 I am now going to turn it over to Miranda McGeley to talk about today's topic, Future Proofing Your Projects Maintenance Continuity and Succession Planning. So thanks again, Jillian, and welcome everyone to our training today on Future Proofing Your Legal Technology Projects, Looking at Maintenance Continuity and Succession Planning. We really appreciate you attending. So I'm very excited and appreciative of our panelists today. We have Christopher Alfano, who's here from Illinois Legal Aid Online. We have Jack Haycock and Kathleen Coddwell from Pine Tree Legal Assistance. Also with us today is Sheila Fischer of North Penn Legal Services. Xander Karsten joins us from Legal Server and again I'm Miranda McGeley from Pro BonoNet and I'll be moderating the panel. So I'm just going to start things off today with a brief introduction of the presenters and the themes of the webinar. Then we'll hear from Kathleen and Jack who will talk about their experience with staffing transitions while maintaining existing successful legal technology projects. Chris will cover his current maintenance strategies being used to support forms development and the forms project at Illinois Legal Aid Online. We'll then hear from Sheila who will share her experience and ideas about planning for future technology projects and Xander will wrap things up with transition planning considerations that are useful throughout the lifespan of the project. So I wanted to start things off. Last October I gave birth to my son who's pictured here. I wanted to share a little bit about the lessons learned from that family leave experience. Do I serve as a Law Help Interactive Program Coordinator at Pro BonoNet. So Law Help Interactive generally is a project where we work with legal aid organizations and courts in forms online. Last winter I gave birth October and because staffing changes occur on a regular basis, whether temporary or permanent, one of the first things I did was to look for existing models to help make coverage easier for myself and for my colleagues. Xander who's speaking later in the presentation had just left Pro BonoNet and transitioned to legal server. So I basically used his transition manual as a template for my coverage memo and having that resource already available helped me to think through the best way to help my colleagues prepare to do coverage for me while I was out. So one of the first lessons was just see what existing resources that are working well are available for you. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. You can start there. The next lesson I learned was thinking about in addition to documenting and providing coverage, a coverage memo or however you decide to document your responsibilities and assist people, you want to schedule time and opportunities multiple sessions to talk through with your colleagues what you've documented, what makes sense to you, may not be clear for everyone else and it also allows you to answer questions in advance if all of questions are prompted by what you've prepared. You also want to notify individuals that you work with both within your organization and outside of your organization of your upcoming leave. A lot of the pregnancy blogs and some of the apps that I was reading at the time outside of work talked about these issues and even provided templates on how to notify individuals that you work with and key partners and you don't want those folks to be blindsided when you're out for an extended period of time. A really important lesson was be flexible and prepare for different scenarios with the pregnancy and since you have a due date and in fact a lot of people were saying that as a first-time parent I'd be giving birth probably later than the due date. That wasn't the case. I gave birth early so you just have to prepare in that situation for different timing but also more generally whenever there is staffing transitions whether they'd be permanent or temporary there are things that you can't anticipate and prepare for so having some flexibility built in your plan is important. The last little tidbit is that I work remotely and my office culture and technology really allows me to feel connected to the office even though I'm not physically present in the office. Sometimes we fall into habits of remaining connected so the last lesson I learned was prepare for the leave but when it actually occurs actually leave and unplug and disconnect so I wanted to start things off with those lessons. So next I just wanted to quickly share this checklist from Pro BonoNet that we've developed to help with statewide website administration staff transition. I'm sharing this first because I'm a huge fan of checklists but also I think that this is helpful when thinking about statewide website staff transitions but legal tech projects more generally there's a lot of things here that apply more broadly to projects. So the first item on the checklist is making sure that you have stakeholder committee lists and have opportunities to meet with the stakeholders at their next meeting so knowing when that takes place. It's important to understand websites membership policies if there's material for instance behind password protected areas of your site you want to know how to control membership moving forward and then have that policy documented or available for the transition. You want to figure out and discuss and document project priorities and also make sure that the credentials needed for transition are available. So the first part of the checklist really covers some of the considerations for before the administrative person or coordinator leave and here are some checklist items for after the person leaves. You want to make sure to deactivate relevant personal user accounts and update relevant contact us and feed email addresses. You want to make sure that you