Practice Management System Replacement
Background
A top 30 law firm had a legacy practice management system that was becoming increasingly difficult and costly to maintain. In particular the finance team were finding that billing was not sufficiently automated and that an incomplete integration with other systems meant that some double entry of data was needed. There were also a number of key functions such as purchase ledger, management reporting and compliance with LLP requirements which were not fully supported and so required significant manual intervention. From the business, fee earners perspective, time entry was simply not flexible enough to meet the demands of all practice areas where working practices varied significantly with partners inability to fully manage and then authorise billing also being a major issue.
Business Challenge
The firm faced a number of issues that needed to be addressed, namely how to:
- Articulate the case for change and justify the investment through describing all the benefits in business terms
- Assemble and articulate a complex set of technology and business requirements
- Get an understanding of the market and potential suppliers,
- Engage time sensitive internal stakeholder groups in the procurement process
- Use an appropriate structured approach to the end to end process, so as to ensure the best supplier was selected
- Design and find a solution that would provide high availability, flexibility as well as meet their budget constraints
Services Provided
- Business Requirements Analysis
- Business Case Development
- Procurement Management
Skills Deployed
- Business Analysis
- Risk Management
- Project Management
- Supplier Management
- Contract Negotiation
- Technical Architect
Our Approach
Consulting Stream worked initially with all the key stakeholders including the management team and the equity partner community to establish business requirements. At the same time a base lining exercise was conducted to establish the current processes and gaps in require functionality with teh existing practice management system. From this we were able to determine and describe clearly the case for change as well as articulate all the benefits and risks. We then subsequently initiated a procurement project utilising our proven procurement methodology. This followed a set of clear steps that involved refining the business requirements and translating these into an appropriate set of business and technical specifications. We then created all the required procurement documentation that could be used to engage suppliers and went on to manage the procurement process. In order to reduce the timescales we also pre-qualified many suppliers in advance of sending out any invitation to tender for the new system.
Business Outcome
The project allowed the client to be able to make an informed decision about the choice of supplier and at the same time the team also benefited from knowledge transfer throughout the project. The overall procurement exercise was achieved on time and within budget and was see as highly successful because of the degree to which stakeholders were engaged and kept informed on progress.
| 
