I spent most of my day yesterday at a J.Boye Intranet Strategy and Round TableMeeting. For those of you unfamiliar with J.Boye, the group facilitates closed-door, confidential, and vendor-free conversations between intranet managers and similar professionals across a wide range of industries.  They meet quarterly to have very open and honest discussions about intranet related issues, with the goal of helping each other to solve problems, discover new technologies, and to develop professionally.   

In most law firms, management of the intranet falls to either KM, IT, or the Library. My unique position is Manager of Intelligence and Intranet – is a combination that “geek extraordinaire” Ryan McClead recently pointed out is akin to being both an umpire and a hot dog vendor at the same baseball game. At the J.Boye meeting, I put my umpire gear away and focused on hot dogs, discussing the evolution of the intranet as a platform.  Lots of companies are implementing micro sites, social media tools, people directories, content management systems, and enterprise search solutions.  They are evaluating UX (user experience) and IA (information architecture) best practices. They are attempting to marry these concepts with robust, never-out-of-date content that people really want and will actually use, even  discussing strategies to encourage users to publish and own content.  There is discussion around monitoring metrics and analytics to determine how effective (or in most cases not) all of these tools are. Their analysis suggests that people are not engaged, user adoption is low, and they need new technologies to bring people in and increase usage across the site.  

Sometime before noon, nearly exasperated, I  tweeted:

By the end of the day, however, I was starting to think that maybe I had been too hasty with my tweet. The intranet isn’t entirely dead, though I can’t help but think that maybe, rather than greater evolution, the intranet needs to devolve a bit.  Let me explain. 

It seems to me, based on the general chatter at J.Boye, that intranets have not successfully evolved much beyond electronic HR manuals anyway. The most frequently used pages on most intranets are vacation request forms, benefits summaries, people directories, and general HR content.  Most other content either goes unread, or people are consuming it elsewhere – in emails, at team meetings, or on external social media platforms. There still isn’t a fool-proof, unvetted, and successfully integrated channel for “social” and the bulk of intranet content is the same sales and marketing content that is available on externally facing websites, in pdf media libraries, and stuffed in glossy brochure stands in reception areas.  

Although intranets were originally intended, as I understand it, to be a source for write-once content, to increase efficiency in the workplace, and to give people all the tools they need to do their jobs in an single, easily accessible location, most intranets have stagnated at this level of first generation “brochure-ware”.  

I would argue that our lack of intranet progress is not for a lack of trying, but because the majority of people currently consuming content on intranets are actually looking for “brochure-ware”, not internal blogging platforms, or collaborative workspaces. 

The concept of an intranet will undoubtedly change as the demands from users change, and as more and more firms start to make content available through mobile browsers, tablets, and the like. The question is not how we can make the current intranet more effective, or what direction we should take the intranet next, but what direction will its organic evolution take once it is driven by user demand and not by hot dog vendors?

Image [cc] Goldberg

As many of you who have read this blog in the past have come to realize… I am not one to let a few grammatical errors stop me from publishing a blog post. I have even come to expect the ad hoc editors out there to post comments correcting my mistakes, and virtually wagging your finger at me for my lack of proofreading. That’s fine. I get it. Grammatical errors are like nails on a chalkboard to some people, and I’ve even had one specific error that I’ve harped on for years… only to have the rug pulled out from under me yesterday by a Slate article. After I read it, my life literally turned upside down.

Turns out that the word literally has a second meaning:

2. Used to acknowledge that something is not literally true but is used for emphasis or to express strong feelings.

For the past few decades, I’ve been wincing every time I’ve heard my Mom say things like:

… and when she found out how much it cost, it literally killed her.
… my head literally exploded when I heard the news.
… that literally blew her mind!!
 

Sorry Mom!! Although, now that I think about it, my Mom does tend to be a bit morbid in her use of the word literally.

Not only does this news make me a bad son, it also makes one of my favorite quotes from the TV show Psych, slightly less funny:
Juliet O’Hara: Detective Lassiter is literally on fire today.

Shawn Spencer: “Literally on fire” as in Michael Jackson in the Pepsi commercial, or as in a misuse of the word “literally?”

Let this be a warning for all you grammar police out there (many of whom I apparently see on social networks pointing out the proper place to put an apostrophe on major holidays.) Be very careful on pointing out the grammatical errors of others. It could literally come back to bite you!
 

