By Dan Safran – Unbiased Consulting
The new COVID-inspired, remote workplace has caused many law firms and law departments to contemplate adopting more modern task management and collaboration solutions. This includes creation of administrative resource pools or developing centralized, virtual service centers to support the organization’s lawyers. Our clients tell us that delegation and information sharing remain primitive between lawyers and teams. Lawyers are spending too much time on non-value tasks and activities.
Administrative management finds it difficult to plan, manage and track remote and virtual support resources. Communications are cumbersome. Some support resources are over-taxed, while others carry light workloads. Phone, video calls and email are the prevailing tools. While these tools work, they are often awkward and inefficient. Little structure exists and work and communications are more fragmented than ever.
Virtual Resource Management (VRooM) Readiness Assessment
Unbiased Consulting assesses your readiness and provides recommendations to identify needs, manage support resources, solutions that span improvement and innovation in people, process and technology.
We advise and plan new collaborative environments and assist with development of supervisory processes and resourcing structures. While automation can help support virtual resource tasking and management, we typically start with assessing those software products already owned to see whether we can leverage your existing technology investment. In helping you validate and select the right tools; we know the products and software configurations that can be used to meet your needs. Our recommendations point you to the path of planning and launching the resource pools or service centers quickly capture efficiency and cost reduction opportunities.
Virtual Resource Management (VRooM) Design, Planning and Deployment
The Unbiased Consulting Virtual Resource Management team helps design, plan and deploy administrative resource pools and service center.The work includes design, planning and deployment of the new environment(s) that encompass the following:
- Process – service request intake and processing policies and procedures,
- People – resource planning, communications, load balancing, management and reporting,
- Technology – automation to support service request management and oversight, through to work completion.
We find that organizations often roll out new models without attention to thoughtful and documented policies and procedures required to optimize the new environment(s). Often overlooked is definition, planning and deployment work to design daily work processes and procedures, user guides, marketing of the service, service level agreements, resource expectations, load balancing processes, team coverage, task management and measurement.
Similarly, we find that people issues make the differences between success and failure. Understanding pooled resources skillsets, the types of work requirements, working and communications behaviors, employee needs and requestor requirements are critical to a well architected solution. Last, some organizations start with automated tools, or attempt to support the work with no supporting technologies. We find that there are a number of existing legal toolsets that firm may already own, that can be leveraged. We focus on using that you have, versus identifying yet another technology toolset to introduce to your already complex technology environment.
Our team provides a detailed deployment plan to ensure that the new pool or service center is deployed in a thoughtful, planned manner. We find that this plan is required for a smooth transition.