publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/535467
ILTA WHITE PAPER: JUNE 2015 WWW.ILTANET.ORG 37 EFFICIENCY CHALLENGE: PRIORITIZE PROJECTS THAT DELIVER MORE VALUE Communications: How many of you have had this experience? A lawyer in your firm has a new offering/program/idea. Your project team sits with the lawyer and draws out the project details, and everyone works on it. After six months of development and three rounds of scope changes, no one has spoken to a client, shown a client any functionality or gotten any broader buy-in to the project. Eventually the project is abandoned. Communications requirements are frequently overlooked in project evaluations, but they represent both a cost in time and personnel resources and are important to success and benefit realization. Exciting and innovative ideas with obvious benefits to clients can easily become failed projects if you do not allocate resources to aligning project milestones with communications. Here is a simple model with which to assess your project costs: Quantify the number of internal and external stakeholders Identify required engagement milestones with stakeholders, and make an estimate for hours needed to prepare and hold those engagements Determine whether you have the skills on the team to handle this or need additional help Let's use a simple extranet project as an example: • 10 internal stakeholders • Three external stakeholders • Three engagement milestones (four to six weeks apart due to client schedules) • Three to five hours needed per engagement for preparation and meetings • Internal team skills sufficient but need to be dedicated to each engagement Assessment: Communications cost is medium because the timeline is pushed to a minimum of 12 to 18 weeks since you can only get the client to meet every four to six weeks, and you need to keep your 10 internal stakeholders engaged over the entire period. If your project requires more people to maintain internal or external stakeholder engagement, ask for communications help. The skills to run a project, communicate benefits and solicit feedback are not always held by the same resources. Make sure clients, internal and external, understand the value your project provides; communications experts can help make that happen. At the conclusion of the project, be able to say you invested this much money, time and manpower with xyz outcome three months, six months and one year after project completion.