I was babysitting my 4 year-old nephew last night and we were playing with a German circle puzzle. The puzzle is very much like the Chinese Tangram puzzles that are popular now, where you take the geometric pieces and try to arrange them to match images published in a booklet.  The pieces of this particular puzzle fit into a circular arrangement for easy storage in the box.

When we were done playing, I told him to put the pieces back together to make a complete circle.  He worked diligently for several minutes and then suddenly announced, “I did it Ryan, I made a complete circle!”

I must have had a less than satisfied look on my face because before I could speak he added excitedly, “…with a hat!”

It’s hard to argue when you’re getting more than you originally asked for.

I have made the point several times in this space that failure, in and of itself, is not a bad thing.  Failure is typically the first step on the path to success.  Still, it can be hard to present failure to superiors and if you do it too many times it can be detrimental to your career.  The brilliance of a 4 year-old reminds me, that while it’s good to be open to failure, it’s not always good to call it that.  Sometimes you’ve got to look for the hat that makes a failure a little bit better than success would have been.

I now have a German Circle With a Hat puzzle that proves the maxim.

Image [cc] Daniel*1977

An article on a recent legal market survey suggested a new trend in legal pricing: a trend away from Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFAs). Trend may be too strong a word, but in any event, the survey results bear consideration.

Offline I received a number of reactions about the survey result. Most people were concerned it might be viewed as a sign things are returning to the Old Normal. Yet at the same time, no one suggested they were seeing signs of such a return.

So what does it mean?

I never thought AFAs were going to sweep through the market and eliminate hourly (a.k.a. time and material) billing. As much as hourly billing has been pilloried as the demon of the profession, it will retain a role in the market as along as clients find it useful. So it would only be a matter of time before some new equilibrium of pricing approaches was established. This new balance would likely include a greater variety of types of billing arrangements and over time the balance will always be adjusting to market conditions. But maybe we are reaching a point where AFAs have peaked in their natural share of the market?

In looking at various surveys and market data, I see a possible explanation. As clients continue to seek ways to reduce the cost of legal services, some surveys and commentators rightly suggest that clients have been asking for AFAs, and then settling for bigger discounts. Market data seems to confirm this, as rate increases are moderating and realization against standard rates continues to drop. As well market surveys show firms in the second and third tier of the market (AmLaw 200 and Mid-level firms) have been doing relatively well, compared to the top tier (AmLaw 100).

This all suggests clients are moving work to lower rate providers instead of embracing AFAs. So a survey stating AFAs may have peaked seems reasonable to me.

Looking past the various surveys, I see two other market movements afoot. The first is a growing recognition from clients that not all work needs to be handled by top tier firms. In the past, this was the classic “you can never go wrong choosing IBM” approach. Clients sent a vast majority of their work to top tier firms as a means to protect themselves. No one wanted to take the risk of a bad legal result. With cost savings pressure increasing, in-house counsel now have the cover they need to take those risks. Saving money takes precedence over legal risk. Or at least we might make that assumption based on the market behavior.

The second market movement I suggest is afoot, is yet to fully materialize. Moving work to lower rate providers may or may not save clients money. It is easy to claim credit on cost savings with a 10% reduction in billing rates, but does it actually save money? The answer is: we’re not sure. Which is not a great answer. We see a number of providers entering the market bent on helping answer this question.

Adding the two movements together results in clients taking on greater legal risk without a clear cost savings result. I think this issue will come into focus over time. At that point clients may do one of two things: #1 – They may re-engage on AFAs, or #2 – They may increase their attention to efficiency and effectiveness. With #1, clients will be shifting their focus to cost savings at the fee level over the rate level. This approach should result in more quantifiable cost savings. With #2 – clients will more deeply engaged with their law firms to focus effort on value. Of course some combination of #1 and #2 is even more likely.

At the top level, I sense the market is just trying to find its way to new ground. AFAs were originally held up as the best path towards cost savings. In reality, they are merely a tool. Achieving cost savings goals requires more than different pricing approaches. So the market will continue in its struggle to find the right mix of tools and approaches to meet that overriding goal. I suggest it is an overriding goal in the market, given the consistent focus on reducing legal fees across the market.

In the meantime, I predict we will continue to see such trends, within trends.

