Do your people use workarounds in your IT Systems? Probably, and here’s how you change this.
Watch the video here.
Over my time as a freelance IT expert, I have come across many employees in Professional Services businesses - partners, paralegals, assistants, etc - who have grown accustomed to creating their own workarounds to make the firm’s IT systems work for them. When asked why, the answer is always the same… “It’s just easier and quicker.”
There are many different reasons why they might be doing this; getting around a system error, a dodgy document, a long-winded process. What they don’t realise, is that by creating these workarounds and ignoring the root problem, they are clocking up valuable time they could be spending on billable tasks. More importantly, the issue is never addressed and they are not moving towards a more efficient working process, they are creating these workarounds that need to be remembered (and may even be shown to others!).
What if I told you that your IT systems could be tailored to make sure all these procedures run as smoothly and efficiently as possible? You probably know this, but your people don’t want to endure the pain of explaining the problem to someone, to then not have it fixed!
When you invest in case management software, it’s understandable that you would assume you can just start a majority of things ‘straight out of the box,’ given the cost of the product. The majority of firms want to just get cracking and start using the system, finding niggles here and there, a procedure that doesn’t work for them, but they carry on. Maybe your firm has already done some tweaking and development, but it just doesnt work correctly and people are too busy to risk the time involved explaining and fixing this… and this is how these workarounds build and become common practice over time.
The key is to run successful IT change requests or development projects. This is part of the reason I have built a project management framework. Using this, I can ensure that any conversation with a user can be converted into a successful change so that (over time) you are using your case management system to its full potential. If this is a problem in your firm, I can either use my expertise to identify your needs and concerns, implement new procedures to upgrade your working processes, or I can work with your IT Team so they can use my framework to deliver successful IT change. The choice is yours, depending on your resource levels, but either way, if you are not successfully developing your system for your firm (per area of practice) then your people are likely struggling day in, day out, creating and sharing their own ways of working around the problems they face.
If you can identify with any of the above, let’s talk about how we can work together to ensure smooth and efficient processes throughout your firm.