Introduction to Work Management

Project/ Work Management 101
Overview of Work Management
1. What is Work Management?
According to Gartner, Work Management is a system that organizations use to structure their workflow for every level and team. It is a process that helps a business manage the flow of work and the load of work simultaneously to improve results and performance.
The purpose of work management is to increase clarity within individual teams to ensure that there is minimal internal miscommunication, which can cause unnecessary delays and stress. Effective Work Management also encourages collaboration within all levels of the organization, which further boosts productivity.
With effective Work Management, team members will always be given tasks to complete without making the threat of burnout. This ensures that tasks are completed efficiently and effectively without overwhelming the team with work they can’t complete within the given timeframe.
2. How is Work Management different from Project Management?
Some organizations tend to use the terms Project Management and Work Management interchangeably despite the two having completely different meanings.
Project Management helps to organize a team’s workflow and tasks to complete the delivery of a single specific project. Its primary purpose is to ensure that the project meets expectations and deadlines. Additionally, Project Management only involves the project team members that are associated with the project.
Meanwhile, Work Management has more to do with an organization’s day-to-day work. Its primary purpose is to help the business grow by ensuring that all of its teams’ workloads across multiple ongoing projects and ad hoc tasks are managed efficiently.
Additionally, project work and general work are too different entities. Project work is any task that is directly linked to a project. This makes this work time-bound with a deadline. Project meetings are an example of this. Meanwhile, general work is an organization’s day-to-day work that continues regardless of whether there is an ongoing project or not. An example of this are weekly meetings and general tasks.
While the two are separate ideas, both are important for managing and improving productivity and delivering key results within an organization.
3. The Work Management Lifecycle
As a process, the Work Management lifecycle can be done in many ways. Getting Things Done, or GTD, is a popular framework for organizing tasks. Frameworks like GTD help accomplish the primary goal of Work Management: to streamline the flow of work to make it more manageable for an individual or team.
> Work Identification
The final step, after executing the tasks, is to assess the finished work and its quality. This means asking certain questions, such as “Is the finished work up to your standards? If not, what went wrong and how can this be avoided in the future?” Analysis of your finished work allows your team to continue improving.
It’s worth noting doing this steps can be made much simpler through using an all-inclusive Work Management platform, such as SwiftEnterprise.
Without first consulting the execution teams, it can be difficult for managers to set a realistic deadline for their tasks. More experienced managers will have less difficulty due to their knowledge, but there may be other factors that can affect delivery times.
Introducing and implementing Work Management to your team requires the proper tooling. A quality Work Management tool, such as SwiftEnterprise, can give your team everything they need to work together and complete their tasks on time.
Here’s what a Work Management tool can do:
If you are interested in learning more about the Work Management tool that can help your teams work more effectively, you can request a demo here.