Mastering Tech Transformations and Implementations Podcast

Brendan Hughes: Hello, welcome to Scaling Justice, a video podcast by equivant that operates at the forefront of the justice space. I’m Brendan Hughes, Director of Marketing at equivant. All of us at equivant are dedicated to delivering innovative solutions to simplify justice. Today’s episode of Scaling Justice is the result of something that occurred last month in Kansas City at the NCSC Court Technology Conference.

Now, the conference was obviously focused on emerging technology solutions for courts, a lot of AI discussion, things of that nature. But I was fortunate enough to moderate a panel at the conference that seemed to resonate with attendees, and it wasn’t really about technology at all. There wasn’t any discussion about software features or benefits or latest kiosk hardware or really AI anything. It was about best practices and tips on adopting new technology and implementing change at courts or justice agencies.

At the conference, it became clear that many courts across the country are in the midst of updating their technology stacks. A lot of courts have legacy systems that are old, probably beyond old, and there is definitely this wave of new technology coming to courts and agencies. And what was clear from the reaction at the conference last month was that lots of people are dealing with the challenges of implementing change and adopting new technology at scale. It’s impacting a lot of people in the justice space. So we got back from the conference. We thought to ourselves, this is something we have to address on our next podcast.

And to provide more insight on mastering tech transformations and implementations, we are lucky to have one of the panelists from the well-received CTC session joining us today. Erin Tellez, Clerk of North Las Vegas Municipal Court. She’s an innovative court leader with experience in change management and new technology, and we’re excited to hear her insights coming off of that impressive performance at the conference. And also joining us is Mandy Clements. She’s a leader at equivant Court and she has lots of experience implementing new technology in courts, and she’s currently working closely with Erin and thought it would be good to include her perspective to this conversation. So welcome Erin and Mandy.

Erin Tellez: Thanks Brendan.

Mandy Clements: Thanks Brendan.

Brendan Hughes: First before we get into the meat of this, Erin, do you mind providing a little bit of a brief background on your experience?

Erin Tellez: Sure. I am the Court Administrator for North Las Vegas Municipal Court. We are the highest volume per judicial officer court in the state of Nevada. Just to give you a little bit of insight into the volume of cases and at the speed of which we need our technology to work and run for us. I’ve been working in the court system for over 20 years. My background is primarily in process improvement and I’ve been the Court Administrator here for the last four years.

Brendan Hughes: Great. And Mandy, do you mind providing a little bit of your background? I know you work with people like Erin across the country and have for many years.

Mandy Clements: Yeah, thanks Brendan. So I started out on the client side. I was working with our CV2 product. Loved it so much in the implementation process and the team from equivant that I wanted to come work for equivant. So I set my goals there and started as an Implementation Specialist and have worked my way up to Implementation Manager.

Brendan Hughes: Well, I appreciate you both being here to speak to us today on this topic. Like I said before, seems to be really resonating with people around the country. And so Erin, one of the places that I thought that was interesting when we were at the conference was this idea that preparing for a tech transformation really starts before you even select a software or whatever you’re going to implement, maybe even before that at the start to preparing for an RFP or preparing to think about what you’re going to purchase. Why is that so important?

Erin Tellez: I think it’s important for a number of reasons that the biggest thing is nobody should be taking on an endeavor of implementing a new technology product just for the sake of implementing a new technology product, right? You have to be very mindful of what is it that you need out of that product? What is it that it needs to do? Certainly there are certain things that any technology product, whether it’s a case management system, has to be able to execute. You need to be able to process warrants, you need to be able to accept filings, you need to be able to accomplish certain goals, but you may have very unique needs that are specific to your state or reporting requirements that are, again, a requirement for you. You may have interfaces that you need to work with certain other systems. We certainly don’t work in a silo or a vacuum.

