Through a recent Q&A with LMS’s Senior Strategic Product Manager, Louise Sturman-Morrlle, we gleaned insight into the beginnings of LMS’s agile and collaborative way of working, learning how the UK’s leading provider of conveyancing services transformed the industry.
How long have you worked at LMS and how has your role evolved?
I’ve worked at LMS in numerous positions for 21 years, with a short hiatus in the middle. What I really like about LMS is that there’s always change. Every day is different, so I never stand still.
My first role was within capacity management, involving allocations and performance management for the law firms on the fees-assisted cases.
I then worked on the HIPS (Home Information Packs) Project, delivering LMS’s capability to be able to produce HIPs nationally at high volumes, before moving into an overarching project management role, between business and IT.
Sometime later, I became a Supplier Management Manager, which was when Panel Link came to fruition.
In 2018, I was pulled out of my day-to-day role and moved to Business Improvement, along with the Operations Manager at the time, and we were asked to reimagine LMS.
Imagine a blank canvas – what would LMS look like?
This is something we worked on for several months and, during this time, we decided to change the operating model – we steered away from the waterfall method of delivering projects and moved towards a more agile way of working.
How did agile working increase delivery and products to market?
Agile working gave us the ability to change direction when something wasn’t working – we could test our hypothesis without investing too much money.
For example, when we released the first iteration of Secure Link as a chatbot through Conveyancer Zone, it wasn’t used in the way we wanted it to be used. So, we went back to the drawing board. We completely pulled the product and started from scratch. We realised that our pilot version had been too big, and we could have gone for something less expensive. Within 6-8 weeks, we had version 2 out. This is the version of Secure Link that we have iterated on.
We learnt to ask ourselves when testing new products, how do we test our hypothesis on a small enough scale, without spending too much money but still creating value for the end user?
If you release it with too little functionality, then we’re not going to get any adoption. So, it’s a fine balance.
It was late in 2018 and early in 2019 when we started delivering on the stuff we’d spent time processing, underpinned by agile creation. Fundamentally, we started our agile journey, which has led us to how LMS is today.
As we were implementing and delivering these initial projects and changes, we became more collaborative. A question we often asked ourselves was, how can we make things better for everybody?
Rather than just getting the job done, the project evolved into how can we make conveyancing easy?
By collaborating with other people, we created an improved version of eCOT, and delivered DART, our Charge Registration service, and, as mentioned, Secure Link.
What we have managed to achieve since starting this agile way of thinking far exceeds what we delivered before.
How do you engage with your customers?
Again, this is about collaboration. We’re not assuming we have all the answers. We have our own ideas and experiences, but we understand that we don’t know all the problems that arise in conveyancing for every different stakeholder. This is what makes roundtables so important for us.
In roundtables, we can give our perspective on a problem and discuss our ideas on how to fix it. We can give our high-end view of an issue and ask, will these tools help? This is when we then listen and learn. It’s how our successful product, Secure Link, was created.
Secure Link gives law firms a secure workspace – a place where they can interact with each other without the risks associated with emails. We created Secure Link after listening to firms state their concerns around receiving emails, one of which was navigating through huge email chains, a time-consuming process where information could easily be lost.
To this day, we continue to develop Secure Link based on feedback and through collaboration.
Other roundtables we have hosted include one on charge registration in which issues were identified and discussed. Then we improved the process.
By gaining references at the start of an application to poll data from HMLR, we could obtain updates about the registration of charges, reducing communication with law firms. We are still giving further support to the industry with charge registration, and there’s more work to be done in the future.
Our last roundtable, Synchronisation Taskforce, was set up to explore the development of synchronisation as we work towards an end-to-end digitalised conveyancing journey. We discussed what the future might look like, and, in the spirit of collaboration and information sharing, we talked to law firms to discover their pain points.
How do you manage internal and external stakeholders?
Internally, we do sprint reviews and plenty of planning. Externally, we conduct demos and listen to feedback, actively keeping engaged with law firms.
Our regular sprint reviews enable stakeholders to get involved. We use high-level scope to size new products, discussing it and using past knowledge and past experiences on different projects. Then, we put it into the roadmap. In delivery, we might find extra complexities that need to be managed with our stakeholders.
Our roadmap may consist of three things that we can do next. Then we have a discussion as to which we choose.
The roadmap gives us a clear view of what we are doing over the next three months and a possible view of what could be happening in the future. We can pivot, we can move, we can change our minds. We can ask the question; is this the thing we need to be working on next? We also have the flexibility to respond to the market, their decisions, regulations, and feedback.
What are some key themes you have seen recently?
For law firms, there’s been a rise in new products and services within the conveyancing industry, making navigating this landscape challenging – firms are uncertain of which products to adopt and the vendor to go with.
At LMS, we encourage stakeholders to have an open-minded approach. Try things and collaborate being mindful of not adopting something that could form a closed loop.
There’s also been a lot of chatter about upfront and material information recently.
In the past, charge registration was a hot topic, but the changes we’ve made have helped alleviate some of the challenges associated with the process. As mentioned, these changes came about through listening, leaning into each other, and collaborating – I think the same approach is necessary to overcome perceived hurdles around upfront and material information.
What are you most excited about in the future of conveyancing?
Improving the home-buying and selling process has been talked about throughout my entire time in the industry, but with technology advancements, changes in customer expectations, and a willingness to collaborate across companies and sectors, I feel we have a chance to really effect change and move things considerably forward.