connect the new administrator to relevant lists and resources. Make sure that there's messaging to key partners inside and outside organizations letting them know that a new person is in the role and so that that new person can have access to relevant training and onboarding materials. And finally if the transition isn't smooth if there's some space in between one person leaving and one person joining making sure that there's an insurance plan in place to make sure that there's a fluid maintenance of the website or whatever the project may be. So I hope my sort of quick lessons learned and checklist was helpful to get ideas flowing and get the conversation started. I'm going to turn things over now to Jack and Kathleen but also just wanted to flag some selected resources on the topic that I've added up as the last slide and you can access these slides in the handout section of the go to webinar and also be available online through LSNTAP.org. So thank you very much. Hey everyone. This is Jack Hacock from Pine Tree Legal Assistance along with Kathleen. Kathleen? Yeah I'll take it off. So we want to talk today. Recently Pine Tree has undergone a really enormous staffing transition because Kathleen has retired which is not the first transition of this kind that Pine Tree has been through. Kathleen if you want to give a little bit of the history behind that. First I just have to say I hadn't heard even though we had a planning media obviously I hadn't heard Miranda's talk and I was chuckling at myself about the part about leave and then really leave. That is such good advice and trust that you've done everything and that's such great advice and I totally flunked that piece of advice because just my last payroll date was August 18th and just yesterday I was online and I'm still on our network like wrapping some of things up and I sent an email to Jack saying oh are you going to go to that meeting? That's a really important meeting don't miss that meeting. Of course he was going to go to that meeting but I just like you know I still wake up in the middle of the night thinking oh I got to tell Jack this or I got to tell Jack that. So take Miranda's advice on that one not mine. So yeah this is actually the second time that we've transitioned all of our websites over from one person to another. Some of you may be old enough to remember one of the elder statesmen of the TIG world my mentor Hugh Calkins and he transitioned two websites over to me. We worked together for a long time and so that made it kind of easy and then at this point I transitioned five to Jack plus helping out on another four or five and I basically just used the same model that I had learned from Hugh. So it's funny when Miranda asked us to do this and I think it's sort of appropriate because we've just been through it or we're at the tail end of going through transitioning a statewide website plus a bunch other website administrative tasks. You know we really had to sit down and like how how did we do that and and assess the time we spent together and it was a pretty interesting exercise because I'm not sure that we really knew how we did it. When we had our planning meeting Miranda said well you you're going to present your heuristic approach. I didn't even know what that meant so I had to look it up and I looked it up on Wikipedia and it was hands-on a practical method not generated not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect but sufficient for the immediate goals. That seems that seems pretty right on. Were you the one that said that Miranda? Okay so that's kind of the background of what's going on. I had the advantage of Jack being in the great northeastern co-op program his last year of law school so I got him for two school terms and we worked together real intensively for two school terms before I turned everything over to him and I realized that's not always possible in every organization but Hugh and I had a similar thing and I just it's if you can get that and I think our our executive director is gets that and is committed to that it may seem expensive but I just don't think there's any substitute for having Miranda mentioned a series of meetings to hand things off I just I don't think there's any real substitute for just time together. Yeah and so the method that we're kind of on about here is we're generously calling it a holistic approach to a staffing transition so coming into this we didn't really have any formal system at Pine Tree for managing this kind of staff transition. A lot of the time even though I was lucky enough to work in Bangor with Kathleen for about three months to start off after that we were in different offices and so trying to coordinate all of this remotely so we don't really have a formal system to present but we do have some best practices to share that made life a lot easier for both of us. That picture on the right to my office by the way. So probably the number one thing that has kept us on track with this transition is communicating. We talk frequently and really openly and frankly about not just the tasks that need to get done and the projects that we're working on but also one thing that I've always appreciated from Kathleen is her honesty about what the difficulties are with certain projects or what things have gone wrong in the past that I can avoid those pitfalls. That's really been something that has helped me immensely getting my head around this very amorphous position that I now find myself in. Navigating the politics of the court system. Yeah there are a lot of things like that. So something else and this is kind of along the lines with the court system is there's Kathleen has 20 years of institutional knowledge about all of our websites and I had about a year to try and learn all of that from her. So I don't know if Kathleen you have any tips on how to