We need to be able to partner appropriately with our jails, with our stakeholders from the prosecutor’s office, from the state reporting requirements to our warrant interfaces, all of those things We know any system we bring on has to be able to work with. And so being very intentional in your RFP process and designing that RFP to be very indicative of what are the requirements that you will need as a customer? What does any product have to be able to do well for you?

But also every case management system is going to have functionality to dispose of cases. But when you are able to highlight your pain points or the points that you want to ensure are addressed in any intentional bid for that CMS product, it’s great to be able to highlight those things in your RFP. And that gives both any vendor who’s looking to work with you, a very clear indication of if their product is the right product for you, or what things they can highlight when they’re doing a demo for you that will really address the needs of your court that are different than any other organization. Nevada, for example, we’re not a unified court system. So I really wanted to ensure that the RFP for me was very specific to my organization and my agency. And so being very intentional in designing that RFP, setting out what those requirements are meant that the proposals I received and the scope of work that we ultimately designed and came to together was entirely appropriate for our project.

Brendan Hughes: Great. And Mandy, I think Erin touched on something there where that I think could be beneficial for on the vendor side, knowing some things in the RFP will help a vendor prepare for initial demos or responses to the RFP. Is that correct?

Mandy Clements: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that I always ask is what are your pain points? I don’t want to hear what you like about your current system initially. I want to know where you’re having problems because I want to be able to solve those problems or tell you how we can have a solution that’s going to fit your needs and your practices. The other thing that we look at is what’s working well for you? If you really like something that’s working well in your system, after we get through the things that you don’t like, we talk about how do we do those as well and do we do them better? In most cases, we do.

Brendan Hughes: I appreciate that insight of really thinking ahead even before an RFP is out and how that can alleviate some problems down the road. So the next part I guess, is after you’ve put out the RFP, you’re close to selecting a solution. The large tech change is coming, and that can be intimidating. So where do you start?

Erin Tellez: I think you want to just solicit positive feelings or that willingness to embrace change in your team. And I think the best way to do that is helping them understand the why behind the change. Again, change for change’s sake is not necessarily the best motivator. I think that courts are often sort of drenched in tradition and are maybe not the most willing organizations or even members of judicial officers may not be looking to take on change versus just for the sake of change.

But when you have the ability to explain why it is you’re moving away from your current system, why you’re updating a process, you can sell that in ways that you show how it benefits that end user, whether that’s your frontline staff or your judge, or even stakeholders like your prosecutor’s office. You can show what those process improvements may or may not be, but just allowing them to feel part of the process and understand the why, the benefits that will come to them as part of that change. And maybe even that’s why your current system is not currently working to best suit their needs, really helps to ensure that your entire team is excited about change, but also is willing to embrace the idea of rethinking current processes because this is a big part of what we have to do is not just duplicate your existing system, your existing processes in a new CMS.

Mandy Clements: Having somebody that champions everything is huge for us.

Brendan Hughes: Yeah, I was going to mention that, Mandy, it seems like on the vendor side, having that kind of change management impact at the start of the project can make a big difference throughout the rest of the project.

Mandy Clements: Well, yeah. We want somebody that’s going to champion it. So we walk into the court and they’re excited about the change. There’s not that hesitation or worry about their job. They’re thinking about how does the process change for me? How can I get to my end goal better and faster? Or everybody at the go has a stack of papers sitting next to them that they’re looking at, and because they have the stack of papers sitting next to them, they can look at them now as “That’s work I can get to,” where before it was just, “Hey, we’re just getting through the day”. So looking at those processes, then thinking about the future.

Brendan Hughes: You both mentioned something and touched on the idea of a project champion, and I know Erin, you had also at the conference talked about project roles and how important it is to establish those things at the outset. Do you mind expanding on that a little bit?

