Define Scope
Maturing your eDiscovery practice is a broad statement that can mean many different things if it’s allowed to remain a vague concept. The purpose of defining the scope is to narrowly define the exact goals and the actions that will take place during this process.
Time to Perform is 1 hour 20 minutes to 2 hours 20 minutes
+ Why
You’ve got the team and now you need to define the scope of the project, which is different from the goal of maturing the eDiscovery practice. This helps focus the team on viable and valuable actions within the context of the organization. Sure, it would be great to get every single detail integrated and optimizing, but is it worth it? Is a once a year report that takes a couple hours to compile worth holding up improving workflows that happen multiple times a day? It’s not, and frankly that report will probably be easier simply as a result of the improvement of everything around it. Take it a step further though, do you realistically have the time and resources to fix every workflow right now? Maybe not, but if you improve some workflows that will free up time and resources to improve other workflows which in turn frees up more time for more workflows. Maximize what resources you have by leveraging the compounding effects. Your journey to the goal of a fully matured eDiscovery practice may require multiple iterations of this process, and honestly that’s probably the smart way to do it.
In fact, here’s our recommendation, leverage the Pareto Principle - 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes. In relevant terms, 20% of the workflows being performed by the team comprise 80% of the work being done. That significantly cuts the time and resources required to work on the project while maintaining a disproportionately large impact on the effects of the project. This not only makes the ROI efforts look that much better, it also will free up a ton of time so you can circle back to more workflows with more time and resources available this time.
You know what though? Starting with just one workflow is good enough. Dip your toes in the water. Maybe you don’t have enough time and resources to do more. Maybe you need a little practice to feel comfortable first. An incremental change is still very valuable. Especially if you can follow it up with another one. Save 5 minutes here and another 5 there, and all of a sudden you are saving hours, days, months, years. No seriously, years - this methodology has doubled team efficiency on multiple occasions. After a year of working, how much time saved is that then? My only caution is that if you pick something that is too low hanging of a fruit, it might skew perception by having minimal ROI. To guard against that, pick one of the workflows in the 20% and if you can pick the one that is the biggest part of that 20%.
Time break down
10 minutes - Setup “Workflow Scoping Data” spreadsheet
30 minutes to one hour - Pull data on workflow counts and time.
Note: If your organization lacks the reporting capability to easily pull this data it may take significantly longer to gather this information. In this case, feel free to use the anecdotal approach outlined in Step 1. It’s more important to move forward than allow this step to become prohibitive to progress.
30 minutes to one hour - Meeting to define Scope
10 minutes - Create folders in central location