assisting the planning process by examining the lawyers Outlook calendar to capture future commitments.

Now the process has been in place for a month or so, what has been learnt? The first challenge has been to get the lawyers to think about tasks more from a time management perspective than the professional work aspect.

Prioritising work is an issue. We have continually had lawyers reporting on their task lists that they have 60, 70 and 80 hours of work that had to be completed in the week. What we haven’t seen though is super stressed staff as a result of this workload nor real issues with customer service because the tasks haven’t been done on time. We are hoping that as time passes the lawyers, after seeing the feedback from their numbers in the report, will be become more disciplined as to how to prioritise.

Estimating work is an issue. Basically, the system needs a number of hours, not a range. What we have ended up doing is taking the midpoint of the information provided but when you see a range of 8-60 hours you worry that a greater breakdown of the actual task is required. Of course, tasks can have different possibilities of resolution so estimating can be difficult. Once more, we are hopeful that as the tool is used these things will work themselves out. In the end, however, it is the aggregation of data that is important not the individual items so the variations should come out in the wash.

The interesting thing that has happened since implementation has been the introduction of another category for “potential future work” for a bit of a longer range forecasting ie. the next 2 to 3 months. This is not future new clients from business development activity but work that is reasonably likely to occur from existing matters. This has allowed the management team to decide on hiring people in one of the practice areas based upon real information rather than a feel. The first small sign that the processes are maturing.

Automating Client Reports

We just finished an interesting project with an Elite 3E customer. It was building on work we had done with their Keystone database but interesting nevertheless.

The business requirement is that the firm has a number of clients that regularly want information about their matters in electronic format, most typically Excel. The information varies from client to client, either in content, layout or sort sequence. What they did previous to our involvement was highly manual, employing the equivalent of a person just to manually create the reports.

To address this we developed a program that allows them to register a report for a client. The first step is to give it a report name, some grouping and filtering information, column sequencing, report headings, the file format to be created (Word, PDF, Excel) and then the email address of who it is to be delivered to.  The next step is to pick the columns of information to be included on the report by ticking check boxes.

Once the report is registered, it can be set up to run every day, week, month, quarter etc… for a particular range or period of time. The user runs the report production program, selecting which schedule to run. The program then automatically requests SQLServer Reporting Services to generate generic content and Excel macros to format and customise the layout for each client..

As it turns out, they typically email to the partner/secretary responsible for the client first to check the data quality rather than email the client direct. The document is reviewed first and then forwarded to the customer. One manual step but at least people aren’t involved in the monotonous task of extracting and formatting the data each month now!

The net result from the firm’s view point is that the process is significantly less labour intensive and setting up a new report is simply adding a line in a program we have created. The number of reports produced like this now for clients is well over 50 and, because it is all automated, the costs involved have diminished considerably.

Bulworth

I know that this is a legal systems blog but I just saw a great movie that I have to share with you.

Bulworth, written, directed and acted by Warren Beatty. A black comedy and satire, beautifully played out with a real political sting. A bravura piece of film making. Well, for Hollywood anyway. Well done Warren, yeah hup. Five stars.

Debt recovery specialists Results Legal live with Web Collaborator

Results Legal is an innovative and specialist law firm, dealing purely in debt recovery, insolvency law and commercial disputes. With offices around Australia the firm is quickly making a name for itself as one of the leading providers of these specialist services in the country.

Founder and Managing Director Karl Hill puts the business’ success down to a focus on quality of service, proactive file management and effective internal systems, meaning the firm maintains a clear and competitive fee structure.

“Our goal was to take all of the stereotypes and frustrations associated with law firms and improve on them. Faster time frames, clearer costs and better communication” says Hill.

Key in dealing with Results Legal’s clients is the use of Red Rain’s Web Collaborator system.

“We wanted to be able to provide our customers with complete transparency into all the work that we do for them and do it 24/7. Web Collaborator has been fantastic for this. The clients love it” says Hill.

“Our view is that the client should be able to, at any point in time, see the latest information about their matters and we work diligently to keep this up to date in our internal LEAP system, as a part of our quality processes. Web Collaborator then knows the change has been made and makes it available to the client” says Hill.

The firm manages the whole process through the LEAP application. They set up an email address as a “web user” and then attach it to a matter or matters. Web Collaborator recognises that this has happened and, the very first time, emails the user a log on and password. It also extracts the matter information and designated documents and synchs them into the cloud. The user then logs on and they can send see the information in a completely secure environment. Web Collaborator then monitors for new matters and new information to be published.

“The beauty of the tool is there is no need to worry about setting up and managing complex web servers and security and the like. We don’t want to worry about technology, we want to concentrate on looking after our clients and being the best lawyers we can be in our chosen field” says Hill.

Another powerful feature is the ability to publish file notes and receive instructions back from the customer that are automatically posted to the database and immediately emailed to the applicable lawyers and staff members within the firm.

“We have found that customers are using this facility extensively and it has made the entire interaction process easier and simpler for all parties” says Hill.

Overall Results have seen an excellent return from their investment and the software is now a key part of their business offering.

“We are very happy with what we have been able to achieve with the system and dealing with Red Rain has been an enjoyable experience. They are professional, know their stuff and the quality of the software is fantastic”.

Taking a Law Firm to the Cloud

We did a “cloud” project for a client a few years ago that I didn’t realise was a cloud project at the time. The firm was a 45 person legal practice with offices in 2 of Australia’s capital cities. We had done a lot of work with their application systems and brought a lot of productivity improvements in the previous year or so but now the hardware infrastructure was starting to creak at the seams.