prioritize what kind of what gets passed down. Well you know it's again it's so interesting listening to Miranda about the checklists like I agree I really believe in checklists but we didn't and handbooks and documentation I mean that's all those are all such good practices and ideal practices I think but it's kind of contrary to the pine tree culture so it's it was a lot more haphazard I think in the way we pass things down and later we're going to talk about the kind of project management systems that we that we think know we need that we don't have and the kind of documentation systems we need and we don't have and that's the weak point of of our tradition but the strength of our tradition on the other side of the coin is that kind of style of mentorship that I mentioned with Hugh and that I tried to pass on to Jack and that is you know not only showing him all the ins and outs of the website and all the dirty laundry on the admin side where it exists and what he needs to clean up etc etc but also just really helping him start to navigate all of all of the office politics all get to know all of the players from the other partner organizations introduce him I took him to the 20th anniversary of our of the organization in Maine that's the spinoff that does administrative and lobbying work and class action work and you know just just really introducing him to the kinds of things and the players and the dynamics that you can't really do with that you can't do with checklist right yeah yeah and that's been it's been a big help trying to get my bearings here because so much of this job isn't just kind of working in isolation on the website it's also needing to be in constant contact with this amazing expansive national network of people and Kathleen I think you've done a really good job making sure that I got a warm introduction to as many of those people as possible and so something else that Kathleen has already mentioned is that overlapping time has been probably the biggest advantage we've had we were able to work together on and off for about a year and honestly I can't imagine stepping into this job without having had some of that yeah if there are any administrators on this call I saw Sue on there I get I get like dealing with the board and and budgets and trying to squeeze every penny out that that may seem like a luxury and it was kind of ideal with Jack because we got him for free for two school terms and you don't always have that advantage but I think to the extent that my observation in all of this is that our executive director and Nan Hield was really supportive of that and and there was some time when we were both being paid and I just think that as an administrator if I'm passing along a job like this if there's any way possible to create that overlap that it's it's really important yeah agreed oh this is my slide isn't it yeah if you're so take it away um I you know I I think I love what I do and Hugh loved what he did and um I think that Jack feels like he had a good orientation and I think you know 80 percent of that is is passing on the our enthusiasm and our love of what we're doing Miranda mentioned documentation obviously on any tech project documenting is really important and we're probably not the best example in the world of doing that but it's really important um and you know to encourage as the mentor to encourage the person that you're passing along to to you know just the obvious things of tell them to make mistakes tell them to be curious tell them to ask questions um you know that they need to be engaged with you in order to to be a good donor um yeah I guess that's it yeah absolutely it was kind of stunning to me when I arrived at the first day of my internship over a year ago and Kathleen basically handed me the keys to the website and said try not to destroy anything but you know it worked out because Kathleen was an incredible mentor and really uh let me have that room to make mistakes but also made sure that I knew how not to make them again um so if if we had to do this all over again uh you know hindsight is 2020 we might have started using some project management tools one that I've just started using that I really like is a sauna I'm just gonna hit the highlights here so it's free for up to 15 users which right now at Pine Tree is kind of where we're at um I've found it really easy to use and organize I like to sort my tasks by due date and that makes me really happy when I sit down and try and figure out what I have to do in a given week or month or day um there are some really interesting visuals for tracking the status of projects and it's easy to see how you're progressing over time and for someone new starting out this would be a really great tool to jump into because you can see all the history behind the projects where it's progressed who's working on what um kind of where you fit into it and I think it would be really good in transitions for helping to get new people up to speed I you know again Pine Tree is a little late on the project management software end of things so we probably don't have a other than Jack having discovered the software that he really likes we don't have any probably brilliant suggestions probably a lot of you already have your favorite software but if you if you are sort of behind as we were um it's not perfect but of course Google Drive can go a long way toward having some kind of efficient coordination um use base camp in the past um I know those of you who remember Gabe Hammond I remember she really pushed this many years ago it's it's an older system because of its usability it's really simple um I think it's kind of on one end of the spectrum in terms of if if you're you have an organization people who are are nervous about using new software base camps like super easy and it not real um robust but it can