Better technology does not ensure better quality. W. Lawrence Wescott, a senior consultant with Kahn Consulting, takes the opportunity of the recent Apollo Moon Mission anniversary to point out that:
Despite the fact that the computers available to NASA at the time had a fraction of the power of today's laptops (the computers within the command module itself had less power than an ordinary cell phone), the many complex systems had a failure rate of less than .01 percent. The key to the success of the space program was superior management.
Project management is likewise the key to success in e-discovery. Project management facilitates the coordination of the many parties involved, promotes communication between those parties, allows a record of the process to be created, and promotes discipline throughout the process. Project management fosters the creation of a repeatable process, and is an essential requirement for a successful e-discovery outcome.W. Lawrence Wescott II, Dan Regard on Project Management in Electronic Discovery, Electronic Discovery Blog, July 27, 2009, at URL (last visited July 29, 2009).
While collecting, processing, reviewing, and producing e-mail is not quite the same as sending someone to the moon, Mr. Wescott is absolutely correct to emphasize the professional project management over technology. Too often, law firms and corporate legal departments are overly dismissive of formal project management, feeling that it will lead to "over-management" of the legal work, but at the same time are overly optimistic in what new technologies can do for them.
Concept searching and clustering, social network diagramming, machine translation, auto-coding, and similar tools can all be extremely useful, but will not compensate for poor planning and ineffective management. The opposite is true: such tools will exacerbate management failings and make major oversights and quality lapses more likely. I've heard of a number of instances, for example, where over-reliance on bulk-coding by concept, without effective quality assurance processes in place, have lead to large amounts of non-relevant data being produced, significant amounts of relevant data NOT being produced, or, worse, privileged data being produced.
With proper training and professional planning, modern search and review tools can not only increase efficiency, but will also improve quality. But I would still put my money on a well-managed team conducting linear review in "last-generation" tools, before I'd trust my data to those who bought into the sales hype and believe that their bleeding edge tech. solutions will manage the review for them.
Project management courses are most beneficial when there is a clear intent to address specific relevant and pressing issues.
Project management courses are most beneficial when there is a clear intent to address specific relevant and pressing issues.
Project management training is in high demand today as businesses and organizations constantly look for ways to streamline and refine practices and operations for the most cost efficient, resource friendly, solutions to increasing productivity and improving the bottom line.
Online project management training is the best solution to any company, organization or professional that wants to learn how to analyze and resolve the problems impacting businesses today.