Debbie Scott, Head of Support Services International at Eversheds Sutherland, shares how BigHand Workflow Management gives them the visibility needed to optimise their support staff workflows.

We have BigHand Workflow Management and Document Creation. Particularly post-pandemic, we’ve been able to use the solutions across several teams. We have central administration team hubs in each location, remote billing teams, in house document specialists and our PA community. We’ve been able to move work around among all of those teams in an easy, quick way. We’ve seen massive benefits of this. We’ve also started to see other teams interested in using it, although slightly differently. Our facilities teams are interested in Workflow Management because they all use central Outlook, Mailboxes etc. We’ve also seen our project management team starting to look at how they can use it for bespoke one-off projects among their team.

As well as how we intended to use it for our practice groups and support function, there are other sides of the business now starting to enquire as they see the benefit of being able to track pieces of work, being about to gain data and move work around different locations. In a hybrid working world, this is a huge benefit.

What benefits are you seeing?

We’ve been able to track trends on kinds of tasks being done in certain practice groups and certain locations. From that we’ve been able to pick up what resources are needed in one team versus another. We’ve been able to then resource up. An example, our Birmingham central admin has huge volume of matters going through it, we can now make sure that other teams in other locations can support them, we get this information from our data and analytics.

What advice would you give other firms?

Make sure you have the right sponsor. Somebody who’s interested in change, energetic and enthusiastic about it. Bring a number of people into the project that have different viewpoints from different practice groups to make sure that actually you’re covering all work types and continually have communication on it.

It won’t happen overnight, and you need to bring people on the journey. You can’t just do that with one off comms and training. Keep regularly communicating and really targeting your key audiences and key stakeholders.