get the job done we had a project with a bunch of judges and private lawyers many older and um doing um setting up a foreclosure diversion program in Maine and we actually got them to use base camp even though some of them probably still dictated to their secretaries you know um I always my go-to person with questions like this always is Gwen Daniels and um she loves Jira uh she pointed out she gave us a little run through she pointed out she really likes how customizable it is um that it has a good notification system she likes the documentation features um and that it has a really it's widely used and has a strong support community I don't think it has a free version and I don't think base camp has a free version uh as Jack mentioned asana is free um and since we're kind of behind on this we wanted to ask for other people's either software you're using that you love or software you've tried that you would not recommend um somebody's Jillian said base camp a lot of people like base camp at pro bono net confluence anybody else actually your share point has not worked great for pine tree we use that as an internet and I think we're switching but that may have more to do with with our use of it then it might not be inherently that bad anybody else have ones zander also called out trello let's say hello um I'm a huge fan of slack if you can get people on there is that like slack brian yep okay makes makes things easier so you've got more time to slack ah okay by the way jeer I think it's kind of at the other end from base camp um I maybe Chris will come in I think it's a little more geeky which is why Gwen loves it but apparently they've gotten people to use it yeah we've you jeer we've been using jeer for the past few years and it's been a great tool for us it is uh it is not free um I think with fewer users it's a little bit um less expensive than uh what we're paying but so I don't know how cost effective it is for people but it's a great tool great does anybody else out there have no put it in the chat if you think of something um I also chatted with Gwen because I mean if obviously there are continuous transitions everywhere in every organization and somehow through all those transitions Illinois has managed to have the best website ever so I always go to Gwen to ask her what her tips are um and she talked about the Chris the weekly meetings that you have and so that when someone does leave um there's lots of institutional knowledge everybody kind of understands a lot about each other's jobs and it makes the transitions easier just by having that great ongoing communication regular communication with the team um Jack you were going to talk oh this one's going to be embarrassing for me but go ahead and so for anyone anyone who's using Drupal and I think other platforms probably have something similar there is uh there is the revisions tab when you edit things which you know we have I think our practice has changed over the years on how we kind of document changes we make to pages on the websites but I've tried to start up the practice of using these revisions so that you know when I come back to something three years later and wonder when on earth was the last time I looked at this I'll be able to see what I did three years ago and hopefully that will uh jog my memory a little bit and I guess my Kathleen was too dumb to even have it turned on Jack had to discover it on his own you know Kathleen it's a learning process yeah right right so if anyone else has any um you know hot tips about how to make these things a little bit easier we'd love to hear them I do have a comment from Abhijit who says that he finds slack going back to some of the tools that he finds slack and google docs very useful okay Abhijit if it's good enough for you it's good enough for us but is there a free version that's pretty important for a lot of not for Illinois legal aid online but for most of us great so I guess to sum up staffing transitions can be really hard but they don't have to be miserable Kathleen and I have had a ton of fun in this year working together we laugh a lot we joke a lot and I have learned so much and feel that I'm in you know at least a decent position to try to fill her shoes um going forward here and I love telling Jack the dark side of everything legal aid so it's been fun very enlightening all right so thanks everyone actually just quickly on the slack price side it is free for five gigs of storage and 10 000 messages searchable if you want to use it to archive stuff more than that there is a price to it but for all the projects I've used it's worked really well on the free model great um hi everyone I'm Sheila Fisher um I've been working with Pen Legal Services for a couple decades much like Kathleen and also much like Kathleen I want to be retired sometime soon so um I'm looking back over my years I wasn't an attorney till about 12 13 years ago and basically I've been a full-time template developer since then and um but I'm the only one at North Penn that develops templates and I'm talking about H.J. and hotdogs and I'm the only one in Pennsylvania for a fact so we have these large banks of templates and I'm looking back at them and thinking sort of what have I wrought and succession planning and also thinking about how did I get here in the first place and part of how I got here in the first place is because I've envisioned projects that I've gone out and sought grants for and maybe some of them have been terrific ideas and maybe some of them haven't been such terrific ideas so um um I have learned a lot I've been listening um it was wonderful to hear about Jack and Kathleen working together I doubt sincerely whether I'll have that and we have no team here like I said so to sort of work these things out so this topic has been on my mind for some time oh I forgot okay so what