Are You an “Intelligent Project Manager?

(Part 1)

The people who manage eDiscovery, forensic, and governance projects are smart people–they have to be, to keep track of all the moving pieces, hold their own in rooms with business and legal leaders, and connect dots that other people might be actively working to obscure.

But, it’s not always about how smart the Project Manager is—sometimes, it’s about how well that Project Manager uses intelligence that they might not be familiar with already.

As projects become bigger, budgets become tighter, and analytics move to the left on the EDRM, Project Managers have an opportunity to apply business intelligence in a way that drives efficiency, control, and impact.

The New Intelligence About Data Processing

We know, there’s a ton of data and it’s just growing. And then there’s the data about the data, and that’s growing even faster.

You might be familiar with the standard eDiscovery Processing Report, listing item and volumes from source through material, original, tag, production set and export.

Maybe you track throughput, deduplication rates, and total volume by project.

Here’s some new data about your projects, process, and performance:

  • The number of steps – and the type of steps – being performed to process and analyze ESI;
  • Utilization and location of hardware resources (check out our blog on Resource Pools);
  • Time in Queue as jobs wait for resources to become available;
  • Notification rules for when processes are completed;
  • Speed to review and the value of shaving off a week, a day, or an hour;
  • Parameters governing data onboarding, conditional Workflows, and analyst input; and
  • The number of projects each team member can support in a day and still leave by 5PM.

The teams who are thinking about this are competing on quality assurance (not quality control), optimizing marginal cost at scale, retaining talent, and blowing away SLAs.

The teams who aren’t, argue that data processing is commoditized and re-assuring their clients that one shop is as good as another.

Share
Comments are closed.