Productivity Guru David Allen's recent newsletter discusses two "project management" problems that should resonate with any legal project manager: (1) having a system that covers various projects requiring different levels of planning detail, and (2) integrating "horizontal vs. vertical" control.[1]
Mr. Allen defines a project as "anything ... that is not likely to be finished with one action step."[2] This might be a broader sense of the term than most people intend when they talk of "projects," but adopting this definition helps highlight a common issue faced by legal project managers:
I've never seen any two . . . projects that needed the same amount of planning or detailing of steps to get them under control. It ranges from three bullet points on the back of an envelope . . . to days of intensive planning with a group of a dozen people, with pages of outlined steps, critical path, etc. So most single "project planning" or "project management" models would under- or over-plan most of our projects.[3]Many lawyers complain that traditional, highly formalized project management methodologies and tools are overkill for most legal work (prepare a will). In some cases, however, detail-intensive planning is needed (identify, preserve, collect, process, review, and produce hundreds of gigabytes of data from multiple countries, in multiple language, involving hundreds of people from the law firm, client company, staffing agencies, and litigation support bureaus). While some lawyers may dismiss the application of project management to legal work as over-planning, many clients are becoming frustrated at what they see as under-planning on their large projects and the associated hourly billing churn that comes with it.
Where the importance of better project planning is appreciated, how to implement it is a challenge. Is there a one-size-fits-all project planing model for all legal work? Can firms afford to implement and maintain multiple management systems?
The second issue Mr. Allen addresses is how to integrate "horizontal vs. verical control." Vertical control involves detailing a single project, whereas horizontal control looks across and monitors all active projects. This is the classic time-and-focus management problem. How do you define, assign, prioritize, and track all of your ongoing project work? Other than perhaps rules-based calendaring, most traditional practice-management applications do not provide much help with this, providing only rudimentary task and workflow features.
Mr. Allen recommends a "holographic" approach:
It requires that we know how to think rapidly through a project, problem, or topic as required (vertical, natural planning); capture the results of that thinking and plug it in appropriately to the whole mix of action reminders and information we might need to access; and scan the complete horizon regularly enough to trust our intuition about what we need to do and by when."[4]Good advice for lawyers, except perhaps that bit about trusting one's intuition. But what tools are available to legal project managers that are flexible enough to scale to the needs of both simple and complex matters and allow you to drill down into a matter, without losing sight of all the other outstanding matters that need attending to? What tools support both Mr. Allen's Getting Things Done methodology[5] for determining your next actions as well as formal practice and project management workflows?
One of the more exciting trends I follow is the increasing integration of social networking and real-time collaboration technologies with project management, knowledge management, contact relationship management, contract management, personal information management, time management, accounting, human resource management an other business applications. A number of companies are offering increasingly sophisticated suites as SaaS offerings at a price that even the proverbial "poor country lawyer" can afford. Zoho and 37signals are two that come to mind.
While these solutions are not customized for lawyers (e.g., no rules-based calendaring, no way to manage trust accounts, and no practice-specific forms), a new breed of practice management solutions have taken to the cloud, adopting some of the collaborative, mobile, and social aspects of their more generalist counterparts. Rocket Matter and Clio come to mind.
I predict and hope that the development paths of these legal-specific and generalist applications will converge. Those of us who live on the Web, on the road, and in the "cloud" already have come to see integration as our birthright. The future favors context over applications. We need to free our legal matter data from our practice management applications and draw it into our project management, knowledge management, client relationship management, [fill in the blank] management applications. The "holographic approach" to legal project management is the ability to use applications to apply different contexts to the same client and matter data.
When firms embrace context over applications, they will take a big step towards solving the issues of over/under planning for a given matter, too much/little detail for a particular stakeholder, and forgetting the forest/trees at a given point in time.
[1] David Allen, David's Food for Thought: The Project Management Problem, Productive Living, Nov. 19, 2009, http://www.davidco.com/newsletters/archive/1109.html (last visited Nov. 19, 2009); for more information about David Allen, see his company profile at http://www.davidco.com/david_allen.php (last visited Nov. 19, 2009).
[2] Allen, supra, note 1.
[3] Id. (emphasis added).
[4] Id.
[5] David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (2001); see also David Allen & Co., What is GTD?, http://www.davidco.com/what_is_gtd.php (last visited Nov. 19, 2009).
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