Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/34417
AN UNCONVENTIONAL APPROACH The genesis of the pilot started months earlier as lawyers in the firm began investigating different approaches to matter management, alternative fee pricing and a greater degree of leverage. While it was tempting to simply fine-tune existing approaches in an effort to control costs, these lawyers recognized that a new approach was needed to address the root causes of deal expense and client frustration. By identifying ways to achieve client goals more efficiently and effectively, the partners aimed to differentiate their services to ultimately give their clients a marketplace advantage and the firm greater market share. Of the range of project management and process improvement methods available, the chair selected Lean Six Sigma as the pilot’s frame of reference because these methodologies resonated with a cross section of the business community, including success in service sectors such as health care and banking. Furthermore, the tenets of Lean and Six Sigma, such as listening to clients, continuous improvement, process thinking and measurement, distinguished these approaches from others commonly used within the legal industry and promised to challenge status quo assumptions. Since the partners worked with different types of clients — from private equity investors to strategic buyers — the team needed an approach like Lean Six Sigma, which would allow them to develop their capability to collaborate with a client to design a framework that could improve its approach to deal management. At the same time, the team did not perceive Lean Six Sigma to be a silver bullet. Based on their own exposure to quality initiatives in large corporations, the partners recognized that a significant percentage of top-down improvement initiatives failed to deliver What Are Lean and Six Sigma? Lean and Six Sigma are process improvement and project management methods that combine both common sense techniques and data-based tools to eliminate waste, reduce defects and delight customers. During the 1940s and ‘50s, Taiichi Ohno, Eiji Toyoda and others developed a knowledge management system, later known as the Toyota Production System or “Lean,” to leverage the tacit expertise of their workforce. As a scientific approach to building value through an entire flow of activities, Lean workgroups use a cycle of planning, action and reflection (plan, do, check, act) to test and improve the design of a process through actual employee performance. During the 1980s and ‘90s, Bob Galvin at Motorola and later Jack Welch at General Electric (among others) developed Six Sigma as a project management system that focused on customer value and utilized statistics to eliminate defects caused by process variation. Throughout the project life cycle — described as define, measure, analyze, improve and control (DMAIC) — trained project managers execute a measurement-based strategy to eliminate the root causes of quality issues and improve customer satisfaction, sales and revenue. ILTA www.iltanet.org Knowledge Management 41