Digital White Papers

89 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER LITIGATION AND PRACTICE SUPPORT You Do What, Now? : Building a Method to Identify and Communicate Roles, Responsibilities and Solutions For Ediscovery Services Teams eDiscovery environment, an outsourced operations team located in Latin America and project management teams spread across the US, UK and Asia Pacific. All the spokes of this wheel needed to turn in the same direction for efficiency and best practice, but the teams operated in silos. This caused miscommunication, out-of-balance workloads and a "we-they" aitude. Defined roles and responsibilities was crucial to success. For Schiefelbein, the challenge in the first phase was to understand the task level: to see who did what, what skills were necessary for the tasks and who on the team had (or did not have) those skills. This was a very useful exercise in several ways. First, the consultancy gained insight into what an individual thought was his or her job, as well as how others perceived that role, and it helped to define the ideal. The second phase was to assign those tasks to a role so that each individual team member understood what she or he must do to keep forward progress, and build the RACI with this information. The match of role to responsibility and skill set allowed for more fully evolved job descriptions and direct and clear lines of communication. The team was able to identify gaps in ability, which it addressed through training or "re-homing" the resource. It became clear that the operations team should report directly to the project management team so there was a direct line of accountability to the shepherd of the end product, aka, the project manager. Creation of the RACI matrix for Schiefelbein's client was an ideal solution to understand who did what, where training was necessary and how to communicate up, down and across complex team structures. tools: whether to insource or outsource and how best to implement once those decisions have been made. One tool he finds very useful is known as a RACI matrix. This is a roles-and-responsibility document that lays out four levels of involvement in any task: who is Responsible, who is Accountable, who must be Consulted and who must be Informed. A RACI can be used to manage a specific project or an overall team. We outline below a method for creating a RACI that identifies repeatable roles and responsibilities for a complex team. Schiefelbein was engaged by a global consulting firm to coordinate the implementation of an entirely new ediscovery environment, including a processing tool and document review platform. The challenges were many, including a globally distributed IT function, support requirements for applications unique to an

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