Our Head of Customer Success, Sam Holden, speaks to Brian Evans, Managing Partner of Lanyon Bowdler, about implementing a new BI project during lockdown.
Why implement a new BI project during lockdown?
Brian: What I’d say is from our perspective we were quite a long way down the road of implementation before lockdown started. But we decided to carry on with the project and not try and put things on hold. Very much the aim that we had in putting in reporting software in the first place was that management have been relying really on monthly reports being produced centrally and the ability of department heads to extract basic performance analysis details from our PMS.
But it was either quite time consuming for them to pull that all together or by the time they have a one to one with other members of that team, that information was out of date. We very much wanted a tool to make it is easier for department heads and team leaders to have regular discussions with their teams on performance with less need for time to be spent by them preparing figures and reports.
Our strategy on expenditure during lockdown is that actually its either got to be essential or it’s got to be something that’s really going to contribute well to our ability to manage the situation that we’re in or to improve the bottom line.
And I see this reporting software as very much giving us that ability to manage and hopefully improve the bottom line. It’s important that we’ve gone ahead and continued with the project.
Did you have any reservations about investing in Katchr software?
Brian: Yes, there are always concerns about any kind of expenditure project. One of the classic things about an IT project is that we’re buying it when we know least about the software and how it works. There is a fear to whether the company that is supplying it really understands how we work.
And whether there’s going to be a mismatch whether it’s really going to deliver what we hope it will deliver and whether people will use it. Whether we’ll get the engagements. Its early days on the engagement side because we’re just using it with a pilot group at the moment before rolling out to the whole firm.
But, certainly from the perspective of working with Katchr we’ve been really pleased. Katchr deals with law firms. The Katchr staff really understand how a law firm works, they talk our language, they use the terms that we use, and throughout the process I’ve been really confident really comfortable that what we were going to get would deliver what we wanted, because Katchr have got that knowledge and that experience in our sector. That’s been great all the way through.
In terms of the engagement the product has a great look and feel. It’s very intuitive. We’ve had about an hour’s training, I think, and we were running with it.
It’s very easy to use. The graphic displays are good and one of the reasons we chose Katchr in the first place was because we liked the interface. It was all of the products that we did look at we felt it was the one that probably our staff would engage with best.
Yes, I’m confident that it will be a great success. Certainly, initial feedback from our pilot group is they are using it they are enjoying it they are getting to information more quickly than they otherwise would. I’ve certainly been using it a lot in the time that we’ve been able to and finding that actually it’s giving me data which I would have struggled to find before or I’m finding it much more quickly.
That’s improving my decision making and improving the information I’m able to give out to other members of the firm to help them with their decision making too.