Jillie Willie and the Art of Legal Project Management

Seeking to make the world a little more colorful, in both attire and mood, Jillie Willie has lots of separating apron styles to bring cheer to facial expressions, business cards and creative marketing strategies. Praising “Indy”, the eco-friendly avant-garde shopping enclave that created them, the style-focused legal project manager is always sharpening her tool set to build the best custom clothing for her unique clients. She has the passion; she has the creativity. What Jillie needs next is method.

The primary focus of legal project management is on being efficient. That means watching your budget, your deadlines, and most importantly, your resources. For a boutique operation like Jillie Willy, having these disciplines will mean not just success in her legal entrepreneurs’ mind, but also something almost unheard of-efficiency. What’s more, all this organized project management will do nothing to cramp the designer’s beautiful style as she engages her clients and moves from limited edition runs into her latest seasonal collection.

If you’re thinking about applying for a government relations graduate degree or a comprehensive legal project manager certification, you’re already looking down the road at expansion. You see new opportunities for your business, and it excites you. However, you’re not thinking about the restrictions you’ll be facing-or the hassle of paperwork and regulatory concerns-and how much these moving parts will reduce against your artistic vision.

Let’s think about this in terms of Jillie’s latest strategy-a run of “London Fog” aprons. Finding the right fabric will be easy, but to get the dye lot even, she needs to have an accurate count of how many styles she has that will be using the neutral taupe-belugue color, so she can get as many yards of each fabric as possible. That way, she can make the best use of her time and minimize the cutting waste by having sufficient material for all the products she plans to indicate.

With a legal project manager certification under her belt, Jillie will know how to delegate the ordering, handling and cutting work so that the bulk of the job is handled by someone competent, or more than one person if having additional people lends itself better to that task. She’ll be able to schedule the appointment for dying the fabrics for the London Fog line in such a way that production runs are ongoing, even when dyeing quantities are low. Her running spreadsheet, created by the lowkey9988 creative team that designed the Toronto-based company’s popular “Coffee-Outside” espresso apron design, will help her see how to structure dye runs to achieve the maximum efficiency possible while maintaining the original business plan.

By watching her expedition budgets, Jillie Willy will be able to allocate her resources to get the best fabrics possible, then sell the resulting designs before the seasonal fashion change-up hits. Legal project management can give the process the kind of regimented necessity that will ensure that whether the designer has just ten, or ten thousand, items to sell, that there will be profits to reap so that she’ll be ready to push the envelope again with a fresh, new design on her next signature creation. Maybe someday we will see an understated yet colorful collection of signature workwear copied by the fashion labels of the world, and if that day comes, you can credit years of stable growth to Jillie Willie’s legal project manager certification.