Erin Tellez: No, not at all. I think that roles really kind of help establish clear and appropriate levels of communication. I think that establishing roles allows both your vendor, but also everyone else on the project from the city or from the court’s perspective, understand who’s authorized to make what decisions, who can do what, who can ask for what changes. I am a big believer in productivity. I don’t have time to have meetings for the sake of having a meeting to talk about something and not actually effectuate or make a decision. So one of the things that I felt was really important is that at every status call, at every business process review, at every configuration meeting I had someone authorized to make a decision, be present at those meetings.

And that’s not to say that we are not taking feedback from our frontline staff or asking how they feel about certain things or making those modifications or changes, but if we pause to kind of deliberate and pain over every single process or change we’re looking to make, it can make this project take significantly longer. So by ensuring that we have a very clear delineation of communication who needs to be looped into certain conversations, that the right people are at the right meetings and that we have somebody that is able to make decisions, be present for all of that, it’s allowed our project to be in a place that we’re prepared to go live four months ahead of schedule.

Brendan Hughes: Wow. Yeah, ahead of schedule is really unheard of. And Mandy, from your perspective, the idea of project champions and specific roles, how does that impact the vendor’s involvement in the project?

Mandy Clements: So it really helps us when we’re looking at the project overall. If we don’t know what those roles are or they change throughout the implementation, it makes it harder for us to get to the end goal on time. So Erin hit it a moment ago, we’re four months ahead, and that’s so exciting. But when I sat back and I looked at it, I said, we had somebody there, like she mentioned at every meeting that can make a decision. We didn’t leave a meeting without a decision on items. We would sit there, we’d figure it out, and we’d have a decision. Now that doesn’t mean it’s written in stone. That’s the other thing is we have a chance to change that later on. So if we want to change it, and we have, we have that opportunity to do so, but it really comes back to that communication, like you mentioned.

Erin Tellez: That communication’s huge. But I also would say that makes a really big argument for documentation during that process as well. If we made a decision, let’s document why we did that because we may rethink that same thing later and well, “Why did we decide to use a tickler instead of an event for this? Oh, because… and there are these other downstream effects”. By documenting that we’re not revisiting those same decisions that we made over and over again and re-litigating the same things over and over again. We have a very clear communication. Everyone’s involved and following up with that documentation has just been, I think, a huge part of the success of this project too.

Brendan Hughes: Great. And one of the things you mentioned documentation that I know that you’re passionate about is something that we talk about for project success is that the documentation of current workflow, current processes as a baseline and how important it is to have that before the project. And maybe you could talk a little bit about that.

Erin Tellez: Well, you hit it. I may be a bit of a data person. I may have a spreadsheet for my spreadsheets and want to be able to back up. They’re a love language at the end of the day, but No, you’re absolutely right. It’s hard to talk about what’s an ROI for taking on a project like this if you don’t have data to compare it to. So the fact that I have things like my time to disposition rating, but also staff functionality, how many attorney adjudications can a single clerk process given our current case management system and the functionality within that system? How long does it take us to process a day’s worth of default judgments or whatever that is? So by taking the time upfront to measure what that time investment is, the clerical time, and that really comes back to the cost per case. My cost per case is dictated by staff time in getting these things through the process.

So if you are, whether or not you’re taking on a technology project right now, I would really make an argument for all Clerks of Court or Court Administrators to be sure that they’re keeping stats on these things. Your costs time, your time to disposition, the cost per case, what does that look like for you? Because if you are really actively working on case flow management and ensuring that you’re being efficient and effective, you should have that data available to you. Once you have that and you’re taking on a project like a new case management system, it’s really, really easy to say what that ROI is and oh my goodness, look at the staff time, look at the reduced backlogs. And that’s not just from an anecdotal feeling of we’re not all feeling like we’re drowning in work all of the time, but you can really point to specific numbers.

As a municipal court, I have to answer to my funding authority at the end of the day. And so when I take on something like a case management system that’s a larger investment, I’m so easily later able to point to the success of that implementation just by looking at the efficiencies for both us as the court, but also for our stakeholders, the improvements to our police department, the improvements to the city attorney’s office, to probation areas just based on the improved caseload that we’re able to create. So it really allows you and empowers you as a court administrator to be able to articulate the success of the project itself because I have both the data before and I’m so easily able to more accurately capture data after implementation.

