Managing and coordinating work across different team members and stakeholders can be an extremely challenging task, and it’s only going to grow even more complicated as your organization grows. This is especially true if you don’t have a proper system and infrastructure in place: imagine digging through hundreds of emails every time you need to find information and/or clear disputes.
Without proper work management, you’ll quickly find inefficiencies throughout the organization: missed deadlines, budget exceeded, missing compliance steps, and so on. Yet, many organizations still don’t implement work management because they don’t know where to start.
This guide will discuss all you need to know about work management, its benefits, and how to implement it in your organization.
What Is Work Management?
Work management is both a discipline and technology or tool.
It is a discipline aimed at managing work more efficiently across the organization, but as defined by Gartner, work management can also be defined as a software product or a set of software products/services that allows us to apply workflow structure to a ‘work’. Work here is defined as the movement of information within an organization and the interaction between human workers and business processes that generate this information.
The objective of work management is to streamline and improve the efficiency of business processes.
In practice, implementing work management in your organization involves:
- Evaluating the existing business processes.
- Identifying potential bottlenecks as well as the strengths of each business process.
- Optimizing them to be more efficient.
This will require us to properly create a visual representation of a business process using a business workflow builder tool like Aproove.
Only after the business process workflow is properly visualized can the organization get a better overview of the process. From here, we can eliminate redundancies, reduce waste, and optimize all the different aspects of the workflow to create the most efficient business process possible.
This, as a whole, is work management.
Why Is Work Management Important?
Work management is essential because it improves the efficiency and productivity of work within an organization. When proper work management is implemented, your organization can deliver high-quality products or services to your customers faster, resulting in a faster generation of revenue. With better efficiencies, the project will require less financial investments.
Work management is also designed to streamline processes to improve productivity and eliminate bottlenecks and reduce any redundancies that will translate into unnecessary usage of resources, time, and money.
Work management reduces waste and eliminates activities that serve no purpose to create a more efficient business process; this is the core of the benefits provided by work management.
However, work management also provides other additional benefits like encouraging collaboration by improving the work process’s transparency and improving accountabilities. Team members and stakeholders can recognize each other’s roles and responsibilities and work on which task. This can improve communication throughout the organization and a more precise direction, so no two employees have to do the same task more than once.
How To Implement Work Management
The core idea of work management is to identify many aspects of a business process or project and integrate them into a system that boosts productivity. These aspects may include managing communications and collaborations, time management, delegating and allocating tasks and roles, resource management, budgeting, and more.
The exact details may vary depending on your organization’s structure and objective, and we can collect all these different elements into cohesive work management by following these steps:
Step 1: Data collection
The first and the most crucial step of implementing work management is to gather as much data as possible about the work. We have to define how the work is executed accurately, when the deadline is, and other elements.
You should conduct surveys and interviews with everyone involved in the business process to collect this data. Let them voice their concerns and provide feedback about the existing process.
Step 2: Panning
In this step, we will use the data to plan what work must be done and who is going to execute it. We should start planning deadlines for each task and the resources necessary to fulfill a task.
Step 3: Schedule
Translate what you’ve planned into a comprehensive schedule and timeline. Proper workflow management tools should also provide a tool to create a schedule to define an appropriate workflow and your stakeholders’ different responsibilities.
If your work involves different tasks, you should also prioritize them as needed and detail potential collaborations.
Step 4: Documentation
It’s essential to have every step of the work management process well documented, including the communications involved throughout. Having a proper workflow management solution can be very beneficial, so you don’t need to worry about documentation. In Aproove, for example, you can easily track every comment and feedback left on any step of the workflow, improving the whole process’s transparency.
Step 5: Monitoring and optimization
Last but not least, monitor everything you’ve implemented to refine the work management process. Remember that workflow management is not a one-off thing but rather a continuously improving system.
Conclusion
A key aspect of work management is to know your team: by assigning the right task to the right people at the right time, we can improve the overall efficiency of the business process workflow. The better you know your team, and the better your team members know their workflow, the better you can implement work management. This is why communications are essential when implementing and developing work management.
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