The Wild West of Ad Hoc
As romanticized as the heroics of the eDiscovery cowboy might feel initially - novel custom workflows, save the day antics, finding an impossible solution - the wild west is full of danger. Like any good story, there is a balance between good and evil and thus for every cowboy there is an outlaw. An outlaw stealing your money and causing chaos. Worse yet, the outlaw is so crafty at stealing and such a master at hiding that money that you may have no idea just how much is being lost.
See, an Ad Hoc workflow may appear to only have an associated cost to it when someone makes a mistake and rework is done. That’s the obvious part of the story. However, what about the times where no mistake occurs. Surely there is no money lost here.
Let’s run a thought experiment. If you have two employees performing the same task in an Ad Hoc environment, can you verify they are doing it the same way? If they aren’t doing it the same way, can you verify it takes them the same amount of time? Can you even verify that the same employee is doing the same task the same way? You can’t answer any of these questions and in that ambiguity is where the outlaw is hiding your money. If employee A performs a task and it takes them 15 minutes and employee B performs the same task in a different way and it takes them 30 minutes, you are losing 15 minutes every time employee B runs a task. That may seem somewhat trivial, but what if that task is run 10 times a day and is split between the two employees? That’s 150 minutes (2.5 hours) a day, 750 minutes (12.5 hours) a week, 3,250 (~54 hours) minutes a month, and 39,000 minutes (650 hours) a year. That’s right, 16 weeks a year lost because employee B doesn’t know the 15 minute approach. Let’s say the discrepancy isn’t so bad, and employee B takes only 5 minutes longer than employee A - that is still 13,000 minutes or ~216 hours or ~5.5 weeks lost. To think of this in monetary terms, let’s say employee B is making $100,000 a year. If they are taking an extra 15 minutes on this task, then you are losing ~$30k/year. If they are taking an extra 5 minutes on this task, then you are losing ~$10k/year. So for one employee performing one task you could be losing somewhere between $10k to $30k a year. Now expand that to the rest of the team and to the rest of the tasks.
How much money is being lost to the Ad Hoc Outlaw? Who knows, everything is Ad Hoc, it’s hidden. And this is easier to find money.
Let’s say employee A learns a new way to complete one of the steps in the task and reduces the turn time to 10 minutes. You realize those savings for that employee, but no other. What should be a savings for the entire team is stuck at the individual level. Let’s be generous and say employee A gets excited and shares the new way to perform the step. In order for the rest of the team to adopt it, it has to be compatible with the rest of their process, they have to independently choose to adopt it, and they have to remember to apply it. But remember, you can’t even prove that any team member is even doing the process the same way twice.
Again, the cost is completely unknown because everything is hidden.
Here is the good news! The solution to this problem is simple. Measure it.
The core of the work that needs to be done to move from Ad Hoc to Managed is shining a light on these hiding spots.
Ready to root out this lost money? We’ve got you covered with all the tools you need to get rid of these Ad Hoc Outlaws.
Quick tip: once you download the checklist, every Step has a corresponding set of documentation to guide you through how to perform that step. Simply click the name of the step in the Steps column to be taken to the documentation.
Download the Ad Hoc to Managed Checklist