actually motivates us for new projects well there's a lot of motivations um we have systems that are outdated we want to increase efficiencies and cost savings these are normally what we tell funders this is why we need to get some new money into our project to adopt or to take on new technologies um and by the way I am sort of my background is I always call myself a one-trick pony I do document assembly but I think some of the things I hope some of the things I'm talking about sort of applies to a wider range of technologies not just document assembly um we also go to take conferences and learn so much and see such great projects that's also a motivator to want to adopt new technologies back at home there are priority categories in each of each year's tick process not all of us are LSE grantees and can get that kind of money but a lot of us do and what I've been working on majorly for the last year two years almost three years are two tick grants that I got in 2013 and in a way I say I got them because at North Penn since I'm the only template developer and they're both document assembly projects they've been on my lap and in that particular year 2013 I haven't really looked at the application process since and one of the categories was expert systems and that really piqued my interest since I've been doing this for a while we all like to do things better and crazier and more efficient um it really piqued my interest to do a particular projects which I'll talk about during the course of my presentation we also have now LSE baseline technology guidelines we are supposed to have tech plans all the things these are the things that say this is what we aspire to do this is what we should do is there a project out there that can be funded to keep up with these guidelines and tech plans and we do we we sort of like to be leaders early adopters when it's possible so we take on a new project and of course we love grant money and um I don't mean to be so sort of um sort of crass about the money aspect but certainly um TIG grants we couldn't possibly take on the new projects what we have if we didn't have somebody funding us and helping us along the way so so now we're motivated but the idea is here and this is sort of a lesson that I can pass on is don't bite off more than you can chew and I and I haven't actually I don't think that's happened here but I can tell you I've come near choking several times on trying to get RLS to TIG projects done and on some other projects we've been working at here in the program so what you should you consider when you go off to do a new project um there's the excitement and the glitz and glam of it but does it fit in with the other technologies that are already in use or are we going out on a limb in order to bring money in or going on a limb because it looks really cool and then one of the TIG projects that we got was to build an intake tool so that it could determine financial and case priority eligibility on once our intake staff was sort of overwhelmed with several tools that they had to refer to for every little in for every intake that came in and someone recommended that we consider the the software neodologic and touted it as being a very powerful tool it is wonderful I've seen it in action it is spectacular but as we got involved in the project the grant was awarded to us then we started really seeing more about the back end of it we started seeing more saying well wait a minute we were told it does this can it do that and so whether or not it really fit in with what we were already doing or was this another technology that was going to demand a whole new set of skills and as we've been talking about a whole new set of maintenance skills as well and this is what I've just been talking about we've we would have had there was new training involved I would have loved I've done all that it's sort of like those of us who get excited by new technologies are really ready and willing to learn but you know when it really comes down to doing it are you really going to have the time given all your responsibilities or is what you've taken on something that could already be met with something you already have in house I mean how many systems can you maintain how many systems can you be trained for keep staff on and know the technology well enough to take it into the future and not have it be abandoned here in Pennsylvania we were the recipients of a Cypre award and the money was targeted for a new case management system across the state although we each have our individuals we all move from one case management system to a new one and we're now working with legal server which in a very basic way can do basic document assembly so now we have people sort of like saying well we have this already for our case management requirements or needs can we use this also for our document assembly needs and in some cases yes why would you go on to hot docs if you have something that's already built in people are already trained on familiar with if you really don't need to go to a more sophisticated level of using hot docs of course from my point of view everybody needs to be literate in hot docs but that's another training so and then how will the new technology advance service goals we can bring um technologies in um we can get a grant to build some hj templates for prosa clients but is it always how is that going to actually work in with our service goals or is it always going to stay on the outside once particularly the grant is over so the object is to avoid those kind of project pitfalls taking on more than you can possibly chew and how would you do that well first of all you might want to ask experts and get second opinions i had recommendations about neotologic but it wasn't enough um for uh my other big project is this monster called a divorce tracker which we originated