Rees Morrison brings up an important point in a recent post to his Law Department Management blog and touches on one of my pet peeves with many who discuss "project management" in the legal environment. The title of his post nicely sums up a point I often struggle to make with some of my colleagues: "project management software doesn't necessarily mean the discipline of project management."
Rees is characteristically concise in this post, a positive character trait I have trouble emulating. He doesn't go into much detail on the tools available and which support project management standards, or whether supporting standards is necessary in a "project management" application. It did, however, hit on something that I've been meaning to write about for some time.
His post focuses on the fact that many applications and services that advertise themselves as "project management" applications (e.g. BaseCamp) do not support any project management standard. It is not that these companies are being deceptive, they are simply using the term "project management" in the broader sense of a collection of tools that help with team collaboration, document management, and perhaps task tracking and billing. Tools like BaseCamp are popular because they excel at making it easy for people to work together without having to learn any particular methodology. These tools can be very useful and can help your teams work together more effectively, but they do little to implement formal project management in an organization.
After reading his post (and please do, and subscribe to his RSS feed while you're there), a logical question is whether standards-based, project-management applications exist and whether such tools are more effective in promoting project-management initiatives in an organization. Should a firm looking to promote project management in their organization use BaseCamp or should they use what the "big boys" do, "professional" project management software and SaaS products like Microsoft Project, Serena's Projects-on-Demand, Oralcle's Primavera, and the like.
Some would argue that neither are appropriate and you should use applications that are narrowly tailored to your environment, developed by companies that understand the unique needs of lawyers and litigation support professionals. There are a number of case management applications that provide collaboration, task tracking, and document management, but which also provide functionality that is especially useful to lawyers, such as calendaring workflows based on local rules of procedure (e.g. Thomson West's Prolaw, LexisNexis Time Matters, Tabs3, Amicus Attorney). There are also project management applications designed specifically for litigation support departments to manage e-discovery project (e.g. IDS Tech's iFramework and Exterro's Fusion Discovery Workflow Management).
While I do not buy into the argument that project management standards are not applicable to legal work, I do think that Microsoft Project Server may not be the most appropriate tool to roll out for attorneys, paralegals, and litigation support departments to use to manage their work. Software tailored to the needs of the legal community can save a firm or corporate legal department a lot of time in customizing the tool to their processes and reporting requirements. Later this week, I'll be posting a recent interview I had with John Rowley, Director of iFramework, where we discussed many of these issues.
The point that I would like to make in this post, however, is that implementing project management software does not equal implementing project management. Project management is not a tool. It is a culture built around a set of standards. It requires buy-in from an organization's shareholders and involves a lot of measurement, monitoring, training, and communication. Buying a lathe doesn't make you a master carpenter. Buying a case management application will not miraculously turn you into an effective lawyer. Similarly, buying a project management application does not make you a project manager.
Depending upon the standards adopted and work environment, an effective project manager uses a number of tools to organize and monitor project work. Some of those tools will be used by the project team as a whole and some tools will be used only by the project or program managers. What those tools are will be determined by the environment of the law firm or the corporate legal department; such as the number of practice areas, the complexity of the work, stakeholder preferences, office politics, and, of course, budget.
You don't need MS Project to practice project management. A skilled project manager could run a project in MS Excel or with pen and paper if he or she had to. It might not be as convenient or efficient as a more specialized tool, but it would be project management nonetheless.
Managing partners, CIOs, and GCs should certainly look into project management software, especially now. There are a number of compelling legal project management solutions that have come onto market in past couple of years that can make your legal work, especially e-discovery work, much more streamlined and much better documented. Software, however, is not a panacea for all your legal project management ills. If you are not willing to invest the money and effort required to achieve stakeholder buy-in, provide sufficient training, and develop or acquire expertise, you'd may be better off not buying a tool that will likely not achieve the results you were hoping for.
Hi,
In case you or some your readers are interested, I've created an add-in that adds project management capabilities to Microsoft Outlook. All of your project based emails, files, contacts, tasks and appointments are managed in a central, easy to use location. It also incorporates time tracking and reporting.
You can find more information on our web-site: www.missinglinkprojectcenter.com
Kevin