Mark: Have you found that the lawyers actually want to use these reports on their own? Or, are you having to spend a lot of time handholding? How have the performance reports been rolled out from your point of view?
Ron: It was expected that many would have a hard time adopting the new technology and that we would get a lot of phone calls. But up front we set up a little live tutorial and orientation that lasted a half hour. That really took care of it for most people. The dashboards are really intuitive enough.
Operationally, there is a process to calculate profit for the quarter. That takes two days. As soon as that’s done, we can hit the go buttons. So, getting it out is easy and fast.
Mark: Just for myself, I found your reports and dashboard very easy to understand and to use. Have you found that with your own people, as well, that they – they are able to self-serve, or do they want you to take them through it more, or how does that work?
Ron: It’s a bit of both. But certainly they can use it easily. For complex questions, they would normally have one of the finance team with them. Sometimes it’s just that they have got questions about more details. So, for example we’re looking at staff margin.
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They might want to know, well what’s causing that particular person’s margin to be low in which case that finance person would go often do a bit of digging into the detail and find if the person wasn’t very busy or if they’re working on some client that Is billed quite a low figure. They are able to help with the root cause analysis of that particular performance question.
The follow-up is done by the line managers. But partners themselves are aware of the issues and can flag them pretty quickly. And we have quarterly meetings where we call it a performance agreement. So, we would look at this chart, and I’d say, okay, for the next quarter in particular we’re going to focus on staff margin and working capital. And these are other things we’re going to do, and that would become becomes part of their day to day management objective.
Mark: Yes, I think you were telling me a story earlier where you’re saying that someone very quickly saw a problem called out in a report and took charge for themselves, and was able to make a positive difference very quickly.
Ron: Yes, well, the first quarter when we put out these management reports, the September quarter, the managing partner rang me. And he said, oh, Ron, we’re meeting with our first cluster tomorrow. I’ve got half an hour now, could you pop up and run through the numbers, so we know what we’re going to talk about. So, I said fine. Now we also have got hard copies of all these reports.
That’s for all the pages for the 24 clusters and all the drills downs, as we call the histograms. That’s five huge books. I took them all in hard copy with me. And the partner looks at his hard copy. He sends out a lot of emails. He receives a lot of emails. But generally if he wants to know about a particular number, he’ll just ring up me or one of other finance guys, and just ask how’s this profit?
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How does it compare with last year? How is our production for today? How was it or for this month last year? He just asks. You know, he doesn’t sort of look at detailed reports or spreadsheets and so I expected he’d want to use the hardcopy. Anyways so I go up to his office. And we sat down, we started to flicking through the pages and going back forth.
I bring another book, and we’re going through a different one, because we’re in a bit of journey of discovery, because this is all new for us. We got a phone call which he said he had to take, which took a couple of minutes. And when he came off the phone call. I said look, John, please do me one favor. And he said what’s that. And I said well I sent you a file this morning. He said, I just saw the email. I just said, you just try and open it up.
He didn’t want to, but he did. So, we opened up the whole interactive report from the link he had got in the email on his PC. And I started to click on the charts. And I said, well, look, here we’re talking about cluster one, and we can see you had this staff margin. And we go over to cluster three. And we could see their numbers. And after about two minutes or three minutes, he took the mouse out of my hand. He started clicking on it.
The interesting thing was when I first arrived. He said these are fantastic when we had the hard copy in hand. And he said he loved it. He said the richness of information here it’s just amazing. He said, Ron, could you send a copy of these over to James who is the managing partner in the UK. He is going to love to receive these. And I said yes, no problem we can send it.