Image [cc] billychic

Usually, I ignore unsolicited emails that rant about a vendor or association or how I could benefit from having a real editor review my posts before hitting “submit.” Every once in a while, however, I do get some gems, and this weekend I got one I wanted to share with you. The email comes from someone named “Phil Batman” (which I am assuming is a pseudonym) and it was sent to me and 19 executives at Thomson Reuters. I guess Phil thought that I would appreciate the humor, even if some of it is ‘inside baseball’ and may not be understood by most folks that don’t have a good understanding of the current set of players at Thomson Reuters. Hint: a quick Google of some of these names may clear up why they are being mentioned.

So, straight from my in-box to your browser, I give you “Phil Batman’s Top Ten Items on the Reuters To Do List”:

10. Learn difference between a product and a hole in the ground
9.   Review pay package of CTO James Powell
8.   Rehire Tom Glocer to sell toasters door-to-door
7.   Lead story on every Reuters newswire: “Eikon products still dependable and affordably priced!”
6.   Three words: “Eikon With Porn”
5.   Find out who the hell this “Dave Thomson” is (Singers enter)
4.   Have Anna Nicole Smith keep marrying rival executives until they’re all dead
3.   See if Powell’s engineers can help Albert Lojko use his cache of iPhones, iPads, & MacBooks
2.   Assemble all employees for a huge party followed by massive layoffs
… and the number one item on the Reuters To Do List:
1.   The Late Show With Phil Brittan
 

My kids watching The Dollyrots’ StageIt Show

Evan Lowenstein noticed that the music industry had changed, and for musicians, that wasn’t a good thing. “It caused our industry to go from hundreds of artists making millions of dollars, to millions of artists making hundreds of dollars.” In fact, for a solo artist to just make minimum wage these days, they would have to have people download 12,399 songs, per month, from iTunes or Amazon, or their song would have to stream over 4 million times a month on Spotify to make the minimum wage threshold. (See the Information is Beautiful breakout, also see today’s report in The Atlantic which counters this somewhat.) Remember, those numbers are for solo artists, multi-member bands have to make three, or more times that to break the minimum wage barrier.

So, what should artists and bands do? Tour? Yes. Sell merch online? Yes. Run promotions on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or PledgeMusic? Yes. All of those make money, much more than the traditional selling of songs and albums does, but they are also very demanding and are either one-off type projects, or extremely expensive. Lowenstein has come up with an online alternative to touring, and you may see your favorite bands performing for you, right from their living rooms.

Lowenstein created the online concert platform called Stageit. The idea is pretty simple. Your favorite musicians perform live, usually from their own homes, and sell tickets to the show, usually at a “name your own price” amount. So, you can watch a live performance and pay 10¢ (if you’re a total cheapskate.) Most fans pay between $1 and $10, depending upon their own financial situation, and how much they like the band. In addition to the ticket sales, which the bands keep 60% of the sales, you can also “tip” the performers during the show. The tips go directly to the artists, and usually the artists will put an incentive for ‘big tippers’ by giving away some merch or singing a special song for the top tippers during the show.

During the show, you get to have an online chat with the band and they see your comments as you post them. Last month, I watched my favorite band, The Dollyrots, perform from Kelly Ogden’s living room couch, and I streamed the show directly to my big screen TV using the HDMI cable on my PC. As you can see from the picture above, my kids also joined in on the fun. What you didn’t see was them asking me to type in requests for the next song throughout the show. We enjoyed the show, it was cheap, it was intimate, and the band made a decent amount of money right from their own living room.

The Internet has been a double-edge sword for the music industry. It has allowed many bands that would never have made it under the old model to find a following around the world. However, it has become a driver in pushing musicians’ wages down. New resources, like Stageit, are helping reshape the way musicians can reach fans, and make money at the same time. If you’re looking for a Stageit show to attend in the next couple of weeks, I have a suggestion for you. Another one of the LA Pop-Punk Girl Bands that I like, Go Betty Go, is having a Stageit show on March 10th. If that’s not your type of music, then go search Stageit and search around. Even popular bands and artists are finding it to be a great way to reach out to fans, and make some money at the same time.

Perhaps Law.com was just fishing for traffic by choosing a controversial headline (something we at 3 Geeks would never condone!) but yesterday’s article, misleadingly entitled AFAs Trending Down in U.S. and U.K., got a lot of attention. To be fair, the data gathered in the 9th Annual Litigation Trends Survey Report, does indeed show a decrease in AFAs from 2011 to 2012.  And it gives some indication that those numbers MAY go lower again this year.  However, there is one big problem with the headline, the second word.  The appropriate headline would have been AFAs Down in U.S. and U.K. There is no trending about it.