Brendan Hughes: Yeah, that’s amazing. And one of the things I know you also mentioned to me was SOPs or standard writing procedures.

Erin Tellez: Yes.

Brendan Hughes: Everybody who’s ever stepped into your court works for you, has those outlined. Correct.

Erin Tellez: You do everything. Yes. That’s very true. Actually. I had a friend, also a Court Administrator for a small or more rural court for sure. But that had reached out and asked “Erin, do you happen to have any written policies and procedures?” “Absolutely for what? For anything!” I have one that tells you how to clock in. I have one that tells you how to process anything.

 But I think that in the court space, this is not any other municipal department. This isn’t any other government agency. I think that our necessity to have accountability for accuracy if we want to be able to improve public trust and confidence in the court system, that has to come down to us being accurate, handing out accurate information, which means that the appetite or the room for clerical error in the court space is just truly nothing. As opposed to somebody working maybe in the water department where a clerical error is a late fee being added to a bill, or maybe worst case scenario, somebody’s water being turned off. Those are both terrible and unfortunate things. But when you take that from the perspective at the court level of maybe a potential loss of liberty for an individual or somebody losing their job because their license was inappropriately suspended, those are our risks that just we can’t have at the court level.

So being able to document, have written standards, policies and procedures, allows me to hold my staff accountable, allows me to ensure that they’re aware that there’s a right way and a wrong way to do anything and everything within the system. But that’s also been a big part of why we’re looking to increase the number of automations that we have available for us, the number of interfaces that I’m not scanning a paper detention order over to our detention facility to ensure somebody is released appropriately. By us allowing those interfaces and those automations and workflows, it really ensures that there’s no opportunity for things to get lost in the cracks of anything that we really have that improved and increased level of accuracy. But that also allows us to feel comfortable improving and increasing transparency in the core system.

Brendan Hughes: And yeah. That’s great. And Mandy, from the vendor perspective, for any vendor that’s going to work with a court to implement a new software, the existing documentation, the existing processes, the existing procedures, having information like that is probably helpful for you?

Mandy Clements: Oh, absolutely. If we walk in and we have a manual that we can look at and we can walk through that current process, we can see where we can have improvements. It also helps because you know what everybody’s doing, right? At the end of the day, if I walk into a court and they’re like, “Well, some people do it this way, other ones do it this way”, there’s no consistency. So then we have to account for that when we’re moving forward as well. So consistency is key. And having a written SOP that we can go back to and reference also tells us what are the trigger points and what is the end goal? So that’s one of the things that we looked at while their processes today, maybe five steps, we really want to focus on what’s the initial step and what’s the end goal that we’re getting to?

Erin Tellez: In workflow speak we could say “What’s your trigger?”

Brendan Hughes: All right, I like that. So one of the things that I know is also important, and you guys are kind of displaying it right now, is when you’re working with a vendor, so the court is going to take on a new technology, a big change, there’s going to be a vendor that’s implementing the technology, or there’s going to be consultants as part of the process, there’s going to be other people that you’re working with. What are the keys to make that a successful relationship? I’m guessing communication’s in there and some other things, but what are some things you’ve learned along the way that makes that a successful relationship?

Erin Tellez: From my end, obviously communication is going to be key. I think communication, both in that everything must be communicated, but also time understanding. When am I going to hear back on this? When will I not hear back on this? Having those weekly status calls. So at least there’s some level of check-in at that time. But I think it’s really important that for a customer, that you’re able to frame your space, understanding that your vendor’s, your partner, and if I am bringing a either pain point or a goal that I need to ensure is able to be accomplished, that I bring that to them as a partner and understand that our relationship is such that they want this implementation to be successful. And so if I’m bringing it to the attention of my vendor that they’re going to help me find the appropriate solution to accomplish whatever that goal is.

