[The third in series of four articles on this subject by Rachel Shields Williams, Rachel Cohee, and Kieron Champion – BIO info below:]

In previous articles in this series, we outlined how most successful experience management programs are aligned to strategic roadmaps and employ product management principles. Both are critical success factors and distinguish leading practice installations and initiatives from those which offer more limited solutions and business value. In this article, we turn to the importance of taking a multi-disciplinary and “full-firm” approach to experience management projects.

Experience Management initiatives often provide a necessary (and welcome) opportunity to break down silos within a firm

The genesis of an experience management project almost always originates from a single function or business requirement. The most impactful and successful implementations determine, from the outset, that to be truly effective requires engagement with, and participation from, representatives from across a firm - practice groups, role, office and region, and business support function. Only by working collaboratively within multi-disciplinary teams can a program establish the foundations that provide the ability to meet longer-term objectives to gather, manage, and use experiential data for a range of purposes beyond a single group or use-case. In that sense, successful experience management programs truly “take a village”.

Breaking Down Silos

Experience Management initiatives often provide a necessary (and sometimes welcome) opportunity to break down silos within a firm. These silos can exist within organizational structures, the management and use of data, and related business processes and workflows - and will almost certainly limit the impact and business value of a program focused on leveraging data and insight on clients, matters, and people!

Establishing multi-disciplinary teams provides the ability to identify these silos and address them - developing solutions which meet business and data requirements of all groups and individuals. Firms that work collaboratively in this way challenge the concept of “ownership” and instead emphasize the concept of data stewardship and governance - that reflects distinct requirements and security/privacy protocols but enables the firm and its functions to make appropriate use of data to inform their work and decision making.

As teams work together they will, in almost all cases, uncover many examples of where multiple business units require access to the same or similar data - but for different business objectives. They will almost always discover that each business unit has developed their own processes, solutions, and access controls to this data - with obvious impacts on efficiency and duplicative effort across teams, and consistency and accuracy of the data used. For example, Marketing may capture law school data to display on biographies, while HR captures this information in a different format within a separate (HR) system where it is used for recruiting. Similarly, BD may need a list of all matters for a firm client, inclusive of all subsidiaries, to provide guidance to the client team on growth plans and opportunity management; where Pricing colleagues may need that same information to analyze and report on staffing and profitability. Only when project teams include representation from across functions and locations will common business and data requirements, and disparate approaches and solutions, be uncovered. The process of designing and implementing a single experience management system can significantly enhance the quality, relevance, and governance of a firm’s experiential data - and improve efficiencies and productivity in teams charged with gathering and managing it.

Beyond Planning - Multi-Disciplinary Teams to Support Multi-Phase Roadmaps

Although the work that uncovers disjointed and duplicative business and data processes will begin during the development of a strategic roadmap, the work of the multi-disciplinary team must continue beyond this initial phase. Firstly, identifying disparate processes and siloed data collections is useful but will serve no business purpose unless teams work collaboratively to define and agree on changes and improvements. And secondly, a cross functional team of advisors should provide counsel to, and evaluation of, future phases of work that extend the scope and scale of the firm’s experience management program and solution. This team can also provide the means to maintain high levels of engagement with key stakeholders, who often have more intimate knowledge of the specific needs of their business units and other initiatives that may influence the long-term strategic roadmap.

Building a High-Performance Team

When establishing a multi-disciplinary experience management team, it is important to carefully consider the mix of resources, representation and skill sets. It is also essential that the team members are empowered to be highly effective. They must be given a clear understanding of the objective of the program, the priorities, and the team itself. They should be active and highly engaged in the work of the team and act as advocates for their business unit, their data objectives, and the firm’s experience management objectives. At the same time, they must not delay progress or decision making.

The size of the firm and the scope of the experience management strategy and roadmap will determine the exact nature and representation of the team. Based on our experience and observations of high-performance project teams we recommend the following mix:

• Junior Level: team members can help identify data sets, conduct data hygiene activities and consider general day-to-day support of the deployment.
• Mid Level: team members can support training of the lawyers, practice and department roll outs, request for configuration changes and exploration of new features.
• Senior Level: team members that drive strategy for the deployment, manage scope, and assess requests for changes to data structure, taxonomy, layout and other high level configurations that impact the enterprise-wide nature of the deployment.
• Sponsors & Execute Leaders: firm leaders to provide strong, visible, and sustained sponsorship to the initiative, remove ‘roadblocks’ and act as advocates for the value of experiential data.

Along with a mix of levels and representation from relevant business units, it is important that the team has access to the following ‘soft skills’:

• Comfort with ambiguity: oftentimes solutions will not be based on boilerplate designs or standardized processes - teams will need to make decisions with incomplete information and reach compromise if necessary.
• Intellectual curiosity: teams and individuals must be willing to explore new or different concepts and ways of working.
• Willingness to challenge norms: the team must feel able (and comfortable) to question conventions or accepted ways of working.
• Customer service mindset: the team must retain a focus on customer service and supporting teams and individuals - even when they must say no to requests or requirements.
• Able to embrace change: experience management programs and systems will demand changed processes and ways of working, and use of new and rapidly changing legal technology and so team members must be able to cope with significant and regular recalibration of the path forward.

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Rachel Shields Williams is a Director, Knowledge Management, at Sidley Austin. Kieron Champion is a Partner, and Rachel Cohee a Consultant, at Fireman & Company.