 The survey has been asking “Does your company use Alternative Fee Arrangements?” since 2009.  If we add 2009’s survey results to the data published in this year’s report, we see a different story emerge. Plotting the percentage of positive responses to the AFA question over the last 4 years (solid lines), and then using handy dandy Excel to plot linear trend lines (dotted) over that time, you’ll see that even with last year’s drop in AFA usage, the trends are still pointing up.

Now, a relatively small drop in use of AFAs in the U.S. – from the current 51% to less than the 48% reported in 2009 – would turn the US trend line down over the five year period from 2009 to 2013. But, to do the same in the U.K. would require AFA usage to be cut nearly in half to only 32% this year. A very unlikely occurrence.  
The Law.com article correctly points out:

“…in 2011, some 52 percent of U.S. respondents said they intended to increase their use of alternative fee arrangements. But only 39 percent this year said they expect increased use over the next 12 months…”

But from this they conclude:

“…indicating the downward shift will continue.”

This is an example of statistics that seem meaningful until you tease them apart.  In 2011, at a time when AFA usage had just gone up 17% in the previous year, 52% of respondents said they would be doing more AFAs.  In 2012, when AFA usage had diminished by about that same amount, only 39% said they would be using more AFAs. This does not indicate that the downward shift will continue, it indicates that people tend to assume this year will be pretty much like last year.  Sometimes they’re right, often they’re wrong.

It will be very interesting to see the 10th Annual Litigation Trends Survey to see how the trends actually play out in 2013, but a single Year-Over-Year drop in usage, does not a trend make.

This post is the final part of a whitepaper written by Scott Preston and Ryan McClead. The full paper can be downloaded here.

Conclusion

Image [cc] – ANDRA Drag Racing

By now it is obvious there will be no return to the glory days of an ever-expanding legal market and steadily rising hourly rates.  Legal Project Management, in its earliest incarnation, awakened many firms to the need for better project planning and greater control over budgets. But it also put a heavy burden on partners to ensure delivery of services at an agreed upon price without providing them any mechanism to control the process.

The second generation of Legal Project Management, by incorporating task management and monitoring and control mechanisms, now gives the partner a more effective way to deliver services on time and within budget.  LPM 2.0 makes it possible to catch problems as they are happening not weeks after they’ve already occurred.  It improves communication with clients by being inclusive of the client and making the end-to-end process as transparent as possible. This gives clients an opportunity to have meaningful and contextually relevant discussions with their attorney, greatly increasing the level of trust between them.

In shifting from a time management paradigm, in which attorney hours are often captured days or weeks after the work has been completed, to a task management paradigm, where pre-assigned tasks are checked off as the work is done, LPM 2.0 leverages technology to provide contextually appropriate support resources to attorneys at the precise moment that they are needed. This leads to a better use of resources, time, money, and ultimately to a better understanding of the legal process for both the client and the attorney.

Legal Project Management in its more complete form, incorporating all three stages: Planning and Budgeting; Execution; and Monitoring and Controlling, provides many benefits to clients, to attorneys, and to firms. By far the most important benefit to everyone is a more consistent, repeatable, and continually improving practice of law.

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This post is the fourth part of a whitepaper written by Scott Preston and Ryan McClead. The full paper can be downloaded here.

Legal Project Management 2.0 

The next generation of Legal Project Management software (LPM 2.0) extends and expands on the Planning and Budgeting capabilities of earlier products, and it includes tools to help with the Execution and Monitoring and Controlling stages of Project Management. Personal beliefs to the contrary, most attorneys do not execute, monitor, or control their projects any better than they plan and budget for them.  LPM 1.0, with its focus on Planning and Budgeting is a great introduction to the concepts of Project Management, but LPM 2.0 fills in the missing pieces.

