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.
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