In the sciences, a recent movement is often referred to as “reproducible research.” What it espouses is a philosophy of transparency regarding data and analysis – share the data you collected, what you did to it, and how you did calculations and graphics. Those who conduct surveys, for example, should…
Mostly for lack of a better way to classify companies, benchmark surveys ask respondents to choose from a list of “industries.” We see those lists all the time: manufacturing, technology, pharmaceutical, and so on. In the messy real world, we all realize, companies are not so neatly boxed and defined. …
Software is now available that could take all the blog posts on GC Metrics’ Law Department Management and all the articles written in the past five years and all the books about leading law departments and analyze their contents. A combination of algorithms that use machine learning, network analysis, data…
Several posts on this blog have laid out criticisms of various well-known management tools. This first post of two starts with a half dozen. For each of the six tools listed below I begin with one or more references to previous posts that give drawbacks of the tool. I continue…
Continuing my series on the pitfalls of popular management tools, I offer some for process maps (See my post of Aug. 28, 2005: some criticisms; Aug. 6, 2010: components of process improvement; Sept. 22, 2010: compared to procedure guides; Nov. 19, 2010: contrary to a Romantic view of management; March…
Intriguing and intuitively attractive, scenario planning has a buzz about it. This blog has several posts that refer to it, but as yet I have not challenged the technique (See my post of Aug. 25, 2009: uses of scenarios in legal departments with 18 references; March 1, 2010: elaborate scenarios…
In my consulting projects, I am not a fan of focus groups. Here are some of my concerns about them. They waste many people’s time. Members sit for stretches of time and have little to contribute. The moments of value to others sometimes represent a small portion of their…
From time to time this blog mentions where several law departments have banded together to push an initiative. I refer to them as collective actions and praise them. Progress would be made on several management fronts if fellow-traveler departments more often combined their resources. To be helpful, I wrote an…
Back in the mists of time, I wrote about the 18 tools that general counsel most commonly use (See my post of April 14, 2005: based loosely on Bain’s annual studies of tools.). Seven years later, I would no longer include balanced scorecards, employee satisfaction surveys, psychometric tests and retainer…
A tool to help communicate about and plan for a complicated project is what some analysts call a design structure matrix (DSM). As described in the Harvard Bus. Rev., Oct. 2011 at 106, in a DSM, “a project’s tasks are listed along the rows and columns of a matrix, and…