Five reasons why secure collaboration will help your law firm merger

Last week Lawrence Graham and Wragge tied the knot to create a £170m firm Wragge Lawrence Graham & Co. Mergers are all the craze. Everyone’s doing it…! It’s been a tricky five years for most law firms with many going out of business including some big names like Cobbetts and Challinors. One way that law firms are fighting back is through mergers.
In fact, law firm mergers have been en vogue for a number of years, so much so that it’s most likely that many law firm management teams have already had meaningful discussions about or had actually completed a merger in the last two or three years, and many more are expected to happen. A 2013 survey by PWC found that 83% of the top 25 UK law firms believe a merger is very or fairly likely by 2016 read more.

How we’re making agile development work for us

Mondays are no longer crazy workdays for the development team at HighQ. Why, you ask? Well, now that the planning stage is over, we’ve started working on executing our vision and plans.
It has taken more than six months to get to where we are now. We have not yet reached our management goal but we are moving towards it. There is clarity in our technical goals and what we are trying to achieve. The technical team is becoming aligned with business plans and can now react to changing needs.

Changing our methodology

We undertook a major transformation of our development methodology and planning processes after our most recent major release took substantially more time than was originally expected. The delay was attributed to a few factors, but one of the key ones was the absence of an agreed development methodology.
We had been using wikis, emails, and meetings for gathering and documenting requirements, which meant that it took time and effort to translate these requirements from the business to the technical team.
Working in this way, we planned a major redevelopment of the interface for the release of Collaborate 3.0 with the intention of making it responsive. We achieved this goal, but bottlenecks in the process and a lack of coordination meant that we fell behind schedule.
Although we used various tools for requirement capture, there was no one application where everyone could work together. Subsequently, the development and management teams struggled to communicate changes and requirements with one another, which slowed the process down.
In January this year we decided to take some radical steps to transform the way development was being managed. Collaborate 3.0 had not yet been released and was still in active development, which gave us some time to organise and reform our development process for the next version of Collaborate.

Roadmap planning

We started by setting up a roadmap team, which specified the business goals. The roadmap team was made up of five people, each representing a business unit and jurisdiction, who met fortnightly. We used a workshop methodology to prioritise new requirements. This helped us to flesh out the key goals of the roadmap.
It was clear that there were too many small-to-medium features to discuss and agree on in these planning meetings, so a smaller team was created to discuss and prioritise small-to-medium features as a continuous ongoing effort.
We also tried giving each consultant a quota of features they wanted resolved in the upcoming development; however, this did not seem to be the best way to prioritise features, so we removed it from the process.
The backlog was discussed and agreed in a wiki to facilitate input from all stakeholders. Once the backlog items were clear, they were moved onto a Kanban board. The Kanban board had various stages to cover all of the prerequisites for a features development. Once all of the required prerequisites were complete, the feature was moved to a separate development board.

Finding the right tool for the job

Our development team comprises of around 65 developers working remotely in India. The project managers in India report to the development managers in our London office. This meant that it was even more important that we found a simple-to-use, agile management tool which could cover all aspects of project management and reporting.
We decided to find an industry-standard development methodology tool that would help us to manage the project consistently. This would require not just a change in tools, but also a change to our way of thinking.
After evaluating many options we decided to go with JIRA + Greenhopper as it gives us granular control and reporting, but at the same time allows us to manage the development on simple agile boards.

Development planning

Every Friday the London technical team conducts a Scrum planning meeting with the project managers in India. After some trial and error we have adopted a hybrid system in which new features are managed using Scrum, whereas urgent bugs and any immediate small-to-medium issues are pulled into the sprint.
At times, this does mean that the sprint goals will not be achieved due to change in the work in progress, but that is acceptable as long as the critical issues are being addressed and do not have to wait until the current two week sprint ends.
Prioritisation and estimation are the key issues impacting the planning process. Estimations on epics (large features) can take time, so we try our best to be lean and not spend excessive time on getting accurate estimates.
We believe that once the team matures in the estimation process, their estimates will take less time and become more accurate, further facilitating the planning process.
It is essential to prioritise requirements that need to be estimated, specified and designed, however prioritisation requires significant time by the stakeholders. Without prioritisation, however, the sprint planning process fails in making good use of the development capacity and delivering the most required features.

