BUSINESS DESIGN – PROJECT MANAGEMENT LEAD
For the first six (6) to nine (9) months you will be partially (25-75%) seconded within one of our clients, an AmLaw 100 firm. We are active in piloting and launching a new practice service model that we have designed over the last several months with the firm. We need an on-site, hands-on, confident project lead to work collaboratively with the client team – consisting of all fee-earners types and status as well as business function leads and managers. This is an amazing opportunity to gain experience in legal business design and elevate your skills to the next level. Outside of this client work, you will be working across our clientele and projects.
What you will do.
As the Business Design Project Management Lead you use your knowledge and experience to apply adaptive project management techniques to plan and manage a myriad of diverse engagements. In your role, you will perform as a key resource and expert not only as a project manager but supporting the design of new business and service models leveraging your experience in practice management, process engineering, and previous work in law firm operations. Your multidisciplinary experience includes rolling up your sleeves as a SME with legal technology solutions, but you don’t look at technology as the starting point or the most important ingredient in business but understand its role and how to integrate it to match human behavior.
You have applied project management and process improvement techniques to the delivery of legal services and have managed innovation-related projects. You are bullish on using insights and data analysis to build a business case and validate ideas before building solutions. You know how to identify and address barriers to change from all angles to integrate solutions to match human behavior.
Our Business Design Team combines strategic thinking and human-centered design processes to think differently about existing business models, and to craft and build new ventures. You will collaborate with a broad team of Bold Duck designers and diverse and numerous client stakeholders to drive teams through the ups and downs of project execution. With diverse and numerous people come great ideas but also immense political and cultural pressure when it comes to making change happen. You are able to navigate this deftly and interact at various levels throughout our clients’ organizations.
Because our engagements flow from conceptual to prototype to functioning models and ultimately to stand-alone businesses and services, it can be a painstaking and arduous journey for our clients regardless of how fast we move. This makes communication and interaction our primary tool. We must bring the human client with us on this journey without alienating them or overwhelming them. It is a delicate balance. No matter the back-end work of financial analysis, market insight, operational audits, and so on, our clients are human and therefore our primary job is firstly making change itself a craving rather than something to fear and avoid.
How you will do it.
As a Business Design Project Management Lead, you will roll up your sleeves and work at the coal face of organizational change. You will be working with the Business Designer Lead to ensure that the validity, feasibility and desirability of new concepts are thoroughly considered. In this capacity, you'll work with a team to understand the business context, collect and interpret relevant data, develop insights, explore and define growth opportunities, shape strategic choices, create tangible design expressions, communicate the vision, and ultimately help the business get new offers to market.
What is your unique recipe?
We are a growing agency and so fit means more to us than skill and experience. While these are important, they won’t influence your success here as much as fit.
We each bring a unique combination of life experience, personality, and talent. We want to know yours, and we plan on asking you directly. Make sure to ask us too.
Who we want.
We love passionately curious people who think of themselves as lifelong learners and are curious about many things. You are humble, engaging, intelligent and our next best friend. You have strong opinions with an open mind. You are proactive and entrepreneurial. You know how to take boldly and give graciously. Critical thinking is your sharpest tool and you're able to think through the toughest problems.
You've had a ton of client-facing time and have learned how to successfully navigate sharp elbows while working deep within the practice groups with the most seasoned as well as youngest and brightest. You’ve earned their trust and respect by delivering measurable indisputable results.
We don't believe that any process, method or idea is perfect or permanent, so we want people who want to bring change to organizations they join and who want to make impact with their work.
How we live our brand.
We're looking for people who share this way of being - You don't need to be convinced of it, you just get it.
INQUISITIVE We're curious about the world, bringing unique perspectives in, to inspire our work, our design, and the client experience we deliver.
PROVOCATIVE We push the edge of what's possible, but hold our opinions loosely and openly.
COMPASSIONATE We deeply empathize with the people we're designing for, ensuring their needs are at the heart of everything we do.
SCRAPPY We build things in the open, so we can quickly test, iterate, prototype, and learn from them.
INTEGRATIVE We connect the organizational dots, build on the ideas of others, and bring everyone along.
WILD CARD Our strength comes from bringing our whole selves to work - from introspective, to playful, or quirky. What will you bring?
DESIRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:
Qualifications
5+ years of hands-on experience as a legal project manager, practice manager or client value team member working closely at the practice group level with extensive direct client-facing exposure.
Formal project management and process improvement education or equivalent experience
Entrepreneurial mindset with the ability to explore business opportunities in a structured yet iterative way
Ability to act as a change agent and align teams on new ideas and ways of working
Strong financial and analytical skills and a proven ability to think strategically about user needs, market dynamics and business impact
Natural curiosity about people and customers and comfortable with ambiguity
Strong sense of urgency with a focus on testing, learning and iterating
Excellent verbal and written communications skills
Excellent organizational skills, ability to problem solve, prioritize and manage multiple, parallel projects in a dynamic, rapidly changing environment
Responsibilities
Under the direction of one of our Business Design Leads, responsible for project management activities on a variety of diverse projects ranging from client legal service delivery and legal operational process improvement initiatives, as well as development of new services or business models
Leverage the tenets of project management, design, lean six sigma, agile, and change management
Work with the cross-functional team (within clients) to establish project KPIs to measure and track project success
Provide guidance, recommendations and perform project-defined activities based on your prior experience working within law firm ecosystems
Collaborate seamlessly and successfully throughout organizations, interacting with groups such as finance, IT, pricing, practice management, marketing, business development, administration, as well as other groups
Performs other duties as assigned
Up to 30% travel is required to be "in field" engaging with clients and users
What You'll Get
Freedom: We trust you to do your thing and do it well.
Professional Development: We set aside a conference budget because we want to invest in you. Got invited to speak? Even better though we don’t do pay to play.
Work from home: We are a distributed team and work together using this crazy thing called technology.
Pushed towards excellence: We don’t tolerate arrogance or willful ignorance. If you let us, we are committed to making you better and will ask you to do the same for us.
To apply please click below to send us an email. Include a resume and any other material or message you think will be important for us. No need for formal cover letter - just talk to us in your voice.
To apply please click below to send us an email. Include a resume and any other material or message you think will be important for us. No need for formal cover letter - just talk to us in your voice.