eDiscovery Daily Blog

• October 6, 2010

Yesterday, we talked about putting together a “big picture plan” for your electronic discovery project. Now let’s move on to the nitty-gritty and get into resource, schedule, and budget details.

Identifying Resources and Preparing a Schedule

You need to do detailed planning for each task that you listed in your big picture plan. This means calculating a schedule and a budget and determining the resources you will need. For some tasks — like processing data – your needs will be primarily computing resources. In many cases you’ll be looking to a service provider for this work, and they can provide schedule and cost information. For other tasks – like document reviews – your greatest need will be people. This is where schedules and budgets are absolutely critical and need to be done carefully. Tasks that involve a lot of manpower hours are the ones that can get you into the most trouble with meeting deadlines and staying within budgets. Here are some very clear steps for preparing your plan:

• Determine how many units there are to be processed. For a document review, that would be the number of documents or files that need to be reviewed.
• Determine how many units can be processed in an hour (if you don’t already have a good feel for this, do some “time and motion” tests or talk to experienced peers).
• Divide the total number of units by the number of units that can be processed in an hour. Now you have an estimate of the total project hours needed to complete the project.
• Determine how many available calendar hours you have to do the work (for example, if your project needs to be completed in four weeks, you have 160 calendar hours).
• Divide the total project hours by the calendar hours to determine the number of people you will need.

Build in some time for project start-up tasks like preparing instructions and training the review team, and build in some time on the end for tasks like final quality control reviews. That’s it. You know how many people you need, and your schedule is done. Tomorrow, we’ll walk through preparing a budget.

So, what do you think? Have any stories to tell regarding resource identification or scheduling difficulties? Please share any comments you might have or tell us if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.