At the same of the lease for one of the offices was expiring and there was the potential to rationalise office space, given that headcount had been lowered from the abovementioned improvements in business systems.

To set the scene, the existing hardware infrastructure was in a bit of a mess.

Firstly, the servers had been replaced and virtualised a few years earlier but all that had been done was mapping the previous physical servers into a virtual environment rather than restructuring to a more efficient approach.

The result was that we were running out of space on the main production servers even though there was plenty of space available on the SAN. Fixing it meant a reasonably large project engaging consultants as we didn’t have this type of expertise in house. On top of this the Citrix environment that was in place for one of the offices was very old and creating issues that were addressed in the current version however this was a project in itself as well.

Secondly, while a standard operating environment for the desktop was ostensibly in place, it wasn’t really effective and, as we provided more integrations and productivity tools for the lawyers, we found that we were having to go to each PC to load software. This was because different environments and policies on different machines had evolved over the years. What the user really noticed however was the 1-2 minutes that it took the computer to load once they turned it on in the morning. Once more a sizeable project was required to fix this.

Thirdly, a firm of this size can’t afford to have a big IT department but still have a wide range of technologies to look after. Having all the skills and knowledge in one or two people is a) difficult to achieve, and b) risky, and hence costly, when one of those people moves on for whatever reason.

The result of all this was that we had to do something and our company was commissioned to document requirements and put an RFI to the market place to assess what was available. This was sent to 8 organisations: outsourced management providers (with our servers still in house), companies hosting of our servers through a managed facility as well as Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) or cloud providers (but we didn’t know that’s what they were at the time!).

Interestingly, two firms said they wouldn’t be responding and another said they would be proposing because they were such a great fit, but then didn’t. These companies obviously all had too much work in the middle of the GFC!

In the end we chose one of the IAAS providers as the best fit for our needs. The solution is a standard desktop delivered by a Citrix client with all server infrastructure existing somewhere else (actually data centres in Melbourne and Brisbane). We don’t have our own servers but effectively rent a “slice” of the infrastructure a larger data centre.

Access in the office is through a small LAN that connects via a land line. Out of the office access to the same desktop occurs through Citrix web access. Microsoft licensing, eg. the operating system, Office, Exchange, Sharepoint, SQLServer, etc… is bundled as a part of the monthly cost. Core business applications are installed on the servers and delivered via the desktop.

The business case for the approach was compelling and the saving we saw included:

• Computer room costs – floor space, air conditioning, electricity
• Depreciation costs on the capital equipment: servers, racks, etc…
• Our corporate Microsoft licensing agreement
• ISDN line costs between the 2 offices
• 1.5 heads in staff costs.

In all we calculated the cost savings at approximately $250,000 per annum, a sizeable chunk of cash for the partners of a small firm. With the new environment having been in place for a year and a half, I can confirm that those savings have fundamentally been achieved.

Of course, one consideration for the firm was the risk involved and the partnership was justifiably nervous. Our first port of call was our PI insurance provider and there was a small increase in the premium as a result but nothing of a tangible nature. Next we researched, however we couldn’t find any similarly sized law firm in Australia that had gone down this path. The provider did give us two chartered accounting firms as references and discussions with them proved that they had had a positive experience (and their environment was more complex than ours) and this was some comfort.

In the end, our principal concern was in the provider’s continuing existence and we took some solace that they were a listed company, although that doesn’t necessarily mean a lot these days. The basic view we took was that this was an emerging technology and that this was where the market would be going. We figured that the likely scenario was that the provider would be acquired by a bigger organisation as the market rationalised and this is indeed what happened 12 months later.

So the firm bit the bullet and signed up. A pretty gutsy decision looking back and getting it all happening did have its issues but now it is all settled in they are seeing the benefits, and not just the financial ones above. But that’s a another blog!!

Press Release: Web Access for LEAP Customers

Web Collaborator allows LEAP Office users to provide their clients with access to defined matter information and associated documents via the Internet. Clients can also send instructions and notes via Web Collaborator that are seamlessly loaded into the LEAP database, with the practitioner involved automatically notified by email.

The software is the first application in Australia to be built for the legal profession using the Microsoft Azure platform for delivery via the cloud. The client simply installs the Web Collaborator service on their LEAP server and data is published via the software to a secure, robust and scalable environment that ensures optimal performance for the firm’s clients. No additional investment in infrastructure is required.

 “Web Collaborator allows LEAP customers to provide the same type of web access capability that Australia’s largest law firms provide their clients. In today’s demanding market, the software provides a competitive advantage to the firm by giving the client immediate access to documents, status and the information about their matters without the firm needing capital investment or changes to their business processes” stated Stephen Butler, a Director of Red Rain. “Not only is customer service improved but costly interruptions from telephone calls can be avoided” he added.

The software is completely integrated with LEAP Office and the Red Rain development team have been working closely with LEAP software engineers over the past 12 months to ensure that a robust, complete and seamlessly integrated utility is available to meet customer needs.

“We are delighted to have been working with Red Rain on the creation of this new module for the publishing of LEAP data to the web. We believe that Web Collaborator is an important add on to our offering to the market place and adds further value with to our overall solution for our customers” said Richard Hugo-Hamman, Managing Director of LEAP Legal Software.

Red Rain’s plans are to further enhance the product based on initial feedback from first customers and interested parties and then extend the technology to create new modules for lawyer access.

“Now that we have built the fundamental architecture for publishing to the web with the Azure platform we have many ideas for the access of information for lawyers and are currently investigating what is possible with tablets and other mobile platforms” added Butler.


http://www.redraincorp.com/webcollaborator.html

Join me on Twitter at @sbutler59

Join me on Twitter at @sbutler59