CASES · STRATEGY

Functional strategies for HR and Legal at an IT platform

After the development of an HR strategy came the second engagement: Legal. The department was in demand everywhere, involved in everything — but without a clear strategic focus. The central question was therefore: should Legal continue to serve as many topics as possible, or concentrate deliberately on the fields where it can contribute most to the company? And which fields are those?

The engagement

Client Unite
Sector Companies · Software
Period three months to the result in each case
Service Functional strategy
Format Twice two days · department and board member for HR

THE PROCESS

Digitalising a Swiss army knife

1 Engagement

Systemic strategy development

We developed the strategy with the board and the entire Legal department. First we widened the view: what developments are coming towards Legal? What do internal stakeholders expect? Out of that came strategic fields, for which different options were then developed.

2 THE SYSTEMIC ASPECT

Perspectives from across the company

Between the first and second session we tested the three condensed future options with internal stakeholders. That brought additional perspectives into the process — and concrete criteria for which strategic position would actually be robust for Legal within the company.

3 STRATEGIC POSITION

The legal chatbot

Fully automated services, curated by legal engineers — that was the vision at the end of the process. Across all the identified fields, recurring services were to be automated in order to free up time for what Legal is actually there for: establishing legal certainty for the product and the organisation.

FROM THE WORK

Insights.

Strategy workshop: prepared facilitation wall in the meeting room — The prepared workshop room

Strategy development: fields of action on cards — Fields of action on cards

Functional strategy: whiteboard with the strategy sketch — The strategy sketch on the whiteboard

Participant feedback

You facilitate differently from what I am used to — you think along with us more, you challenge us more, you really want a good result. That irritated me and it moved us forward.

Frank Weigelt — Head of Legal Affairs (translated)

A systemic reading

This case illustrates the iterative, looping movement of development processes. The pain: too little focus because of too many requests. The strategic answer: automate recurring requests, for instance through a legal chatbot. Did that create more time? No. Legal was now regularly invited into forums on developing the organisation’s AI competence, as a tech lead. So the department remained what it was — only at a higher level.

Dr. Jonas Asendorpf