Recently in Terms and Definitions Category

This post was originally published on the PMI Legal-Project Management Community of Practice members-only blog.Most lawyers would benefit from the project-management practice of decomposing their legal matters--breaking down the work into more manageable and easier-to-measure components. An important tool for doing this is the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). A WBS is an excellent device to help ensure you have accounted for all work to be done for a matter and is an effective communication aid when discussing a matter with your team members and clients. It is an important part of scoping out your work and an early step in...

Apparently, to Project Counsel, "legal-project management" is an annoying "buzz phrase." Or so that is how it is referred to in an otherwise well-written article on the surge in litigation and compliance document review in Europe. Legal-project management comes up in the article when they explain how a "global holistic approach to GRC (governance, risk, compliance)" is one of "the two biggest changes [...] driving more in-house work [and] more use of outsourcing." Immediately after the term "GRC," they emphasize that it is a "'buzz phrase' sometimes more annoying than 'the cloud', 'early case assessment' and 'legal project management'."[1] Has...

In a recent post to his Lexician blog, Steven Levy reminds us that, just as the map is not the terrain, the artifact is not the project.[1] He points out that: "[t]oo many project managers, bad project managers, don't get this. They see their job as the production of such artifacts. They turn out beautiful Gantt charts, multi-page budget worksheets, process maps, and hundreds of other such museum pieces." Yes, if you work with enough project managers long enough, you'll eventually come across instances where a project manager sits fiddling with his daily dashboard report while the project burns down around him.I've always liked the...

While doing a little digging into Altman Weil Inc. after reading about their being hired by Dechert LLP to provide legal project management (LPM) training to all of the law firm's partners and associates, I discovered a new blog that those of you interested in LPM might want to add to your blog roll.  Corcoran's Business of Law Blog is authored by Timothy B. Corcoran, a Senior Consultant with Altman Weil. Mr. Corcoran was a co-presenter of Altman Weil's recent LPM Webinar, and has recently written a couple of informative post introducing his take on LPM.In a post dated March...

A recent post to the Discerning E-discovery Blog by Aaron Pippen, a Senior Project Manager at Fios, got me thinking about about gold-plating again.[1] By gold-plating I'm not referring to the dental procedure I've been saving up for, but rather the practice of enhancing a product or service beyond a customer's requirements. Mr. Pippen asks whether gold plating on e-discovery projects is necessary, concluding that while e-discovery project managers should provide value, delivering more than what is asked for is generally unwise and "can lead to undesirable issues."  For example, if a client asks for a specific report, they...

I wasn't going to post today. I've had a rare breathing space this Friday and have enjoyed cleaning out my in-boxes. But Steven Levy wrote a short post on his Lexician blog yesterday that created a small spark I wanted to capture, perhaps to think and write about more in a future post.His post, entitled "Project Science, Project Heart," shares a pair of acronyms that summarize the attributes of effective project management. They are:  STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, Math. IDEA = Intuition, Design, Emotion, Art.[1] From these acronyms he draws the following observations: Every project manager understands the former. Too...

During my morning Google Alerts check, I came across a study that looks at the application of the Balanced Scorecard measurement system to legal departments. The article is titled Balancing Legal Scorecard - A Performance Management Tool for Corporate Excellence and is authored by Dr. R.Srinivasan, an associate professor at the Bharathidasan Government College for Women (Muthialpet, Puducherry, India).[1] The article defines a "Balanced Scorecard" as follows: The Balanced Scorecard (introduced by Kaplan and Norton) is a set of financial and non-financial measures relating to a company's critical success factors. It is an attempt to capture the essence of the organization's critical...

Dan Michaluk, an associate at Hicks Morley, recently discussed why project management is a key litigator competency on Slaw.CA.[1] His post discusses a number of points that this blog has covered in the past, but placed in a Canadian context.He starts with a quote from the Sedona Conference's Commentary on Achieving Quality in the E-Discovery Process endorsing legal project management and then provides a brief definition of "project management" taken from Wikipedia, without delving into too much detail (defining "legal project management" can be tricky).[2] Next, he points out that poor legal project management may have ethical implications: There are other sources of...

Last Thursday, Exterro gave an on-line presentation that discussed e-discovery project management in the context of their suite of legal work-flow tools.[1]  Co-presented by Natasha Keitges, Exterro's Senior Director of Business Development, and Pete Warner,[2] a litigation technology specialist at Sandia National Laboratories (an Exterro client),[3] the Web cast discussed how e-discovery project management fits into a company's government, risk, and compliance program and, more specifically, how applying project management processes to the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM)[4] can establish key efficiencies, cut costs, and allow legal departments to more effectively monitor the successes and failures of their e-discovery projects.  The presentation...

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...