Relativity Fest Redux - Strategic Planning

With a rating of 10 comes an opportunity to do it again! Enjoyed reprising with Daniel Young our strategic planning workshop from #RelativityFest today.

The workshop leveraged Ops in a Box, Legal Edition (OBL) to arm attendees with an essential tool kit designed to help with #strategicplanning, fine-tune existing tools and processes and refine operations. 

Confirmed workshop participants received the OBL kit  - compliments of #Relativity - shipped directly and access to the digital version.

In the workshop we uncovered elements of the toolkit and had a rich conversation on strategic planning questions. It was great to see both familiar and new faces.  As always, I learned a lot.  A few key take-aways for me from the breakout sessions for me were:

1.  Flexibility is important.  Operations professionals, not surprisingly, tend to score high for planning.  A strategic plan, however is never one and done.  It is a LIVING DOCUMENT evolving in real time to the situation at hand.

2.  At the same time, discipline is important.  One of the reasons we give regular progress reports is to remind our leadership and client groups of what we have already committed to accomplishing and to give a realistic sense of the time it will take to meet those goals with resources at hand. When we need to redirect for an urgent new project, then we need to be clear on the scheduling impact this will have on projects in progress.  

3.  Another reason for regular progress reports - Transparency.  Once you have communicated the strategic plan a lot goes on "behind the curtain" Don't wait until the unveil; give folks behind the scenes previews along the way.

4.  Implicit in 2. is the need to prioritize.  Part of the process is helping the legal team to shift mindset.  In many cases, folks may be comfortable with how they calculate their contribution without always thinking about how they could raise the bar in delivering value.  Legal Operations can model the behavior by communicating the question of "What brings the greatest return on value to the business?" informs how the bulk of their time is allocated.

For take-aways from the October session see this blog post.