By Michael Potters

Top quality project managers are the element most critical for the success of any organization charged with processing large volumes of data on time and within budget. Without top quality project managers, even the most sophisticated and elegant system will produce botched results. I say this based on 20+ years in the document processing and litigation support industries.

The following story illustrates what happens when senior management at a service provider fails to pay heed to this fundamental fact. While I won’t be mentioning the company name, each year I talk to hundreds of job candidates and prospective employers and am active in several organizations including ALSP, AIIM and ARMA, giving me a vast network of information sources, and I can assure you that this is not a fictional account.

A major services provider had established an excellent reputation for the quality of its work and its earnings placed it in the top tier of providers. It had built a project management process with a layer of senior project managers who directed the work of assistant project managers and who assumed most of the responsibilities for client contact and keeping the sales people informed on the progress of their projects. When the company was acquired, the new management came in looking for ways to trim the budget. They proceeded to eliminate six of the assistant project manager positions which at the time probably saved the company around $450K to $500K in salaries and benefits.

The results were almost immediate. The workload of the project managers increased dramatically, problems that arose were not identified and resolved early on, causing yet more work, communications with clients became delayed and decreased in frequency, and clients began discovering issues before they were informed by the project managers. Then the clients started calling the sales people who had to take time to field the calls, research issues, get back to the clients and keep them happy. This lead to decreased sales, disenchanted sales people, and within six months many of the sales people left because they could no longer belief that the company would deliver what they sold.

The half million dollars in “savings” on project management salaries and benefits ended up costing more than $18 million in sales.

Having top quality project managers is just as critical within a law firm. Brian Stempel, firm-wide litigation services manager at Kirkland & Ellis, manages internal project managers. He says "Project managers are essential to the successful use of technology in any matter. Litigation support project managers must work closely with legal assistants and the case team to insure deadlines are met and all of the technology i's are dotted and t's are crossed. In addition, during the early planning phases of a litigation when a case team devising to protocols and committing to time-lines, litigation support PM's are excellent consulting resources."

When Stempel is selecting a vendor, he says that "More and more we want to see resumes or conduct interviews with the proposed PMs because their role at the vendor is so critical." He rates PM's as being more important than the sales person for a particular vendor, "It's important to have a salesperson who can go to bat for you internally and move a mountain if you need, but those types of sales people are few and far between. In addition, with good project management, mountains can stay where they are."

My personal experience confirms the wisdom of having top quality project managers. Early in my career I sold scanning services to commercial (i.e. non-litigation) accounts. The sales process there was relatively straight-forward: I just explained how scanning could free up expensive storage space and the purchaser would look at the return-on-investment and decide to go ahead with the project. Since the records were essentially inactive anyway, no one was generally too concerned about tight delivery schedules.

When I made the career switch to selling document scanning and coding services in the litigation support market, I found a completely new environment. Because of the very nature of the work, deadlines and processing standards were of the utmost importance. Litigation support managers would listen to me explaining how we would get things done on time as promised, but I could see a look of distrust in their eyes – it was obvious to me that they if they hadn’t been outright lied to, they had at the very least been told many things that ended up not being true.

I found myself in the position of having been a very successful commercial processing sales person to one who was struggling to sell anything in litigation support. I discovered the answer while working on one large project/account. That answer was to bring a client services person with me. Instead of promising that everything would run perfectly, the client services told the account that on any large project it was a guarantee that there were going to be problems, but that the best people from the company would be on the project, including the best project manager and that the PM would keep the client fully informed an d up to date – the client would be the first to know both the good and the bad about the project.

The involvement of the PM changed the whole tone of the relationship from distrust to trust. The PM was able to build tremendous rapport with the client and we ended up getting much repeat business from the client, even after I left the company. The point being that the relationship established by the project manager was more durable and important to the company that my sales relationship with the client.

When I was involved in selling litigation support services, I always tried to financially incentivize project managers and went so far as to pay some of the PM’s who worked on my projects out of my own pocket.

Today PM’s are in high demand especially those with experience in electronic discovery. However, the most important attribute for a project manager is the sense of ownership that all of the top quality PM’s bring to their job. You can teach technology, but you can’t teach that critical character trait of caring and taking ownership of a problem of doing whatever is necessary to provide a successful outcome for the client.

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