One of my pet peeves is when project management is watered down, sugar coated, or subjected to the literary equivalent of cosmetic surgery to make it more acceptable to lawyers. I don't object to summarizing complex project management theories and techniques using simple English. This is laudable and necessary if we want lawyers to understand and embrace legal project management. What gets under my skin is when obviously informed and experienced project managers buy into the argument that legal projects are somehow unique and that project management standards are not suitable for legal work. Instead of attempting to correct such ignorance, many project managers take the easy "yes, but" route. Yes, project management standards are not appropriate for the mystical practice of law, but they do offer some tools that you might find helpful.
While this may be less threatening to a legal audience, you are ultimately doing them a disservice. Better documentation and reporting practices are good, but to gain all the benefits that a professional project management program can bring, law firms and corporate legal departments need to fundamentally change their view of legal projects. A good place to start is by ditching the chauvinistic view that legal work is special and impervious to process improvements and standardization.
Today I came across another "yes, but" article on legal project management published in LegalWeek.com. I tip my hat to the Discovery Resources blog for bringing it to my attention.
The article is titled "Litigation Support and E-discovery: A Clear Path" and is written by Sanjay Bandhari, head of e-discovery at Ernst & Young. The article discusses the benefits of applying project management skills to electronic discovery. There is only one short phrase I object to in this otherwise timely and useful piece. So, let me first summarize all the useful content crammed into this informative article.
The article focuses on four Project Management skill sets that help clients keep a rein on e-discovery projects, which he refers to as "overarching PM techniques." These are:
- stakeholder management,
- communications management,
- budgetary management, and
- risk management.
Sanjay does a good job at describing of each of these four areas and how to apply them to e-discovery projects. I particularly appreciate his advice that "[a] single project manager is ... essential to an effective communications plan." I agree with Sanjay on this point. I strongly support adopting a team approach to e-discovery work, but I think project success is better assured if the team assigns to a single project manager the responsibility for making sure all parties are working on the same page.
Sanjay also addresses what he calls "process stage PM techniques," which he defines as "techniques specific to typical e-discovery data processing states such as the Electronic Discovery Reference Model." These consist of fairly basic suggestions, such as having a written preservation plan, creating a collection tracking schedule, using visuals to track data processing progress, creating review progress reports, and engaging in scoping exercises or pilot projects at the start of more complex cases.
None of this is new to seasoned litigation support professionals, but they are not this article's intended audience. It is lawyers who need to read this, so that they are at least thinking about project management when their next case goes into discovery.
My one disagreement is with Sanjay's assertion that generally accepted project management standards (he references PMBOK and PRINCE 2) "are not easily applied to the vast majority of e-discovery projects...."
Nonsense!
The knowledge areas and processes of these standards are just as applicable to an e-discovery project as they are to a construction project, software design project, or baking cookies. How you apply the process and the level of detail in the documentation will differ depending on the nature of the project. Nobody trained in these standards claims that the knowledge they describe should always be applied uniformly on all projects. That's why I started a blog on LEGAL project management. Project managers need to apply project management standards differently to legal work than to rocket design. How those standards are best applied is worthy of research and discussion, not dismissal.
I think Sanjay's comment is born of his observation that the application of project management standards to e-discovery projects tends "to be anathema to most lawyers (who often regard them as over-engineering." The lawyer doth protest too much, methinks. I feel very strongly that legal project managers should not capitulate to attorney ignorance. The resistance to measurement, reporting, standardization, and thorough planning leads to the cost overruns seen so often on e-discovery projects.
Sanjay is correct in recognizing the trend of corporate clients "taking direct control of e-discovery across all of their cases rather than relying on external legal advisers to act as a filter on a case-by-case basis" and that "demands for more formalised PM standards seems inevitable." I also agree with his observation that "[t]he greater involvement of corporate clients also appears to be shifting the focus from an assessment of pure cost to an assessment of value....Thus it is not just cost, but cost-effectiveness that matters and that is where good PM techniques can make a difference."
Exactly. Because of these trends, however, we need not disfigure project management to make it less threatening to lawyers. There is no reason we can't apply the mature project management standards represented by PMBOK and PRINCE 2 to legal projects, despite some lawyers' protests.
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