Andrew DelkSystems Engineer| FreelanceBradenton, Fl, United States
Hello All,
I am working for a Law Firm that wants to implement a Process Improvement project to streamline their Paralegal's daily workflow. How can I measure such things and assign numerical value for this? I want to use the DMAIC approach as it is what I am familiar with.
Does anyone have any advice or tips on performing a DMAIC with a Law Firm? How do I measure tasks to make them applicable in such a setting?
Thanks so much for any replies. Saving Changes...
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Michael ZiyadehContracts Negotiator Sr. | Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin CompanyBranford, Ct, United States
Hello Andrew, great question. I used to work as a Paralegal in a small firm (two attorneys) and had to manage time well. In my case the attorney's had set expectations for me regarding the amount of time I should be spending on certain tasks on a percentage basis. For example, 20% of work day speaking with clients, 25% of work day file administration, 10% billing, etc.
I would start by picking the attorney's brains regarding what percentage of time can be allotted to these major tasks. This can form the baseline of your Define effort. The measurement portion can be measured by the Paralegal him/herself during actual execution ie actually doing the work and timing himself. Then analyze the gaps between expectation and reality and begin to focus on the areas that reveal the biggest gaps. Your attorneys may be under the impression your Paralegal spends 50% of the day speaking to clients whereas she does not. Maybe this is a good thing, maybe not. In any event looking at the time committed to major task categories against expectations will begin the conversation. In my opinion, in your work environment I don't believe that it is necessary to break down major tasks, such as client communication, billing, file maintenance, into smaller activities.
What do you think?
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1 reply by Andrew Delk
Mar 23, 2017 8:58 AM
Andrew Delk
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It sounds good to me for a start. I will get with the boss and have him give me such details. Surely he has some idea on this topic.
Thanks so much. I will keep you posted on this.
Saving Changes...
Andrew DelkSystems Engineer| FreelanceBradenton, Fl, United States
Mar 23, 2017 8:08 AM
Replying to Michael Ziyadeh
...
Hello Andrew, great question. I used to work as a Paralegal in a small firm (two attorneys) and had to manage time well. In my case the attorney's had set expectations for me regarding the amount of time I should be spending on certain tasks on a percentage basis. For example, 20% of work day speaking with clients, 25% of work day file administration, 10% billing, etc.
I would start by picking the attorney's brains regarding what percentage of time can be allotted to these major tasks. This can form the baseline of your Define effort. The measurement portion can be measured by the Paralegal him/herself during actual execution ie actually doing the work and timing himself. Then analyze the gaps between expectation and reality and begin to focus on the areas that reveal the biggest gaps. Your attorneys may be under the impression your Paralegal spends 50% of the day speaking to clients whereas she does not. Maybe this is a good thing, maybe not. In any event looking at the time committed to major task categories against expectations will begin the conversation. In my opinion, in your work environment I don't believe that it is necessary to break down major tasks, such as client communication, billing, file maintenance, into smaller activities.
What do you think?
It sounds good to me for a start. I will get with the boss and have him give me such details. Surely he has some idea on this topic.
Thanks so much. I will keep you posted on this. Saving Changes...
Michael ZiyadehContracts Negotiator Sr. | Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin CompanyBranford, Ct, United States
Please do so, I am curious to see how this plays out. My only real advice is to document your decision making along the way. The more narrative the better. Best wishes. Saving Changes...
Anonymous
Hi Andrew,
Sounds like a very interesting challenge!
I do not have experience in the Law sector, but I have some in Shared Services and improving processes related to Product/Project/Portfolio Management (office environment rather than manufacturing).
I would suggest a simpler, more Lean approach to begin. The first thing I try always first is "value stream mapping" for the main process (or activities carried by your Paralegal team). It helps you to visualize the end to end process, the steps, who intervenes in the process, what tools are used and what is most important: what steps of the process bring value to your customers and which ones do not (waste):
1. Gather your Paralegal team, identify their main activities (5-7 top/most common process at maximum) and key contacts (at least one contact/owner per process).
2. For each process, ask your contact to describe it step by step. Ask him to consider: the End to End process (e.g. Since your Client raises a request until you invoice him, archive the case...) and a 360 approach (i.e. not only his part of the process but also where the rest of the team, external parties, the customer... Participates in the process)
3. Draft each process. One easy way is to write down the process steps in post-its (with one color by team or individual) and stick them to a whiteboard so that you can reorder, remove or add steps if needed. Once you have the end to end process, for each step write in the post-it the team or invidivual, the tools (e.g. SAP, email, phone), the time it takes, the number of iterations until you get right that step so you can move to the next one, and the common mistakes/waiting...