Execution

Image [cc] – Tim Olson

The Execution stage is where those who were assigned tasks during Budgeting interact with their tasks. Execution may seem the most intuitive and simple of the stages, but it is this stage that will be the most difficult for firms to embrace, because quality Execution requires a wholesale change of attorney mindset from meeting hourly requirements to completing assigned tasks. This, more than any other aspect of Legal Project Management, most fundamentally cuts against the established practice of most firms. Hourly goals determine bonuses, equity points, promotions, office selection, and nearly every other aspect of an attorney’s professional life within a firm. In LPM 2.0 efficient quality work beats quantity work every time. This turns conventional law firm “wisdom” on its head.  While convincing firms to drop their existing pay structures and adopt a new model is way beyond the scope of this paper, and we absolutely do not expect such a change to take place immediately or to happen easily, we do expect it to happen eventually. The benefits of a task-based system of execution far outweigh that relic of a bygone era of plenty, hourly targets. Those benefits are realized in the final stage of LPM 2.0.

Monitoring and Controlling

By systematically focusing on task completion, rather than hours worked, this final stage can produce accurate project status reports and track financial projections to ensure that the project is on schedule and within budget. With up-to-date task information it is also possible to produce ongoing budget to actual variance reports, for both time and costs, which can be shared with clients or used for internal evaluation and efficiency improvement.  Until we begin to attribute work to tasks, reporting budgeted to actual work is a manual process involving the deconstruction of time entries and/or the reliance on phase and task codes, which in the past have proven unreliable. Monitoring task completion also provides a context for the work being done. The client can look through agreed upon tasks and get a much better sense of how a project is progressing.  This transparent process builds trust with the attorney and eases the pain should the project run into unforeseeable stumbling blocks or cost overruns. For the attorney this eventually becomes a much more intuitive way to work. No one gets up in the morning thinking, “I need to spend 4 hours and 6 minutes on this, and 2 hours and 24 minutes on that.” They think, “I need to complete this task, and when I’m done with it I can begin on the next one.”

In the traditional hourly work model, After Action Reporting and Analysis, should they be done at all, are little more than personal assessments of “how we did” or “where we need to improve”. They are at best subjective analyses heavily influenced by personality and politics. A change in focus to task-based Execution and Monitoring will provide hard statistical data, allowing firms to continually improve their processes and procedures, and to correct or reward their employees based on actual work performed and tasks completed. Over time clients will begin to see improvement in the firm’s delivery of legal services, efficiency and productivity should increase and costs should come down. In addition, this process of tracking tasks and closely monitoring results has implications for several other aspects of practicing law, including:

Managing Risk –As soon as a firm begins working the perfect project plan, reality intercedes and the plan must adapt. Tactics may change as they learn more about the project; and resources change as the workload fluctuates. Timing constraints and requirements may change as a client’s needs evolve.  Without task-based execution and monitoring, the partner has no control or oversight of the impacts these changes have on the project and no ability to effectively keep the client informed about the impact of these changes on timing and costs.

Improving Workflow – By accurately tracking task completion firms will have a much better understanding of the “bottlenecks” currently slowing project completion. Resources can be brought to bear on specific areas giving the team an opportunity to navigate troubled waters more effectively.  

Resource Management – The most valuable (and expensive) resource a law firm has is its attorneys and support staff.  For decades law firms have added headcount on an annual basis, irrespective of any real analytics to support that decision.  Many believed that even if the work wasn’t there immediately, they could always raise rates later to make up the gap. By incorporating the execution and monitoring phases of LPM into a firm’s standard operating procedure, the firm can start to truly understand how it actually works and begin to intelligently “right size” its workforce.

Defensibility – The execution phase, because it memorializes who did what and when, provides an audit trail of exactly how a project was worked and completed.

A Universal Project Plan – By incorporating the execution phase into an LPM solution, firms can manage and monitor projects that include external resources.  This might mean pushing work out to lower cost centers (for example outsourcing e-discovery services) and tracking their progress, or it might mean allowing a client to follow the progress of the project plan (to an agreed upon level of detail).  

Improving Future Project Plans – By tracking task performance firms will have a much better ability to streamline workflow for future work as well as improve project plans for future use.  This makes each iteration of the project plan more accurate than the one before and greatly simplifies the creation of new project plans.

Improving Experience Databases –A complete LPM system tracks individual performers’ execution of specific tasks, which can provide detailed information about who within the firm has experience performing which specific tasks and how much experience they have. This information can be leveraged by various knowledge systems and “Know-Who” databases.
Identifying Professional Development Opportunities – The complete LPM system tracks not only the tasks that individuals complete, but also the time it takes to complete a task. This provides valuable insight into Professional Development and continuing education opportunities.

This post is the third part of a whitepaper written by Scott Preston and Ryan McClead. The full paper can be downloaded here.