originally did um in hot docs in hj but as the project went on and as it sort of showed itself to be the monster that it is it really exceeded the uh the functionality of hj author and so there was this major shift in the middle of the project because hj really couldn't handle um all the functionality we needed to make this divorce tracker run a divorce tracker is one big template that takes prosa litigant in at the beginning provides them with initial divorce forms has that person come back they feedback their answers to certain questions it feeds on itself and produces the second um set of divorce forms provided they did what they had to do certain qualifications were met then they come back and do it a third time and the divorce tracker can help them get through to that final um divorce decree that people want had i asked somebody like bob obin who's on the phone or bart url i probably would have been advised that maybe i was biting off more than this i could really chew or more than the software could really do for me um ask to see demos be demanding for specifics if it's a software you don't know it may be a technology is great for your program and will uh fill a need a real void but be sure you know what it is rather than just getting a great recommendation and see it flash on the screen in some webinar also try to get commitment from your management for funding beyond the project term there's nothing sort of more demoralizing i've spent a lot of time and effort and developed a lot of templates uh for our staff here at north penn legal services for the prosaic community in pennsylvania but um when there's no new grant money there's always a question of whether or not there's going to be money and time for maintenance of the projects that we have or are we going to be able to build on them for the future it's sort of a tease to have a few custody forms when we really need more custody forms and then there's no money for that so there's always going to be the maintenance issue fun grants generally are not going to pay ongoing maintenance costs into the future so there may be the grant money initially but you've got to make a commitment um over the longer term there's also uh important to get some buy-in to the project uh we've done a lot of document assembly here um not all staff like the document assembly uh the prosa projects um are not necessarily referred to by our hotline people um by our workshops which they could be incorporated nicely so really to get everything up and running and to be part and parcel of a project's service um goals service plans the more that it is incorporated into the general stream of what you do your mission work the more it's not an extra demand on the general budget it's just all part and parcel of what you're doing and then just to remember that although you can get a lot of money and everybody is giddy and happy when the project money comes in in the end tech projects really are not money makers so if you're applying for a tech grant just be sure you look the gift horse in the mouth because there's a lot of more costs um than are ever going to be covered by the grant money or so when I was just going through and putting together my slides um Miranda pointed me to this particular very very short article but it really wraps up things very nicely about thinking about technology projects for the future making sure you know what you're getting into and how to make them a success so so that's what I have wait so we'll pause just a minute to see if there are any questions while I pass controls over to Xander hi everybody my name is Xander Karsten I am a project manager at legal server and I'm just going to talk a little bit just as a kind of wrap up of both some of the really great really great pieces and and tips and thoughts that folks have shared so far as well as a couple of my own and the reason that I tend to call this agnostic transition planning and just about every all of the project management um kind of concepts that I tend to present on I try to make sure are agnostic because um and that really just refers to platform agnostic it doesn't matter um Osana that Jack pointed out earlier was is a really great tool um but there are a lot and there are a lot of other really great tools here and other ones were mentioned and so kind of just keeping it to concepts rather than tool specific pieces so the key for me and this is a lot of what I'll be talking about in the next couple of minutes is true for um for any project management and really not just for transition but for any time you're starting or coming into a new project and we've all sort of both been in that situation I'm sure where we are starting up a new project and we have the kind of ability to start from scratch and move forward and get all of our documentation the way we want to um and have everything move um moving cleanly ahead and we've also I'm sure all kind of walked into projects where you know we are the ones who are transitioning in and we need to you know take a look at what's there and um and make sort of do a little bit of pathfinding through a set of projects that we have so for any transition you know plan early and plan often um you know it's never and we'll talk about this in just a second but it really was never too early to start thinking about what happens when somebody leaves knowing your partners knowing your deliverables and knowing your tools will make the transition all the easier and there's nothing worse than realizing at you know the last minute and this has certainly happened to me on a couple of occasions where you know I was talking through a transition of a staff member or a transition of a project and it wasn't until you know a week or two after that project or transition had been that project had been uh transitioned that somebody I remembered that