November 26, 2024

best practices trends flexible resourcing

Part I explored the purpose of resource management (RM) and the importance of better resourcing preparedness in enabling growth. But what tools exist to maximise RM’s benefits by helping you understand your business, forecast, measure, track, schedule, and allocate time, skills, and projects?

Before I summarise leading resource management tools, a key point bears emphasis: when you weigh their different capabilities and functionalities, do so against defined criteria reflecting your requirements. That means clarifying issues like

• The extent you need to integrate with existing systems and processes
• The degree of customisation necessary to meet your specific situation
• The importance of scalability and versatility
• Whether you require collaboration (e.g., the importance of being able to share documents and edit them in real-time)
• Your budget – not only for buying a tool but also for implementing it and its ongoing uses

It’s crucial to assess tools relative to each of these. For example, regarding budget, you need to look beyond free features and low-cost access to certain functions and remain alert to complex pricing structures and the associated costs of adding users and features.

The most common features – available on their own and in combination to different extents depending on the tool – are:

• Time and Attendance Management – automating the tracking and management of employee time and attendance
• Project Management – to plan, execute, and manage (including resource allocation) projects
• Staff Scheduling – scheduling shifts and managing time-off requests
• Legal Practice Management – for legal-industry-specific workflow management, time tracking, and billing
• Capacity Planning – to forecast resource utilisation and plan capacity accordingly
• Resource Allocation – for matching resources to demand and optimising utilisation
• Workforce Management – provides an integrated approach to managing the workforce, including scheduling, time and attendance, and payroll

By streamlining resource management processes, each of these functionalities can improve efficiency and thereby increase productivity and advance your strategic objectives.

It’s ideal to trial a few options so that, before committing to a particular tool, you can confirm it aligns well with your team’s workflow and needs. But bear in mind that implementing and integrating the ‘right’ tools is not a complete solution. There are two additional crucial components. First, you must have the right skills available at the right time in the right location to deliver against the resourcing needs. Second (and by extension), you must know the full range of skills available in your organisation against which you can plan and use.

Taking the former first, this is why many businesses turn to alternative legal service providers (ALSPs) for support. An ALSP can deliver immediate access to an extensive global network of vetted, qualified, experienced, and available resources beyond those otherwise known, available, or accessible to a law organisation. Moreover, partnering with an outside provider allows your RM function to spend more time focusing on internal resourcing, utilisation and retention of the existing team.

Based on our decades of collective experience of working with scores of law departments and law firms worldwide, a true ALSP partnership is one centred around working hand in hand to successfully forecast, model, and respond to resourcing needs based on proven resource planning principles, these include:

• Peaks and troughs in demand – providing additional resources when you need them to meet the increased demand and who can reduce as the need dissipates. An ALSP can provide work for the talent when not engaged with a specific business but then look to re-engage the talent later on for continuity of corporate knowledge.
• Headcount freezes – ALSPs can onboard the Talent and then redeploy them back to organisations via a non-employee route, e., work on the ALSP’s PAYE, or as a limited company contractor (subject to IR35 or other regulations) or payroll bridging for a set period.
• For law firms, ALSPs can provide secondment support to their end-clients, as part of agreed panel agreements or non-strategic secondments – or to backfill individuals internally within the firm itself.

Regarding the latter, undertaking a skills analysis – inventorying the suite of skills, experience, and interests that exist across the workforce – is crucial for several reasons.

First, it enables you to quickly identify the right individuals to support demand.

Second, proactively analysing demand trends and skills gaps will stand the team in better stead for unpredictable future requirements – and enable you to act sooner to minimise disruptions.

Third, when combined with an assessment of clients’ existing and anticipated needs,  a skills analysis helps ensure that required capabilities are developed and maintained and future skills requirements are met. Upskilling/reskilling individuals underpins this.

An example of how to approach this is:

1. Build a matrix and map skills. This defines the skills you need in your team to meet business needs. It is worth looking back at previous demand cycles and mapping against areas of law and geographies. Make sure to include interest levels and aspired career trajectories, which will feed into your personalised resource strategy.
2. Evaluate against each skill. Proceed with caution as far as relying on self-assessments. A better approach is to combine self-assessment with 360 feedback.
3. Analyse and integrate this skills information with the resourcing and work allocation process. The data in the matrix will enable you to quickly assess who has the prerequisite skills to perform a role or engagement or where you have scarcity in a particular skill set or level. This may lead to a broader reach to resource a particular engagement and also inform a more targeted recruitment strategy for the skills the team lacks.
4. Leverage ALSPs as adjuncts to your existing resources. Many organisations utilise ALSPs’ candidate skills pools alongside their own to ensure continuous staffing support and obtain legal professionals as and when needed. This can complement an approach whereby on-the-job learning of more junior members allows you to leverage the upskilling of your organisation’s workforce.
5. Leverage ALSPs for niche and specialised needs. ALSPs come into their own when specific skill sets are required for a finite period (rather than a permanent basis). An ALSP with a diverse talent pool allows you resources beyond what your existing internal network can supply.
6. Consider broadening talent skills. By providing training experiences beyond core legal expertise – T-shaped programmes, secondments, training programmes, etc. – you deepen and extend your resourcing capabilities.

Many resource management functions work optimally with discerning tool selection criteria to ensure the tool not only meets your functionality requirements (e.g., automation, reporting, integration, collaboration, etc.) but integrates an ever-evolving understanding of the resources available to the business. Of course, identifying and tracking the internal team’s skills, capability, and availability is fundamental. However, resources are always finite. A partnership with an ALSP allows for a significantly broader and deeper Talent network – especially if it’s with a highly mature provider with long-term, global relationships with quality legal professionals that you otherwise would not be able to access. The most mature ALSPs uniquely bolster an RM’s capability to successfully resource as and when internal capacity is reached or a specific skill or set of experiences is not available within the organisation’s existing network, while still supporting cost goals.

In Part Three, we will examine the often overshadowed benefits of successful resource management, including talent attraction, retention, and workforce agility. Stay tuned!