We got a new TV!

Last year we finally replaced our TV.

The previous TV was state of the art when we got it. It had a great picture – 3D! -and did the job well, until it didn’t. The change wasn’t immediate. The picture progressively degraded to the point where visible lines ran down the screen. We stopped noticing, but it would have stood out immediately to visitors. We were watching high-definition movies, but they looked like rubbish. The “smart” apps weren’t updated, and we had to use our phones and Apple TV to get to anything useful.

We could have replaced it at any time for little money, but we didn’t, and I can’t really explain why in logical terms.

When we did buy a new TV, it was all done within a day, for a fraction of what we previously paid. The new TV offers so many benefits in terms of connectivity with all the other apps we regularly use.

We really should have done it years earlier, but our mindset was that it was still going, so we’d keep using it until it literally died.

This happens in law firms and legal teams, too

We see this regularly with law firms and legal teams, with much greater costs.

Many law firms are still using legacy practice management systems. They seem to understand that they are no longer the best solution or what they need, but they’re waiting years—perhaps until they need to replace a server—before changing.

In the meantime, they’ve got the handbrake on their whole business compared to what they could do with a flexible mix of cloud solutions. The functionality is no longer best in class, there’s no investment in improvements, and integrations are not possible.

In-house teams are similar. Many are still saving their documents in shared drives, and all their emails are stuck in individual Outlook accounts, where collaboration is difficult and they will eventually be lost to the organisation. Despite the immediate availability of SharePoint and other M365 tools – already being paid for - they’re waiting for some external catalyst to push them to move.

We also come across organisations with basic automation, such as Word macros. Despite knowing they can no longer meet their needs in terms of agility and ability to integrate, they are often planning to run them until they no longer work – whether because the technology has moved on or the one remaining person who knew how it worked retired.

Outcomes are what matters, and the weakest link in the chain will determine the outcomes.

None of this makes sense when you are focused on achieving the best overall outcomes and considering the value that better outcomes would create.

You can have the best quality movies, sound system, and apps, but it doesn’t matter if the TV is rubbish.

You can have the best people and train them well, but if they have poor systems to work with, they won’t deliver as much value for the firm and clients as they could.

Whatever you save on running your server, shared drive, or macros for a couple more years is more than eclipsed by the hours of time lost by manual tasks and the inability to integrate with the best solutions to fit your ideal business model.

You’re also already paying for SharePoint and the other Microsoft tools in particular, so why not increase your efforts and investments to get more out of that – it will have far greater lifetime value for you.

Why do we wait so long to make improvements, and what are we missing out on by waiting years to upgrade?

If we think about the outcomes we want to achieve, it becomes much more obvious that we are holding ourselves back, that the costs of delay are much more significant than we initially thought, and that making a change is easier than expected.

What's holding you back that you could easily change?