How could the practice benefit you?
You’re busy managing your business.
You may not feel you have time for SMART goals and resource allocation.
Work management may sound like a corporate buzzword.
But it can help your business to run smoothly.
It takes aspects of project project management and applies them more widely across your company.
This article will look at how it works and the benefits it can offer.
What is work management
Work management breaks a business’s operation into activities focused on specific goals.
It covers the planning, organisation, execution, and overseeing of these tasks.
With clear definitions of goals and responsibilities, it emphasises efficient coordination of resources, responsibilities, and timelines.
The overall aim is to ensure everyone has everything they need to carry out their tasks, be that time, tools, information, or other resources.
While project management shares much of the logistical approach, work management has a broader focus.
Think of project management as the process by which each individual task is planned and resourced.
Work management is then building cohesion and connectivity between each task’s team, so that collaboration, reassignment, and a holistic approach to resource allocation are possible.
A simple example might be the software programs used by the marketing, sales, and HR teams within a business. Each team has its own data storage solution. One uses Dropbox, another Google Drive, and a third OneDrive.
While each solution works perfectly well for the team using it, if they ever have to collaborate—say a joint sales and marketing initiative—they’re going to have some trouble sharing files efficiently.
This is a very basic example but shows the broader picture of work management compared to project management.
The work management process
While you should customise this approach to suit your business, there are generally three broad steps to setting up and implementing work management.
The first is to set clear goals for your business. There is plenty of wisdom out there about how best to determine and set goals, so we won’t rehash that here. Just make sure your goals are clearly defined and include measurable aspects so that you can track them.
Your goals can be based on your business’s current needs or future ambitions. Meeting business-as-usual targets is just as valid as ambitious expansion goals.
Once your goals are set, define the projects and processes that will help you to achieve them. Again, some of these may be the continuation or improvement of your day to day ways of working. Others may be brand new projects to deliver new products or functionality.
Finally, create tasks and plan the resources they’ll need. That might be people, time, money, tools, or anything else that could be required to complete the assigned tasks.
Once these steps are complete, look at the big picture. You should be able to see where tasks will overlap, what resources could be shared, and if there are opportunities for collaboration.
The benefits of work management
The main benefit of a holistic work management approach is that its focus on collaboration opens doors for teams to work together and break down silos. Teams will have full oversight of what they need for their tasks and how they can contribute to business goals.
If there are bottlenecks, this collaboration can help teams break down barriers more quickly. Identifying teams that need support can help you make adjustments and reassign resources as needed. For instance, moving shifts around using a smart scheduling solution like Findmyshift can help you reallocate people quickly.
You may also find that encouraging teams to work together will generate new ideas for business growth or improvements you can make to your processes.
The exact use for work management will depend on your business and the teams using it. IT teams can track their resolution of regular service requests as well as new software adoption projects.
HR departments might monitor the delivery of training courses or the recruitment and onboarding processes for new hires. These too can be broken down into tasks that require particular allocations of resources.
Even businesses built around customer-facing activities, like cleaners or mechanics, may find opportunities to review their tasks and what each one needs, noting areas for collaboration or improvement.
Let’s say you’ve had success generating business through door to door flyers, and have hired someone to deliver those. Your cleaning team, meanwhile, are on their way to a flat in a large block of potential customers. There are clearly opportunities for collaboration there!
However you use work management in your business, gaining greater oversight of your operations and looking for ways to improve them can only bring rewards.