Operations for professional offices

Client intake done slightly differently by each person, so the file is complete for some clients and not others, and you find out at the worst moment. Handoffs between people, which is where things get dropped, because the context was in an inbox rather than anywhere else.

A junior asking a partner something that is written down somewhere, or was, in a document nobody can find. Renewal and deadline dates living in one person’s calendar. And the slow version of the same problem: procedures that were written once, three years ago, and no longer match what anybody actually does.

Knowledge Management puts what the firm knows somewhere it can be searched and asked, out of your own documents, with the source named. That is the difference between a shared drive and something a new starter can actually use in their first week.

If your procedures exist but are stale or unreadable, SOP Procedures turns the manuals you already have into clean step by step ones. If they do not exist at all, the Procedure Assistant has your best person talk a process through out loud and writes it up.

North Star organizes jobs, the schedule, the customers and the work. A dental practice, a clinic, a property manager running site visits, an inspection business: those are appointment shaped and it fits.

A law firm runs matters, not jobs, and a matter is a different thing with a different lifecycle. We would not pretend otherwise. For firms like that the honest answer is Knowledge Management and the procedure tools, and we would tell you that on the first call rather than the fourth.

Office conflict rarely announces itself. It arrives as a cool email chain with three people copied in and has been running a fortnight before anyone names it. The free guide covers the method, and there is a practice course written for office teams, including the disputes that have been running in writing before anybody spoke.