Looking forward

Changes to the development process have helped us to release Collaborate 3.1.1 within good time. Although not yet perfect, we are certain that we are on the right track and continue to improve as we move forward. Some of the things we are focusing on are:

• Improving the reporting process to give better management updates
• Striking a good balance between epic stories, small-to-medium tasks, and bug fixing for each release
• Changing the estimation process to a point-based system, which allows us to simplify the process by breaking them down into large, medium and small efforts

We would love to hear your views and suggestions. Stay tuned and we will share our experiences of the release of Collaborate 3.2, scheduled to be released early in the new year.
Source: http://highq.com/making-agile-development-work-us/

Enterprise collaboration news: November 2013 round-up

Now that we’re careering rapidly towards the end of the year, the internet is awash with predictions for the year ahead. We’ve had a look at three such reports that we found most interesting, and condensed them into bitesized chunks. We have also drilled down to a couple of concepts that have been at the front of our minds this month: social business and the Internet of Things.

Looking ahead to 2014

Forrester published a report this month which pointed out the top ten technology trends to watch from 2014-2016. Peter High of Metis Strategy gave a detailed run-down of the report for Forbes. Forrester’s trends touch on the expansion of concepts that have been cropping up in the second half of this year, such as APIs, BYOD and the Internet of Things (more on that later). Peter outlined that the report highlights the tightening technological link between the consumer world with the business world, and suggests that customers build their impressions on a company (thus a company builds its reputation) on the digital experience and engagement they have with that business. Consequently, organisations need to make the move towards more sophisticated applications that work seamlessly with cloud and mobile, so that infrastructure becomes an enabler of engagement as opposed to a barrier to progress. This rings true with us at HighQ, as our products are designed to make engagement, productivity and collaboration come naturally.
In this article for Gigaom Research, David Linthicum highlighted three emerging cloud computing trends for 2014. He suggests that PaaS and application migration are the most important trends for the year ahead as more businesses prepare to move to cloud-based platforms. He explains that cloud data integration and cloud management and governance will come to the fore next year too, with reference to the need to reconcile private and public cloud as enterprises begin to transfer data between them, and managing the different types of cloud within one ‘ultimate’ cloud management platform. This is particularly important when we consider the latest predictions about cloud traffic, which according to a report by Cisco Systems is set to quadruple by 2017.
Another article on Forbes by Mark Fidelman gave IBM’s opinions on the forthcoming trends in social business over the next year. Social listening was high on the list, as businesses begin to tap in to social behavioural data from customers. This data can be used for targeted marketing as well as adapting products and services to perceived needs. Similarly, social data gathered from employees could be valuable to HR through recruitment and increase employee engagement and satisfaction. Next year, the article explained, social business will be about more than collaboration; instead, knowledge sharing and social learning will be key to building a smarter enterprise, something we’ve been talking about for a while. SoMoClo will get an overhaul next year too as it merges with Big Data to become SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud).

Turning to social business

As social becomes a key part of business, it is vital to encourage everyone within a firm to engage in their enterprise social network. An interesting Twitter chat took place this month which discussed this issue, and why company leaders must make sure they participate in their ESNs too. Jason Quesada (@jqsmooth) explained that enterprise social networks ”should break the hierarchy model to give everyone in the company a voice”, and Jakkii Musgrave (@slybeer) agreed, stating that the ”great power of ESNs with execs is cutting through that hierarchy & allowing them to be human. Encourage them to embrace it.” Cara Marzilli (@CaraMarz), pointed out that ”Execs who view ESN as “just a technology” (not a business driver) have a narrow view & need more data in order to see value”, which is clearly a view that needs changing if executives want to keep up with the latest social business trends for next year.

The Internet of Things

This month we attended the Gartner Symposium ITxpo in Barcelona. You can read our review of the keynote speeches on our blog. One of the topics covered in the keynote speech was the Internet of Things, which has been popping up frequently this month. If you’re not familiar with what the Internet of Things is, this post by our friend Ryan McClead (who wrote a great guest post for us this month, by the way) will fill you in excellently. The short explanation is that the Internet of Things is a concept whereby more and more devices and objects are becoming connected to the internet (rising to an estimated 30 billion by 2020). An increasing number of these objects will start communicating with one another via the internet, automating processes and ultimately changing the way we live. This post by Esmeralda Swartz of MetraTech for the Cloud Computing Journal takes the concept a step further by talking about how the Internet of Things will evolve into the Internet of Agents. By this, she refers to the services that these Things provide, arguing that there is more value in what something can do for us, than the Thing itself. An interesting concept, and we’re definitely excited to see where it takes us in the year ahead!

Source:  http://highq.com/enterprise-collaboration-news-november-2013-round/