When my team and I at Confluent began to consider a CLM implementation, my biggest fear was that we would go through a long, painful, drawn-out process and end up overpromising and under-delivering on the potential for success we knew was possible. Luckily, that bit of catastrophizing didn’t come to fruition, thanks to rigorous prioritizing, planning, and ongoing open and honest communication. In this article, I’ve outlined a few of the lessons we learned along the way and share them in the hopes that they can inspire and assist other Legal Ops teams going through this exciting but challenging process.
Lesson 1: Plan Extensively but Start Small
Before embarking on our implementation journey, we ruthlessly and rigorously prioritized and planned to effectively manage scope and expectations. The implementation team had frequent open and honest conversations with stakeholders and end users to understand the current contracting process, identify pain points, and flesh out requirements. Once we had a clear understanding of our contracting ecosystem, the internal Legal advisory team worked to bucket the exhaustive list of contracting asks and potential deliverables by complexity, priority, and impact.
It quickly became clear that the best way to manage the myriad of deliverables was to adopt a ‘phased approach.’ By working through this prioritization exercise, we were able to identify a model for our minimum viable product, which then allowed us to focus on rolling out a handful of high impact, medium-complexity workflows. Workflows that were not included in our Phase 1 implementation were added to a contracting roadmap and included in our future phase timeline.
Confluent was able to prioritize, avoid scope creep, and keep to the implementation timeline by strictly adhering to our ‘phased approach’ plan. Because we intentionally kept the first round of deliverables small, we were able to minimize delays, keep on schedule, and demonstrate ROI quickly.
Lesson 2: Technology Doesn’t Fix a Flawed Process
Technology is a powerful tool that we can leverage to get things done faster and easier. It can act as a force multiplier, transforming business landscapes by allowing us to do more with less. But, at the end of the day, technology is just a tool. The use of technology is a choice that we can employ to solve a problem, but it shouldn’t be mistaken as a solution in and of itself. The core of any successful CLM implementation will never solely be the tool, but should focus on the people who use it and the underlying processes.
Before we began our CLM RFP process, we partnered with the consulting team at UpLevel Ops to map out our end-to-end internal contracting process for a handful of our core sales agreements. We sought to understand the contracting process from multiple perspectives (e.g., Sales, Legal, Order Management, Revenue, etc.), taking great care to accurately and meticulously detail all the ways how one can receive, consume, process, deliver, and store a sales contract.
Contracting is a business-critical process, so the tasks and activities that prop up that process must be stable (i.e., relatively unchanging) and follow the path of least resistance, meaning our internal clients’ contracting experience should be easy to understand, user-friendly, and straightforward. By mapping out our current contracting process, Confluent was able to identify areas of weakness and redundancy. We then used this gap analysis to architect a more robust future-state process, one that was very intentional in its use of technology, to automate high-touch junctures and overly manual tasks.
Technology doesn’t have the capability to enhance a bad process, so don’t let the bells and whistles of a new tool distract you from the most foundational aspect of all successful CLM implementations: a robust and well-designed underlying process. Because we took the time to study and improve upon our underlying contracting process, we were able to maintain focus and objectivity during the RFP process, which in turn helped us choose the right tool for our unique business needs.
Lesson 3: Communicate and Educate
Global management consultants McKinsey & Company surveyed more than 2,000 executives in 900 companies over multiple geographies and industries to evaluate the performance and practices of companies with effective change management programs. For approximately two-thirds of respondents, the single most impactful factor to a successful change outcome was clear, organization-wide ownership of and commitment to change across all levels of organization1. It’s clear: To effect change, you must be able to demonstrate buy-in across the organizational hierarchy.
We understood that a cross-functional and highly visible project like CLM required unanimous executive level buy-in at the onset to succeed. Before the CLM implementation project started, we sought alignment and support from our executives by pitching to our company’s contract steering committee, comprised of a small group of C-level and SVP level leaders. We knew it was essential to appeal to and share our ‘future of CLM vision’ with the company’s decision makers early on so we could demonstrate the CLM’s the clear and immediate benefits, not just for our team, but for theirs as well.
Once we achieved buy-in, we were able to leverage the steering committee’s excitement and alignment to i) legitimize our project mission ii) identify key stakeholders + project participants, iii) develop a responsibility and accountability matrix (RACI), and iv) obtain approval to resource a talented cross-functional tiger team. We socialized our vision and plan for change across all stakeholder teams, from the managerial level to the operational level, through a series of global announcements, roadshows, demos, written articles, and office hour-like Q&A sessions.
There is no such thing as over-communication when it comes to a project of this magnitude. To foster a culture of accountability and transparency, and to maintain project momentum, we kept the lines of communication open, updating stakeholders and project participants on a weekly basis. Additionally, we developed a comprehensive training and enablement plan, consisting of learning modules, demonstration videos, in-depth process guides, and self-help knowledge articles, which we actively update and add to quarterly.
Once the CLM implementation was complete, the entire Confluent infrastructure felt the positive impact and could share in its success. One unintended but encouraging outcome was improved communication and understanding of Legal fostered by this project, and the enterprise will continue to reap the rewards for years to come.
1. Lefort, Frédéric, et al. “Secrets to Implementation Success.” Mckinsey.com, McKinsey & Company, 1 July 2015, https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insight….