This past week members discussed LPM programs, help desk statistics and more. Explore curated sources on these topics including some from ILTA’s treasure chest.
Building a Legal Project Management Program
In the white paper article, “Enhancing Legal Operations by Integrating LPM Techniques with Matter Management, E-Billing and Financial Analytics,” David Rueff and Scott Rosenberg explain that “LPM is more than just doing things better; LPM is about changing the underlying dynamics of the relationship between in-house and outside counsel.” With this in mind, gather best practices for your LPM program from the ILTA Radio, “A Discussion on Advancing Legal Project Management,” and a session from ILTACON 2015 that still resonates, “Proving and Improving the Value of LPM.”
Help Desk Statistics
We all want data, ideally great data, for help desk statistics and much more. Data helps us determine staffing needs and uncover areas needing improvement from better tools to better training. First, we must collect the right data. Watch the ILTA Video, “Service Desk Metrics: Best Practices for Data Analysis and Reporting” and read the corresponding Peer to Peer best practices article to begin the collection and analysis process. Some of your data may point to inefficiencies. To remedy this review processes and consider “Affordable Service Desk Tools and Best Practices” discussed at ILTACON 2016. If you want to review the average number of full time employees working at a help desk, begin on page 25 of ILTA’s 2015 IT Staffing Survey.
SOMETHING EXTRA – Defining Legal KM for RFPs and Learning from Mistakes – Amazon’s AWS Outage
A member recently asked how our peers define knowledge management in a law firm for an RFP. When explaining your work outside the legal industry, it can help to understand your audience’s industry. Amy Halverson wrote an article for ILTA’s KM white paper that studies KM from different perspectives. Read “What Can Legal KM Learn from Other Professional Services Organizations?” If you want extra information on RFPs, consider reviewing the RFP Story blog posts including “What is an RFP?,” “Developing the RFP” and “Responding to RFPs.” Next read Cheryl Disch’s guidance on managing RFPs, parts one and two.
Some of ILTA’s members felt the impact of the AWS outage several days ago. The outage and underlying issues were discovered, but David Stier teaches in Data Science Central how to learn from this outage. He urges us to work with our CIOs to develop a plan for “managing technical debt” as part of the risk management strategy. Read more in “‘Typos’ Don’t Take Down Servers.” Stier also recommends reading the 2014 Google paper, “Hidden Technical Debt in Machine Learning Systems.”
As ILTA’s content curator, I’m always monitoring the discussion forums to discover what topics are top-of-mind among the members. Each week, I focus on a few areas that spark your interest, and I provide some curated resources to assist your own information-gathering on the topics. If there are specific topics you would like assistance exploring, please contact me at
joanne@iltanet.org#LegalProjectManagement #HelpDeskandUserSupport