Biz Case For Blogging

Business Case for Blogging Why is the project being undertaken? What are the alternative options for achieving the same or a similar result? What are the timescales? Who is the sponsor? How much of your time will the project take? How much time do you require from others? What records are to be kept throughout the project? Who will be required to commit to the resource necessary Who are the stakeholders? Who will approve the business case? What are the risks and how will they be managed? Who will make the decisions? Who will assist and what will be their roles? What are the control mechanisms? What will be the benefits? What are the activities to be undertaken? How much will it cost?

How to Blog

With blogging, it's not the loudness of your voice which gets you heard, but the quality of what you have to say.

Why is the Pilot Blog Project being undertaken?

Blogs are becoming established as a feature of law firms worldwide.

Blogs are an excellent medium of exchange for internal staff, as well as a marketing tool for attracting external clients.

Not a question if… more a question of when blogs will be used at Lovells. KM should lead on blogging, but they will need experience in order to do so.

A pilot blog would: a) give KM valuable insights and experience into blogging; b) gauge the level of interest in the firm for blogging; c) prepare for a rollout of a ‘live’ blog to the rest of the firm (and eventually to clients).

What are the alternative options for achieving the same or a similar result?

Newsletters: done now but they lack the feedback mechanism of comments and replies. Static documents.

Forums: seen as too techie. Assumption that it would attract too little participation.

Email: difficult to maintain threaded discussions and include all interested parties. Also, people’s email accounts are already overly full with day to day correspondence. It is too unwieldy to keep track of discussions through email.

What are the timescales?

Once the decision is made to proceed

A choice of platform has been made

And interested parties identified ….

A blog can be started in a matter of hours.

Who is the sponsor?

?

How much of your time will the project take?

Pending approval, the project should take no more than a week to get off the ground, though documenting the processes would consume several times this.

The bulk of the time will be in stating the business case and persuading the KM Team of the viability of blogging as a corporate medium of exchange.

How much time do you require from others?

Blog topics can vary in length from 30 to 300 words.

Subject matter can range from formal and procedural to humorous and personal.

Writing on a blog improves with practice.

It should take only 15 minutes to half an hour for one submitted topic per person every few days.

What records are to be kept throughout the project?

A simple plan for a small project, laying out the tasks to be completed.

A spreadsheet to list pilot team members, the number and type of topics and comments, the submission dates, and a column for analysis.

A survey taken before, during and after to assess people’s interest or otherwise.

Who blogs?

Blogging does not adhere to style or content restrictions, thus anyone with anything to say can do it.

Who will be required to commit to the resource necessary

All that is required, aside from someone to administer the blog, are several volunteers to pilot the submission of blog topics. Ideally, it would be advantageous to have a mix of experienced and inexperienced blogging volunteers.

One or more members of the KM Team and/or Training

One or more PSLs

One or more lawyers who are already experienced bloggers

Management assesses the results.

Who are the stakeholders?

The KM Team

Training

Interested PSLs and lawyers already experienced as bloggers

Who will approve the business case?

Alun Davies

Justin Harness

Jayne Britton

Sally Horton

What are the risks and how will they be managed?

Important that whoever does volunteer to pilot blogging does so without it impacting other priority projects/work.

Manager-mandated scheduling of 15 minutes to half hour every few days will be required.

Failure to implement blogging in the firm will make it difficult for the firm to be seen to be “a top quality international law firm doing high-end work for major international businesses”. Especially when the competition are seen to be more forward thinking in this regard.

Who will make the decisions?

A blogging administrator would manage blog submissions and implementation of changes.

Close contact with Research and HR in the event of concerns about content and copyright issues.

Any changes should get approval by Jayne Britton and Justin Harness.

Who will assist and what will be their roles?

Someone to administer the blog.

Volunteer bloggers to contribute content to the pilot.

An interested person from Research to adjudicate over content issues identified by the Blog Admin who will act as moderator.

Someone to track the project tasks, and to keep KM Management up to date about the progress of the pilot.

What are the control mechanisms?

Important that someone in Research and Libraries advises on content issues. Sign-off may be necessary for certain topics/comments.

Any project changes should be signed off by Jayne and Justin.

A task log will be maintained to report on the project’s progress.

How much will it cost?

For the purpose of the pilot, a blog account on Google’s Blogger is free and highly functional. It is a popular blog host with legal bloggers.

Going forward to live, the recommended Word Press blogging software is open source, no licence fee is required. It also has one of the best features sets in the blog software space. Easy to setup and to maintain.