Season 3 Episode 1
Welcome to Season 3 of the Law Firm Data Governance podcast. I’m CJ Anderson, founder of Iron Carrot, and I’m excited to share more of what I’ve learned in my 20-plus years of working with information and data in law firms.
In this third season: “be the best data governance lead you can be”, I’ll move beyond the what of season one and the why of season two by introducing some of the how and the who.
Over the 10 episodes in this season, I’ll share what I’ve learned about using a bottom-up approach to achieve your data governance deliverables. I will be talking you through the specific skills and knowledge that can help you be a successful law firm data governance lead.
In this episode, I talk about project management. What it is, what you need to know as a data governance lead, and some examples of why it’s helpful. I also include some top tips from my experiences of managing data projects in law firms, both as a data governance lead and as a project sponsor.
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Episode Transcript
Welcome to season three of the law firm Data Governance Podcast. I’m CJ Anderson, founder of Iron Carrot, and I’m excited to share more of what I’ve learned in my 20-plus years of working with information and data in law firms. In this third season, “be the best data governance lead you can be”. I’ll move beyond the what of season one and the why of season 2 by introducing some of the how and the who. Over the 10 episodes in this season, I’ll share what I’ve learned about using a bottom up approach to achieve your data governance deliverables. I will be talking you through the specific skills and knowledge that can help you be a successful law firm data governance lead, and then building on top of that foundation, I’ll explain how to engage with the people, processes and conversations that will bring your firm on the data governance journey with you.
In this episode, I’m going to talk about project management, what it is, what you need to know as a data governance lead, and some examples of why it’s helpful. I’ll include some top tips from my experiences of managing data projects in law firms, both as a data governance lead and as a project sponsor. Project management is such a large topic. It is a discipline, a profession, and indeed a career path in its own right. If you’re lucky, you’ll have a project manager in your data governance Centre of Excellence who can help you. If not, you’ll miss out on a great structure to help you plan and execute your data governance initiatives and activities.
At its most simplistic, project management is the planning and execution of a particular project. This is a valuable skill to help a data governance lead coordinate, prioritise and deliver all of the cross functional moving parts in a data governance roadmap. Having a basic understanding of the project management process means that a data governance lead has the tool set to guide them through the actions required to deliver the roadmap steps. It also helps to focus data governance deliverables in the context of scope, time, cost, quality and resources.
The management of a project is divided into several sequential phases. You start with initiating the project, then move into planning and then executing before finally closing the project. The key parts of the initiating phase are to clarify the objective of the project and identify stakeholders. The firm’s data is held in a diverse number of systems, so stakeholders might not be immediately obvious, leveraging the data governance framework members collective knowledge is a great way to fill in any gaps.
The planning phase includes collecting detailed requirements. This can be challenging for data projects as it may be the first time that stakeholders are being asked to think about their needs and the firm’s data in a different way. Your plan needs to include plenty of time for stakeholder education and feedback throughout the project. By defining the scope of the project, you are able to better identify the resources you will need, and this sets you up for the execution phase.
The execution phase isn’t just about pulling the project team together and making sure that they get the work done. It’s also about communication and managing stakeholder expectations. Data projects tend to need a higher than average number of specialists and SMEs from the business services functions who manage the data. You also need to make sure that everything is being documented, because it’s guaranteed to be iterated at a future date.
Another key activity in this phase is monitoring and managing risks. The biggest risk you’ll face is probably stakeholder resistance, so honest communication and requirements negotiations may be required.
Finally, your project needs to be closed even if improvements are planned for whatever your project implements, it’s better to call those future phases and treat them as separate projects. Strong support from a member of the data Governance Steering Committee to act as your project sponsor will really help you manage stakeholder expectations on this one. Project management is required when implementing your firm’s data governance roadmap or data strategy. It’s also unusual for a firm to be prepared to give a data governance lead the support of a dedicated project manager. This is why it’s important for you as a data governance lead, to have a familiarity with the concepts and mechanisms of project management.
The first step in the implementation process is reviewing the tasks and timetables. These come from the detail of your roadmap. You’ll make it easier on yourself in the long run, if you spend some time mapping out the risks before you start. In the early days of your road map execution, the risks and issues log will be equally crucial to the road map to keep you on track. There is often confusion about the difference between a risk and an issue. I like to explain it like this: If you find yourself suddenly standing in a hole looking up, it’s an issue and you can plan how to get out. But if you’re looking down the road and you can see the hole in front of you, there’s a risk of falling in, but you can plan how to avoid it by going around the hole or putting something over the hole. You know what I mean.
The second step is to ensure that resources have been allocated and assigned responsibilities and tasks. Does the data governance lead, you, need administrative, technical, project management or communication support? Are the people in place to provide that support and do they understand how and when you need them to contribute to the road map tasks? The final step is to start at the top of the road Map task list and work your way through it. Leveraging your ownership board as a project board simplifies your project management and reporting. And these project management skills also come into play when you’re helping your data stewards investigate and resolve the prioritised data issues from the firms data issues log.
Like most projects, data projects are challenging to project manage and actually they’re challenging than most technology or process projects you might encounter, and this is because they have fewer opportunities for work arounds and issue recovery than other projects that the firm is working on. This is particularly true for data issue resolution activities.
But data projects can also suffer from the usual challenges that projects face. For example, project outcomes might not be linked to strategic objectives, so you find it difficult to get the resources you need. Or you might have to spend a higher percentage of your time managing unrealistic stakeholder expectations. A lot of people think that the data governance lead has a magic wand to fix this stuff, particularly for issues on the log. So issue requirements are often incomplete and require a step back from a suggested resolution to fully explore the root cause and identify the options to fix it properly.
Of course, in the busyness of your day job, it’s easy to overlook the change processes that need to be included in your data projects unless you plan and resource them properly. Not every data governance lead has a project management qualification, but they usually have picked up enough project management skills to make their role a lot easier. These skills come from their experiences of being in projects, sponsoring projects, reading books, attending courses, or just working alongside project managers for a while.
I hope you now have a better understanding of why and how project management skills can help you as a data governance lead. You can achieve a lot more when you initiate plan, execute and close things like a project. I know that my data projects wouldn’t have been successful without my project management skills. So if you can’t get a project manager for your team, find a way to learn what you need to know about managing projects and you’ll be delivering, more, faster.
Thank you for joining me for this Law Firm Data Governance Podcast episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Please share, like, and review this episode, so that more law firm leaders can learn about data governance. Join me next time for Season 3, Episode 2: Change management. Make sure you never miss an episode by following me on LinkedIn, if you’ve not already done so, and please get in touch if you’ve got questions or topic ideas for future episodes.
