Potential Projects: Results Analysis

The past few posts have focused on legal department strategic planning. Today we look at formal portfolio analysis of potential projects gathered from stakeholder conversation. It can be useful to weigh projects against several different matrices, refining along the way.  If you cook, it’s a little like making a coulis, straining the fruit several times to remove the pulp and seeds and concentrate the flavor.

First and foremost, how will the project impact the client experience in service delivery? Does the project directly touch clients and improve their experience incrementally, transformationally or behind the scenes? If client impact is not visible outside the department or hard to define, the project may be a backlog item.

Next, how does the project align with the strategic objectives, at the enterprise initiative level or for the legal department? Is the project central to the key objectives, foundational but indirect, or perhaps even in conflict with department strategy?  When you survey the department is the project identified as business critical, important or nice to have?

These two filters comprise the Reward score on your matrix. In the coulis analogy, this is the flavor concentration component.

The second axis is the Risk score. In the coulis analogy, this is where you focus on removing or minimizing the undesirable bits. There are several risk dimensions: company external risk, project-specific risk, and internal risk (at times thought of as department risk), which can be derived in part from the other two.

Most importantly, what are the business consequences of doing (or not doing) the project?  How visible is the project?  Does the project raise visibility of the underlying issue being addressed?  If both business consequences and visibility are high, lay the groundwork carefully, focus on communications, and allow for a longer timeframe.  A typical higher risk project example could be regulatory or litigation oriented, but do not pre decide.  If your information gathering leads to identifying inefficiencies resulting in lost revenue - that may be your first focus.

For project risk, consider solution complexity:

1. Teams Involved: Can your team handle this alone, or does it require other practice areas, internal partners or external service providers? How strong are the relationships? If external, is the budget available and prudent?
2. Tools: Consider what tools the solution needs. Can you re-use or adapt something that exists within the company? Is this a standard, ready to use tool, or is it “bespoke” and require vetting or development from scratch?
3. Integration: Is the tool standalone, integrated via a business process, or via an API or MCP integration? If integration, is that application owned by legal or elsewhere in the enterprise?

Final step is to calculate the Risk/Reward score. To create your four square, assign a value range to each element and plot a Scatter diagram in Microsoft Excel.  Decide the midpoint or target values to apply your horizontal and vertical axes.

You will focus your attention on projects landing on the high reward side of the matrix. Low risk/high reward is a clear winner. High risk/low reward likely won’t make the priority list.  Low risk/low reward may be a quick “just do it.” High risk/high reward warrants thorough research and a detailed plan before proceeding.

From the Land the Strategic Plan post, “What are the 3 things we must do right now to keep the plane in the air [risk] and on course [reward]?”