eDiscovery Daily Blog
eDiscovery Project Management: Resolve Questions Quickly
Even with the best procedures and thorough training, people who are new to a task will likely have questions. Nuances in a document collection and unexpected situations will surface that don’t fit into your rules. It is very important that questions are resolved quickly. Most document work is repetitive. Many questions, therefore, will apply to more than one document. If a question is not resolved quickly, there is a good chance that many documents will be affected, and you may face significant rework. This is especially the case in projects that are being handled by a team of people – for example, a document review project. So, handle exceptions and questions as they come up and expand and modify the rules to accommodate what you are finding in practice in the document collection.
Depending on the type of project you are managing, you may need to be prepared to answer two types of questions:
- Questions about the mechanics of the task. These types of questions are usually best handled by project managers and supervisors.
- Questions about the substance of the task. For example, in a document review project there are likely to be questions about the relevance of topics discussed in the documents. These types of questions are usually best handled by an attorney who is familiar with the case and with the documents.
Make sure that you have the right people on hand to make decisions and answer questions. If those people can’t be on the project site, make sure they are easily reached and readily available.
And, have a process in place for disseminating updated procedures and criteria to a team doing the work. If one member of a team has a question, chances are other team members will encounter similar documents and have the same question. You need to get information quickly into the hands of those doing the work.
What do you think? Have you worked on projects that required rework because decision makers weren’t available? Please share your comments or let us know if you’d like more information on a topic.