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Analyzing Law Firm Business Capabilities With Heat Mapping

By Alan Rich and Ric Merrifield
October 30, 2006

(Editor's note: To exploit emerging opportunities in a rapidly changing competitive environment, agile competitors need to strategy-align and optimize their in-house and outsourced business capabilities. Arguing that older process-improvement strategies are ill suited to modern law firms, the authors advocate using Microsoft's patent-pending Motion methodology (in conjunction with benchmarking tools) to analyze and assess a firm's strategic business capabilities.

The Motion methodology employs custom 'heat map' diagrams to highlight specific business capabilities for which performance gains would most likely yield overall strategic benefits. From its origin as a technique to visually depict thermal gradients via color-coding, heat mapping has proved extremely fruitful for visualizing and exploring all sorts of voluminous quantitative data. Heat mapping software products are now available for visualizing business data, including data stored in Excel spreadsheets and Access databases.)

Law firms have been largely unable to take advantage of modern business improvement methods such as Six Sigma and the Theory of Constraints ' complex techniques often applied to manufacturing processes ' with much success. Those methodologies are measurement-based strategies that focus on process improvement and variation reduction.

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