PI Projects

Process Improvement Projects

We lead, support, and advise on all aspects of delivering process improvement (PI) projects, including facilitation, coaching and other project support, and project design and scoping. We employ the DMAIC framework – Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control (DMAIC) to ensure we deliver successful projects that have included change management and communication components.

Typically, our projects deliver significant returns on investment in the form of revenue enhancement, cost savings, and other benefits, such as improved morale, team dynamics, and client satisfaction.

Baseline assessments provide a good starting point, for they give us a critical reference point for assessing changes and impact, establish a basis for comparing the situation before and after process improvement work, and for making inferences as to the effectiveness of a potential project. Process mapping can also be an effective way to begin a project. Through a facilitated discussion, participants in a workshop reach consensus on process scope and identify the major steps in a process as well as the tasks, activities, and decision points within each step. This enables a team to immediately identify areas for improvement, determine next steps, and establish near and longer term priorities.

A particularly effective methodology employed by the legal profession is the Kaizen approach, an alternative methodology that uses a focused workshop technique. We follow the DMAIC steps but compress all project activities into a short period of time. A highly skilled and experienced facilitator is critical, as is a properly scoped project for this accelerated approach, which allows us to complete a project in 4-6 months. Certain aspects of particular processes, such as those embedded within or parallel to larger processes lend themselves particularly well to this treatment.

SAMPLE PROJECT/KAIZEN PLAN