Communications is a piece of both project management and change management that legal operations professionals don’t want to neglect, Anna Richards, the director of legal operations operational excellence at Micron Technology, says.
As part of launching two large-scale programs at Zendesk, where she built out the legal ops function over four years before coming to Micron this past fall, she learned clear and timely communications are essential to secure buy-in from key stakeholders.
“To build enthusiasm and alleviate the stress and confusion [of any big operational change] and create a good and seamless user experience, communication has become central to my role,” Richards said in an Inside Voices podcast hosted by Logikcull.
In her last two years at Zendesk, she launched a records retention program and a shared services operation, both of which required the kind of large-scale changes in behavior by attorneys and others that benefit from good communications.
“I will never take communications for granted again,” Richards said. “It's a huge piece that I’ve learned is a key input.”
Managing change
At Zendesk, the legal team was essentially relying on Slack for its record retention workflow, an informal process that left the company open to risk. But the prospect of changing it “was terrifying to certain parts of the business,” Richards said.
“It was a lot of working through, ‘Oh, gosh, we’ve been using Slack as our knowledge management platform. If we tell people it’s going to go away, we’ve got big issues.’ People were pretty vocal about their concerns.”
Setting up the shared services operation, in the Philippines, was an even bigger change attorneys and others across the organization had to get comfortable with.
“Most attorneys I know have had really bad experiences with offshore support, so this was an uphill battle we were walking into from the jump,” she said.
There was little doubt the company needed to take the step to create efficiencies; it no longer made sense to keep adding budget costs and headcount to support operations.
“It’s a scale play,” she said.
Zendesk opted to build rather than buy an existing operation, a decision that took two years to move from conception to launch.
Because of attorneys’ generally bad view of shared services, clear and timely communications throughout the process was essential to keep people vested in the process and also to let them know about successes as the operation rolled out.
“We knew we had one chance to make a good first impression because we were working on an uphill slope for our folks who had been burned with offshore support before,” Richards said. “So, it was important to find those quick wins that we could deliver upfront to build momentum, and some positive experience to get our champions internally installed.”
She worked with a PR pro from the company’s communications team to help her keep people informed on the projects as they moved through planning and implementation. She also contracted with a technical writer to prepare the how-to material that’s crucial for making people feel comfortable using an unfamiliar workflow process.
“Literally, ‘Click here, click here,’” she said. “‘If you get to this place, here’s a decision tree.’”
As she was leaving Zendesk, the shared services function she created had just started handling all of the company’s non-disclosure agreements, a big cost saver.
“We were able to eliminate a very expensive third party that was handling overflows for NDAs,” she said.
Strategic thinking
At Micron, a tech giant with a legal ops team of 13 supporting about 100 attorneys who in turn support some 50,000 employees in 17 countries, Richard's job is mainly strategic, at least at first.
She reports to a chief of legal operations and works side by side with two other director-level legal ops people, one who manages outside legal work and vendors and one who manages the tech side.
Her role is to take a high-level view of what the legal department needs to optimize operations, help it become a value-added part of the business and become a best-in-class operation—in short, change management rather than project management.
“My timing couldn’t have been better,” she said. “Micron has a year that ends in September, so we were doing fiscal year 2023 planning just as I joined.”
While she’s still learning the ropes of the company, she’s trying to figure out how to roll the pillars she’s responsible for into something that would be a meaningful goal for the coming year.
“So, a lot of it is around laying groundwork, and scope, and understanding what’s out there,” she said. “My privilege at this point is to bring in a net new function. I’m not picking up where someone left off. I’m not grabbing work that’s already in process per se. This is a new offering that the operations team is bringing in, so how do I start establishing the baselines, the foundational pieces I need?”
Among other things, she’s looking at where there are opportunities for process improvement and optimization, where she should look to start building out the playbooks for a shared services launch and whether the department might benefit from a project management office.
Other priorities: “What metrics do we care about if we’re going to start thinking about bringing in an intake system?” she said. “What pieces of metadata do we want to track? We need to have these long-tell thoughts and goals identified in order to bring in the smaller pieces as we’re building out the foundational stuff. So, I’m working backwards from my pillars in the goals.”
She has two staff dedicated to helping her. Good communication is important in her relationship with them, too, because she wants them to have clear areas of responsibility and a sense of ownership so they’ll be able to do their best work.
“I’m getting them set up with goals so they feel supported and clear what the expectations are,” Richards said. “That’s a big part of it, too.”
