Using a Board to Manage WIP of a Practice Group

How to create a board to track the Work-in-Progress (“WIP”) of an entire department, team's work allocation, and capacity.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re the managing partner of a litigation department, of real estate, wills & estates, or M&A, or you manage some other practice group. 

A matter-management board can be very helpful when it comes to managing work-in-progress (WIP) regardless of the type of matters your team handles. We are using M&A but this approach is useful for any practice group.

M&A example

In this example, the law firm organizes typical buy-side M&A deal into ten distinct phases you see here.

As you would expect, the M&A group usually has many transactions all running simultaneously.

In this example (see video) the matter-management board gives you the 50,000 foot (15,000 meter) overview of the progress of each deal the group is working on across the ten Phase matter lifecycle. Each transaction is represented by a separate card - in this context the card becomes a “matter card” rather than a “task card.”

Each matter card is moved from column to column as the deal progresses through the phases.

This board has been created physically on a wall using tape, temporary column labels and colored stickies for the matter cards, this board’s divided into 11 columns starting with the “Not Started” on the far left—that’s where you put cards for matters that are coming up, but upon which work has not yet begun—and ends with “Phase 10 - Closed” on the far right. That’s the “Done” column.

If you do a lot of buy-side M&A work, you know a lot of valuable time and effort can be spent in the weeks and months following the closing, integrating the business that was acquired into your client’s existing business and operations.

You probably would include a column on your WIP board for projects that are in the Post-Closing Integration Phase, since you’d want to know what resources are occupied with that work.

A board like this allows you to see, at a glance, the flow of work across the entire portfolio of matters your department is handling.

It doesn’t take much effort to get a sense of the workload across this M&A group. One deal has yet to kick off, and seven of the transactions are spread across Phases 5 through 8, each of which is reasonably work intensive.

With one deal in the Pre-Closing Phase, it’s reasonable to expect that we might be able to take on some new files soon. But we mustn’t forget we already have one deal waiting to kick off.

What to track

A closer look at the matter cards on the board reveals the kind of information you’d probably want, at a minimum, to track in the context of your department’s work in progress. Here we’ve captured:

• the name of the project,
• the client,
• the expected closing date, and
• the name of the supervising partner
• team member responsible
• comments about the work
• related file(s)

What you decide to capture is limited only by your imagination, by the usefulness of the information, and by the size of the stickie notes you are using.

Digital boards

There are limits to a physical matter-management board. You can’t manipulate and analyze data as easily and in the same way as you can using a digital board.

Board software

You can create matter management boards using all sorts of software including:

• HighQ Collaborate (Task module - "card" view)
• Smartsheet
• Trello
• Legal Boards

No two software systems are the same, but the principles are.

Filtering

The ability to switch seamlessly between different views, to apply filters, and to group data according to different parameters is one of the many advantages that digital matter management boards have over physical boards, which are already a very powerful tool, despite their simplicity.

Managing / maintaining

The value of the matter-management board, whether physical or digital, is directly tied to its ability to provide you with accurate information in real time. Being able to do that requires the board be maintained and updated regularly.

Team members should be moving the cards through the columns as they start and complete work.

Having a regularly scheduled team "stand-up" meeting is important. In five or ten minutes you can review progress and realign the work and resources. 

Depending on the average speed with which M&A deals progress through the different phases of the typical transaction lifecycle, you could probably get away with holding your stand-up meeting once every week or two, rather than daily as would be suggested for managing individual transactions.

Conducted in the same manner as a daily stand-up meeting for an individual transaction, the WIP board meeting would most likely be attended just by the supervising lawyers on each of the deals.