there was you know a deliverable that I hadn't mentioned um so just knowing that and being aware of all of those different pieces can be uh incredibly helpful um to know just to be outside so planning early it's never too late and it's also never too early to plan for transition um we when I do a version a sort of different version of a project management presentation at the TIG conference the last couple of years with uh with Anna Heinlein and uh and one of the things that we talk about when we discuss sort of ramping up projects and that initial project planning phase is to think through you know both in your own in your own work as well as in the work of your partners who is going to take control who was going to step in the best kinds of transitions are the ones like Miranda had when when she went out on maternity leave or when somebody gets a new job or when somebody you know retires and those are the best kinds of transitions and the ones that we have the most heads up about but there are also other transitions um that we may not have the uh the same luxury of time and so just being aware as you're kind of gearing up a project even okay you know if I if something happens to me or if I need to leave um who would be a good kind of successor for this individual project can be a helpful you know place to start and also a helpful uh thing to think about when you're uh when you're working with your partners so sort of succession planning um and you know I tend to like to think of this both in uh discrete chunks for a project by project basis as well as larger overarching pieces of my work um but just sort of looking at that whole project and who understands where the pieces of the project are who can absorb some or all of that project what documentation may they need and who can who else in the uh in the agency can help support that person to make sure that they're successful um you know for most of my uh most of my projects now and I really focus on onboarding people into legal server um but this was true also with when I was at ProbonoNet and when I was in direct service um you know having not only a supervisor who's there who knows um what you're working on but also having somebody who is at the same sort of structural or agency level or even somebody who you supervise who also knows you know where all those pieces are and what's going on can be really helpful um even if you know you just are out sick for a couple of weeks can be you know helpful to keep things moving and to have that institutional knowledge sort of thinking about who who above and who at the same kind of work level that you are can really help support and make those transitions easier so knowing your partners and there's sort of this question for uh we talk again you know when we are doing a kickoff call or doing our first meeting with all of our partners you know who who is each person and you know sharing email addresses and phone numbers and being able to reach out to everybody on on a project can be really helpful knowing what their role but also knowing who's gonna step in and play back up and who who should I contact if I really need to get the answer to a question and just you know sharing that information um for between the partners and whether you keep that information in in a sauna in JIRA I have a Google spreadsheet we'll talk about that in just a second um you know can be really uh really helpful to kind of think through that um so by way of some kind of documentation when thinking about spinning up your project or even if you are coming into a project that that you weren't in before thinking through some accountability matrixing or or responsibility charting can be really helpful just sort of laying out in one public document who's on the team what part of the project are they responsible for um there are some really great um there are some really great templates out there either just accountability matrixing or um or thinking through I I oftentimes use a really simplified Gantt chart that just lays out on you know on the rows what the individual components of a project are who it's assigned to and then the columns are sort of when that happens but if that doesn't work for you um you know just having sort of what the responsibilities are who um who they are identifying who will be their backup either internally or externally it may be that it's a particular partner um leads an agency that piece the project may be absorbed by a different partner and that's absolutely fine just sort of knowing in each project who that's going to be and it also helps to analyze if one person or one group is just you know taking on too much one of the things that is uh that is really uh difficult and and can be difficult for a lot of folks um both within legal aid and um civil legal services but also in not-for-profits in general it's just you know the ability to say no but you know kind of pushing back and knowing and sort of seeing that laid out visually can be really helpful to maintain um to maintain the balance between partners um and in human internally and then know you're deliverable um by the way if anybody really loves these little cartoon guys which I do personally uh the slide deck has links to all of the pictures as um just as uh credit and also because I thought they were really great um so you know making goals deliverable transparent and accessible we all you know most of us here have seen sort of take the documentation and take milestones but if you don't have a document like that for other projects it may be helpful to make one and to really think about you know okay what what are my measures of success and how am I going to uh how am I going to make that happen um I find that that's also really helpful when I have a meeting but I don't have an agenda um we'll touch on meetings very briefly in just