You also have to have a willingness as a customer to rethink processes. I can’t just want to recreate all of my existing processes in a new case management system. If that’s what I was doing, then there’s no point in upgrading and going through this entire process. So that does take sometimes a reframe or the willingness to pause and say, oh, maybe that makes me slightly uncomfortable, but if I take time and process it, I’m still accomplishing the same goal and it’s probably more efficient and better in line with best practices than maybe what I’m doing now. It’s just a change, and I have to be okay with that.

Mandy Clements: And we ask the why. So sometimes that’s a hard conversation. Why do you do something? And if you can explain and have that conversation with us and tell us why you’re doing something, it really helps us with the implementation.

Erin Tellez: I try to, again, with my written policies and procedures that I’m so fond of, I ensure that I cite whatever the authority is. So if there’s a reason, for example, we send notices out on our civil infractions in my policy and procedure for generating those notices, I cite the legislative authority that requires that we send them out because if I want to modify that process, I might need to refer back to that statute so I can see what are my actual requirements with that. Sure, we do it at this day, at this time, but what am I legally required to do? Because if I make a decision to change that it’s very helpful that I’m citing back to whatever that authority is that’s requiring it. It also helps prevent you from going down the rabbit hole of like, oh, just because that’s the way we’ve always done it.

So we should obviously keep doing that. So if you in your current SOPs, ensure that you’re kind of citing or at least referencing back to whatever those authorities are, whether they’re legislative or supreme court orders or administrative orders that you can maybe modify within your own agency, it really helps guide, okay, what has to be done the way we’re doing it? Or maybe can it be rethought of in a different process embodied? And that’s a big part of why that business process review is such a huge part of any kind of successful implementation because yes, I can provide you with all of my written SOPs, and if you are as type I, as I am, it’s truly click for click. And this is how you navigate each part of those processes. But that may not be everybody’s written policy and procedure. It might just be a reference to a process that needs to happen.

And so by having the vendor team on site for that business process review and actually walking through that process is huge. And it really helps ’em understand, oh my gosh, that’s so manual right now. What a pain point for you. Let’s think of what we can do to improve. That has been just a huge part. But also as I’m explaining to the vendor, Hey, I really need a new process for this because they’re familiar with my existing processes, it allows us to really communicate so much more effectively because I’m not having to unpack everything to get to where I want to go.

Mandy Clements: And that’s also something that we open that communication up. So if there’s a process throughout the implementation where we’re stuck or like, Hey, this is a new thing that we’re doing today, or we have to change this process because at A, B, C, and D, we have to have that conversation. And you have to have those hard conversations too. Now there’s easy ones are on target, we’re doing great, but if there is a challenge, we want to walk through those challenges as well.

Brendan Hughes: Yeah, I think that’s something that has come up in the past when I’ve heard both of you speak, is the transparency of the communication too. Good news, bad news. You want to be able to have those difficult conversations, be transparent about where you are in the process.

Mandy Clements: Exactly. And take the feelings out of it. So sometimes we have feelings and we don’t like how something’s done, but taking that a step back and just looking at it for what it is and what is the process, and let’s have a conversation around it, you’re going to be challenged in the process of implementation. It’s not easy, but the end goal, we are a partner, and if you’re competing against each other and we’re pushing back and forth, that doesn’t work. But if we work together to get to that end goal, we get there easier, sooner and faster.

Brendan Hughes: Well, I appreciate both of you taking the time today to talk to our audience about this. I know again, at the conference, it really resonated with a lot of people. It’s something that I think a lot of courts and agencies are dealing with across the country as they start to think about technology change as they start to upgrade their legacy systems, as they start to implement change, they’re running into these difficult situations or potentially difficult situations, and they’re looking for guidance. And I appreciate both of you providing that guidance today.

Mandy Clements: Thanks, Brendan. Glad to be here.

Brendan Hughes: Thank you.