Legal Project Management 1.0

Image [cc] – tmray02

Even before the economic slump a handful of legal technology vendors recognized an opportunity to help firms better understand and budget for their non-hourly billing or Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFA). AFAs are not new to the legal industry; contingency and fixed fee pricing have been available for a long time, but in recent years there has been a significant increase in AFA requests from the client side. Corporations have begun to push back on the standard annual increase in lawyers’ billing rates. They want not only better pricing, but better communication and a better understanding of the amount of time and effort spent completing individual tasks. Attentive vendors have started adding AFA planning and budgeting functionality to their existing software solutions, or in some cases writing new solutions from the ground up.  These rudimentary systems have quickly garnered the label Legal Project Management software (LPM 1.0).

While Project Management as a discipline has had nearly 60 years to mature and develop, the application of PM principles and techniques to the legal environment is still very much in its infancy. Traditional Project Management can be thought of as a stool resting on three iterative and overlapping developmental stages: Planning and Design, Execution, and Monitoring and Controlling. For our purposes in LPM we call the first stage Planning and Budgeting rather than Design. All attorneys believe that they execute, monitor, and control their projects already, but many will concede that they do not plan or budget adequately. Consequently, Planning and Budgeting is the clear low hanging fruit of LPM 1.0 and vendors have focused most of their efforts where they believe they can most easily gain a foothold.

Planning and Budgeting 

After a new legal project opportunity is defined planning begins to determine the full scope of the project. This is done by defining the desired outcome for the project and developing a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) that will ultimately lead to that desired outcome.  The WBS defines any major objectives and project phases, and then breaks those down into discrete tasks required to meet the objectives and complete the phases.

Once the desired outcome and list of tasks is established, the project manager can determine the necessary resources and levels of expertise required for each task, as well as any resource constraints that might impact the outcome.  Those constraints might include expertise (Do we have the right people to do the work?), or time (Do we have the capacity to complete the project on time?), or technology (Do we have the right systems in place?).

Budgeting is intended to provide a realistic estimate of the eventual costs to the client as well as considering the firm’s expenses.  The project manager assigns individual people, or resources, to specific tasks identified in the WBS, and then estimates the amount of time each task should take to complete.  This is where the various alternative staffing scenarios come into play. By experimentally adjusting the degree of leverage on a particular matter (i.e., pushing work to the lowest cost performers who can adequately complete the work while meeting all other project completion criteria), the firm can reduce the cost of its services for the client, better compete with other firms on price, and potentially increase their own profits.

LPM 1.0 promises to provide firms with three new abilities: (1) The ability to create baseline preliminary project plans or templates; (2) the ability to create matter specific budgets based on prior client work that can be used to win new client work; and (3) the ability to compare alternative staffing scenarios, which will allow the firm to produce the same work product at a lower cost to the client while still making a profit for the firm.

Unfortunately, most of these first generation LPM products struggle to balance the development of project plans that are detailed enough to create accurate budgets without being so complex that they slow the budgeting process to a crawl.  Many of them have trouble modeling a firm’s prior work to develop project plans for future work, because phase and task codes available from past matters are not accurately or consistently recorded. And while alternative staffing scenario analysis sometimes makes it possible to reduce the cost of services to the client, it does little to help the firm better understand the process or arrange their staffing levels over time.

In contrast to the Project Management three-legged stool, LPM 1.0 is a one-legged stick chair. It can hold up as long as the project is otherwise perfectly balanced, but the slightest wobble sends the project swiftly to the ground. Legal projects are rarely so well balanced. The greatest plan and budget in the world is often out of date as soon as the matter begins. Attorneys must “work the plan” and adjust as they go. If they don’t actively manage and adjust resources throughout the course of a project, then successful completion of a matter or even successful achievement of today’s immediate goals may be nothing more than coincidence and will certainly not be easily repeatable. LPM 1.0 with it’s focus on Planning and Budgeting is a good and necessary step, but on its own it does nothing to reduce the risk of bad outcomes, cost overruns, time delays, or client dissatisfaction. Additionally, it does nothing to improve the firm’s efficiency, or to increase the transparency and quality of communication between the firm and the client.

The promise of LPM 1.0 is that Planning and Budgeting, in conjunction with the work a firm is already doing, will be enough to meet client demands and maintain business, but in reality, it is in the next two stages that the proverbial LPM “rubber meets the road”.