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Case Study - Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice |
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Industry: Legal
Employees: 1,500
The Company
Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice, PLLC is one of the largest and most technologically
advanced business law firms in the mid-Atlantic and Southeast. The full-service
firm has practice groups comprised of expert transactional lawyers and litigators
from across the firm that cover 29 practice areas including antitrust litigation,
intellectual property, patent, and international trade. Established in Winston-Salem
in 1876, the firm now comprises 530 lawyers in eleven offices.
The Challenge
The IT organization’s team of 11 engineers had a tendency to make frequent changes
to the firm’s IT infrastructure; those changes were often made in a vacuum with
no formal coordination, communication or authorization. These changes often led
to system downtime and created disruptions in service. The lack of a process to
control these changes finally led Chris Kopchik, the Systems Engineering Manager
at Womble Carlyle to investigate change management solutions.
“Making changes that would affect our other offices used to be a huge concern for
us,” commented Chris. “When we made a change in our headquarters, the IT staff in
our other offices wouldn’t even know that change had occurred. If it led to an outage,
they had no insight into the problem so didn’t have any idea how to go about correcting
it.”
“At the same time, I’m only one person with Operational and Project responsibilities.
I couldn’t always drop what I was doing and fire off a thorough communication prior
to changes I knew about. I needed a product that could speak for me in an accurate
and efficient manner; something friendly enough for even non-technical staff to
comprehend.”
The SunView Software Solution
Womble Carlyle selected SunView Software’s ChangeGear Change Management after seeing
the first product demonstration. ChangeGear’s extensible workflow and integrated
communications immediately resonated with Chris, especially after having had several
disappointing experiences with other change management vendors. The firm’s ChangeGear
deployment was fast and simple.
Because Womble Carlyle relies on technology to facilitate more efficient work practices,
they demand more from software products like ChangeGear. It’s a solution Womble
Carlyle believes gives them a competitive edge over other firms and enables them
to take on and support larger, more complex cases.
“It’s clear that the ChangeGear product was well-planned and developed. From the
day we installed the product, it ran perfectly on our existing infrastructure with
no additional hardware or software investment required, and it worked well with
our other applications. It’s just a great product,” stated Chris.
The Results
Since automating their change processes with ChangeGear, communication and productivity
within Womble Carlyle’s IT organization has improved dramatically. By eliminating
ad hoc and unauthorized changes, they estimate saving at least several hours a day
that had been spent putting out fires. Everyone in the IT organization now has visibility
into the change process so if there are questions about a change, the information
is readily available.
“Prior to deploying ChangeGear, we would experience system outages due in large
part to the lack of communication around our changes. Since deploying ChangeGear,
those outages have virtually been eliminated. It’s unusual for us to have a major
problem or outage – and if one does occur, we have the information we need to fix
it quickly. And that means an increase in our firm’s productivity.”
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