This document discusses business process management (BPM) and its application to legal firms. It begins with an introduction to BPM, defining it as focusing on aligning organizations with client needs through a holistic management approach. The document then provides an overview of BPM in legal firms, using the example of a law firm's value chain. It emphasizes the importance of aligning information and processes. The document concludes by discussing specialized design methodologies for BPM, including using personas and roles to represent users and ensure their needs are met.

1. Sally Gonzalez
Director
Baker Robbins & Company
Tom Baldwin
Chief Knowledge Officer
Reed Smith

2. Agenda
• Definitions & pedigree
• Alignment of information and processes
• Specialized design methodologies
• Real world examples in legal

3. What is Business Process Management?
• Management field focused on aligning organizations with
the wants and needs of clients
• Holistic management approach that promotes business
effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation,
flexibility, and integration with technology
– Transition from “build-to-last” to “built for change”
• Attempts to improve processes continuously
• Sometimes described as a "process optimization process“
Sources: Wikipedia & Gartner Group

4. Trends and Directions
• Family tree includes Taylorism (1900), Deming’s production
improvements (40’s), TQM and Six Sigma (90’s)
• Initially focused on improving single department or function
• Today focusing on cross-departmental, enterprise-wide, or
cross-enterprise processes
– Requires new ways of thinking about business
• Perceived benefits
– Cost savings
– Productivity improvements
– Business innovation through insight
– Agility

5. BPM Starts with Law Firm Value Chain
Get More Work
Managing The Firm
Ex
ce
ed
ing
Getting
Getting Staffing
Staffing Doing
Doing Managing
Work Work Work
ns
Work Work Work Work
tio
ct a
pe
Ex
Supporting The Practice
Copyright, Michael Farrell Group, 2002

6. Deconstructing the Business Process Model
GETTING WORK > STAFFING WORK > DOING WORK > MANAGING WORK
Direct Proposal Project Deliverables
Marketing Prepared Opened Prepared
Time and
Inquiry Proposal Work Client Work
Charges
Received Delivered Started Billed Finished
Recorded
Indirect Conflicts Team Project
Marketing Cleared Assigned Managed Legend:
Work processes
Learning loops
Copyright, Michael Farrell Group, 2002

7. BPM Requires Aligning Information & Process

8. BPM Requires Enabling Information Flows
Work Required Skills & Expertise
Blocked
Information
Flows

9. BPM Requires Enabling Information Flows
Work Required Skills & Expertise
Aligned
Information
Flows

10. BPM – Examples
• New Business Intake
• New Joiners/Leavers
• Matter Management
• E-Mail Management

11. Key Success Factors
• Leadership to drive change across multiple business
segments
• Effective partnership between IT and the business
– Change seen as business goal, not technology change
– Design enabled by consistent policy and standards
– Strong vision in technology and business solution
• IT adoption of specialized development methods

12. BPM Development Life-Cycle
• Design
– Focus on improving existing processes
– Include process flow, actors,
alerts/notifications, SOPs, SLAs, and
task handovers
– Good design reduces usability and
cost issues over process lifetime
• Modeling
– Assess variable conditions
• Execution
– Buy COTS or build
– Blend automated tasks with human
Intervention for complex areas
• Monitoring
– Track and report on process states
• Optimization
– Collect monitoring or modeling data and improve process

13. Successful BPM requires specialized development
• Understand what the
organization wants to
accomplish and get
buy-in from stakeholders
• Understand how people
work now
• Understand how business
needs drive change in
work practices
• Translate that understanding into clear requirements
• Translate requirements into clear directions for developers
• Provide the right amount and style of communication and training

14. Design Goals
• Any system embodies a way of working
• A system’s function and structure force users to accept
particular strategies, language, and work flow
• Successful systems offer a way of working that users want
to adopt and addresses the way they think about things
(their “mental model.”)
• There needs to be a way for a cross-functional team to
come to agreement on what users need and how to design
a system for them

15. Goal-Directed Design gets you to successful BPM
Streamlines design, development, and training by providing
clear steps to avoid designing unnecessary processes and
features that only meet a portion of user needs.
The Steps
Research: Gather information on users,
domains, and business objectives. Conduct
contextual interviews.
Model: Develop conceptual personas and
day-in-the-life scenarios that will be
translated into specific features and
functions.
Envision: Prepare mockups and key path
scenarios. Conduct walkthroughs with users
to verify the design.
Refine: Via iterative testing, validate
features and refine appearance and
behavior. Prepare specifications to
communicate design requirements to
development team.

16. “Personas” are key elements
• Represents goals and behaviors of a real group of users
• Synthesized from interviews
• Captured in 1–2 page descriptions including:
– Behavior patterns
– Goals
– Skills
– Attitude
– Environment
– … and a few fictional personal details to make the
persona vibrant

17. Personas and Roles
• Roles address the actual tasks and tools needed to
accomplish a persona’s goals in the workflow process
• Personas support the accurate development of role
requirements
– Put a human face on abstract data about a particular
role in the development of a workflow process
– Minimize "self referential design" reflecting
designer/developer’s mental models rather than the real
user’s
– Assist with brainstorming, use case specification,
features definition, and prioritization based fit to persona
needs and roles as they perform workflow

18. Persona Examples: Matter Management
Persona: Lorraine Faraday, Client Manager
Role: Approver
Goal: Give me an option where I can easily access a listing of
collections for the day and hours so I can assess the profitability
of a matter before approving Opening a New Matter
Persona: Adam Trexler, Matter Manager
Role: Approver
Goal: Give me an option where I can easily see information
about resources assigned to a project so I can accurately
assess the staff when approving a Staffing Workflow
Persona: Ross Fallon, Payment Advisor
Role: Check Request Receiver and Router
Goal: Show me a meaningful list of requests, who needs
what, when they need it, when they requested it and how to
contact them.

19. BPM takes a village…
• You cannot define system
functionality without user
research
• Identify each and every role
in the process
• Give each role an identity by
preparing a persona
• Keep roles in mind throughout
the entire process of design,
development,
implementation, and change
management
Example: NBI Team

20. BPM in Law Firms
Real World Examples