Can Your Team See the Scoreboard?
In most firms there is a target the team is meant to hit. For some it is a billable-hours budget. For others it is total revenue billed, or debtor days, or WIP in dollars, or lock-up days. Whatever yours is, your people need an easy, accessible way to see how they are doing in real time and how they are tracking against the target.
The cricket scoreboard
It is like cricket. (Which, when I get the time, I love to veg out and watch a good five-day test.)
The team batting second gets set a target score to chase. Everyone knows the number. Say they need 280 to win.
Now imagine you took the scoreboard away. The batsmen still know they need 280, but ball to ball they have no idea whether they are winning or losing. Ahead of the rate or behind it. Whether to take risks now or just knock it around. They are batting blind, and they only find out they have fallen short after the last ball is bowled, when it is far too late to do anything about it.
Knowing the target was never the problem. Not being able to see the chase was.
"They can just log into the system"
You might be thinking your team can see it. They can jump into Actionstep, or Clio, or whatever practice management system you run, and check.
Sure they can. But picture saying that to those batsmen. You can see the score, you just have to go find a little monitor, pull up the right match, filter for the current innings, and even then it only shows the runs, not how many balls are left.
That is exactly what you are doing when you tell your team they can just log into the PMS, filter their name and the date. You have sent them hunting for half an answer. And most firms stop there. They set a number, attach an incentive or a consequence to it, and leave it. If each person has to run their own reports and do the mental maths, nobody will. They will just work, and hope, and find out at month-end whether they made it.
A target with no scoreboard. Batting blind.
What we built
This is exactly what we solved for a client last month. We built them a simple dashboard. We used Notion, which is just a flexible online workspace, a shared living web page the whole team can open.
Now each person opens it and sees three things at a glance:
their budget hours for the month
their actual recorded hours so far
and exactly how they are tracking, ahead or behind, today
The target stopped being a month-end surprise and became a live position anyone could read on any day. Every lawyer can see whether they are on pace, so they adjust this week instead of finding out too late. The incentive scheme finally does its job, because the chase is finally visible. And it runs itself. The numbers update every morning before anyone is at their desk.
The lesson
The lesson is not really about billable hours, or dashboards, or Notion. It is this: visibility changes behaviour more than incentives do. You can have the right target and the right incentive structure, but if your team cannot see the scoreboard, they are batting blind. And so are you.
So here is the question for your firm. Whatever your number is, billables, lock-up, WIP, debtor days, can your team see how they are tracking against it in real time, or only at month-end when the innings is all but over?
If you are not sure, hit reply with the one number your team cannot currently see day to day. I will tell you what I would put on the scoreboard first.
More next Tuesday,
Gordon