Is your organization struggling to achieve its annual goals? In order to survive in the world of cut-throat competition, work management is essential.
It’s a process that assists a business in managing its workloads and workflows simultaneously. The process is completed in six stages, each of crucial importance for the outcome.
We hope this ultimate guide to successful work management is of assistance.
What is it?
Work management is defined as a set of services that apply to the interaction between human workers and business processes, which generate information. In essence, workflow structure is applied to the movement of this information. Work management assists in the process of managing both team and individual workflows, either within the scope of a project or any organizational operations.
It transforms essential business processes, such as making work schedules more efficient, meeting the needs of clients, utilizing resources and assets, and evaluating performance. Such practices eventually result in better business agility, improved results and performance, reduced waste, better efficiency, and minimized redundancy.
Even though the majority of organizations share the essential work management features, the concept is unique to every company. Different companies focus on different aspects of this practice. For instance, agencies place the focus on collaboration, whereas law practices on case management.
The main features of work management include collaboration, budgeting, invoicing, reporting, quoting, CRM, as well as resource management, project, time, and task management. The following link, https://www.thebalancecareers.com/what-is-crm-2917373, provides a better understanding of CRM. The goal is for all these features to get integrated into a comprehensive system.
Work vs. project management
There is a huge difference between work and project management, particularly in terms of their scope. The former is helpful in organizing and executing duties linked to multiple projects, whereas the latter assists in planning and performing duties related to a single project. The former assists the accomplishment of long-term goals, while the latter is helpful in the achievement of short-term goals.
Furthermore, work management is a repetitive process with a flexible and evolving structure. The flexibility of this practice is more suitable for organizations that don’t revolve only around projects but have plenty of operational work to support. In contrast, managing projects is performed with a set budget and timescale. The former involves all the teams that are part of an organization, while the latter solely involves the project team members related to a given project.
The six stages
This process takes place in six stages, referring to work identification, planning, scheduling, execution, follow-up, and analysis. The identification stage, as the name implies, refers to identifying the task to be handled. It’s when you define the task and the time of completing it. This information has to be documented to make sure everyone is kept up-to-date.
The following stage is the planning phase. In the course of planning, the required resources are identified, and time estimates are created for the job to be completed on time. After combining all the relevant data, a plan of action has to be devised as well. The scheduling phase is when project managers or team leaders map out the work for the upcoming period.
By determining the project management timelines, team leaders can inform each team member about his/her responsibilities. Once everything is scheduled and planned out, it’s high time for the execution phase to commence. Team members start working on the task by following the plan that has been devised in the previous stages. Any urgent duties have to be prioritized for the objectives to be met on time.
The follow-up stage is necessary to check if all members of the team are doing their job in accordance with the set schedule. In case something goes against the schedule, a backup plan is created to help in achieving the ultimate goal. The ultimate stage of analysis is when team leaders or project managers assess the quality of work and analyze the things that could be performed better.
A final note
This practice is of the utmost importance to organizations struggling to achieve their annual list of goals.
It helps businesses support their objectives by avoiding unwanted tasks that consume their productivity and cause delays!