4. For each process and with the key contact (or even better with all of them), identify what is waste as defined by Lean:
4.1. Transport e.g. copy & pasting across systems, transcribing/scanning and uploading to systems, information going from one team to another/from client to your team unnecessarily
4.2. Inventory e.g. all the records/information that you collect/keep about your client and you never use, or all the information that you collect at some point and becomes obsolete by the time you need it
4.3. Motion e.g. look at how individuals and teams work together, if they have to walk to the end of the office to talk to other teams (versus having teams working typically together sitting together), if they have to go to the basement to collect client record (versus having an electronic system for it), if the office and desk layout is suitable for their work...
4.4. Waiting e.g. check the bottlenecks of your process and what is the reason for the waiting in a given step (solutions could be to ask information earlier in the process, staff more one team versus another)
4.5. Overproduction e.g. check all the information you gather, produce, manipulate and store and make sure is required (you might be producing reports for your clients they have not asked for and you dont have any contractual or legal requirement for)
4.6. Overprocessing e.g. much like above, if your customer is not asking for extremely detailed reports, dont produce them. If a further step in the process will do a full analysis of the case, you do not need to do it at the first steps
4.7. Skills e.g. check those steps with the highest number of iterations (errors) until they get it right, are people performing those steps well trained, do they have the right skills? also, are they over/under utilized? are they bored/could they bring a higher value to the process if they were moved to another more difficult step in the process or to another process?
5. Once I have the 5-7 activities fairly web described, I use swimlanes diagrams in Visio to despite the processes (numbering each process and step) and tables in Excel. In the Excel tables, I typically have one sheet per process. The first columns in each sheets are to identify the process, the step and the description of the process, the following ones to enter the data (times, nb of iterations, common mistakes/delays) and actions for improvement grouped by dates. As I progress with the process improvement, I update the each sheet with updates the data and reviewed actions columns for the new date so that I can track the results.
6. Keep involving the key contacts and share with them the actions and results, some of the findings or actions for one process might benefit another one.
It is much simpler and far more intuitive than it seems, I promise! I hope to get to write an article in LinkedIn about this this Sunday, where I can attach tables and graphics. I will update this post once done.
Lean can improve the "obvious" and remove the unnecessary, then you can do the fine tuning using more sophisticated methodologies. This website is really informative:
http://leanmanufacturingtools.org/
Hope it helps and do keep us posted,
Marisa Saving Changes...
Doug BargerAgile/Scrum Coach| Tech FoundGoodlettsville, Tn, United States
Great replies so far.
I'll submit an approach for your consideration.
List all activities and to the right of your list draw a vertical line from top to bottom creating two columns. Title the first column Impact and title the second column Ease.
You now have everything in place to conduct an Impact Ease Analysis.
For each item on your list assign a score from 1 to 10 based on how much of an impact completing that activity will create for your organization in terms of value and write that number down as a score in the Impact column for that item.
Next, go down the list and for each item assign a score from 1 to 10 based on how easy it will be to implement that activity and/or complete it. Write the score for each item in that item's Ease column.
Now it's time to add the two scores for each column and divide by two to get the Impact Ease score for each item.
Once you've scored each item, you now have a prioritized list with the highest scored items the best combination of the impact that activity will create for you and the ease of implementation it will take to accomplish it.
Your analysis is complete. You start with the activity with the highest score and work your way down the activity list and because both impact and ease of implementation have been considered and factored into your analysis for each item, you're sure you are working in an order that's the most efficient and effective based on a structure designed to deliver leverage for your organization with the most impact for the least effort.This is similar to the Lean Six Sigma tool called Pick Chart developed by Lockheed Martin.
This has worked to help many companies of all sizes prioritize work and I hope this helps. Saving Changes...
RAJESH K LProject Manager, PMP| Bharat Electronics, Bengaluru, IndiaBengaluru, Karnataka, India
Its important to quantify and establish a measurement technique to improve any practise. Saving Changes...
arlene trimbleAssistant IT Director| Local GovernmentAlamo, Ca, United States
From a Consultant perspective: Do a quick survey on what the organization is good at and where they need to be better to align with the organization's mission. Use the feedback as baseline for process improvement work. Saving Changes...