a second but um you know it's often often very helpful to just start with what are the goals here you know what are the goals of the project what are the what are the short medium and long term goals um and like I said if you don't have that you know make that and you know one of the things that I found to be really helpful coming into a couple of different projects was even just to make it for myself um if it wasn't something where I was in a position to kind of take any to take a leadership role but you know I it was helpful to me just to know you know what am I doing this project for what is the ultimate goal um and then if you do have a place to start um to really have the ability to do project planning and as that is part of your role you know starting with what those goals are and moving backwards can be a helpful way um to think through um sort of timing as well as steps it may be different for other people for me it's oftentimes really hard to kind of think forward I tend to think backwards where I want to go and then how am I going to get there and then just knowing your tools um you know I there are a ton of really great tools that are out there ones that I use personally one that one's that uh different partners with my youth um I have found however that when especially when I'm collaborating with other people Google spreadsheets works really well um everybody knows it it's easy to maintain um it looks at enough like an excel spreadsheet that everybody has seen it um and it doesn't really require any additional training however if you do want to use a specific um tool like Osana or like Jira and you want to share especially with external partners you're also going to want to build in some training time and maybe schedule a couple of meetings to do that that's true internally as well um you know as folks have kind of pointed out but it's uh can also be helpful to just build that into your project if you decide to use a specific a specific tool for that communication just sort of generally between um between partners and uh and internally as well and you know I think that that other folks have said it you know just as well but you know clear uh short clear concise and often um you know that the a friend of mine does this uh has this rule where he won't send an email that's any longer than five sentences um which can be uh which can be really uh really helpful to kind of just narrow down what you really need to say um I haven't gotten there yet because I don't like to use a lot of words um but uh you know that's sort of something that's always stuck with me as a as a good practice to sort of think about and then I also just wanted to kind of touch especially folks have talked about meetings and using meetings as transition planning tools and you know there is absolutely no replacement for you know in person or um or online sort of meeting time and meeting spaces um I have found in my own work and in my own sort of world that my meetings are only really as powerful as a follow-up that I'm able to do um I've gotten into the habit of emailing out sort of summaries of all the meetings that I have um each week and and there are quite a few um but that extra kind of hour or two that I end up spending at the end of each week just to email out and say hey thank you for meeting with me today or this week this is what we've talked about um can really be helpful and when you're thinking about transition meetings especially um and sort of setting agendas it's also really helpful to have um a summary email that says you know we met today and here are the pieces of the transition that you know we talked about here is the uh here's the most you know kind of important thing that I think that you should flag or that I want to flag for you um oftentimes they don't have you know a pad of paper next to me and those pads of paper and slips of paper do end up getting lost and having them in one sort of centralized place both as the recipient and as the sender can be really really helpful and then my final thought and this may just be because I've been in California now for a going on for years um but kindness in transition planning and in um and in project management in general is so incredibly important and it's something that we don't often you know take the time to think about we are so dispersed and even within agencies we may not you know see the people that we are communicating and transitioning off to on a regular basis because we're in different offices um if you're working with external partners um oftentimes the bulk of our communication happens either via email or over the phone or through uh web based uh web based applications and it's really hard it's only it's impossible to see people's visual kind of facial expressions body language and it's really easy um and I know that I do this all the time it's really easy to sort of read an email that doesn't start with hello as being you know a little more aggressive than maybe it was intended so as you know both somebody who is reading that email and also somebody who's writing a lot of emails just thinking through you know being kind to uh to the people that we are uh that we're interacting with and taking that opportunity to really share that kindness um can make even the most stressful transition planning um and transitions all the better a little bit of humor a little bit of kindness goes a long way even when you know things are completely off the rails which happens I mean it happens so um so yeah those are uh those are my major pieces in my takeaways uh the time to plan is now no matter where you are in your projects um taking just a little bit of time to plan um to plan on transitions and to think through what would happen um knowing your partners deliverables and tools um can make that process all the easier and then um just be kind