Manage better workflows is a tool to provide teams with the necessary structure, visibility, and clarity over project activities and progress. But creating an efficient workflow system requires some effort. It needs to be tweaked and revised several times before teams can reach a point where processes are efficient and can be replicated easily across different tasks.
What is workflow management?
Workflow management is the process of planning, carrying out, and enhancing existing workflows. Workflow refers to the steps that must be carried out in order to finish a large project and achieve the desired outcome. It’s often a set of actions, resources, and interactions to achieve the same result repeatedly.
Workflow management involves systematically identifying, enhancing, optimizing, and automating existing workflows in order to achieve overall increases in productivity, efficiency, and accuracy throughout the whole project. This is accomplished through the use of workflow management software.
Below are the tips for managing better workflows.
How to manage workflows better?
- Create a layout of your current workflows
The first step in improving something is to have an in-depth understanding of what needs improvement. It is crucial to map out your current workflows and make certain that they are simple to understand for all members of the team in order to keep everyone on the same page.
A clear document and a visual layout of the workflows lets everyone analyze, evaluate, and find areas for improvement in the workflow that is currently being used.
- Maintain thorough documentation
After you have mapped the workflows, you need to make sure that all of the documentation that is related to the workflows is understandable and that older workflow versions are kept appropriately, consolidated, and organized so that they can serve as your organization’s “single source of truth.”
Your workflow documentation needs to be as comprehensive and accurate as is humanly possible.
Don’t forget to provide a comprehensive description of the work, including the resources you’ll require, the people who will be performing the work, and the connections between the different responsibilities. A deeper understanding makes it simpler to implement the newly improved workflow and scale it up across the entire organization.
- Go through the workflows and update them regularly
Once you have your documentation organized, your teams should be able to easily pull from the previous data, track the efficacy of their workflows, and make improvements that will meet their particular requirements and achieve more efficiency.
With a solid workflow management solution serving as a single source of truth,’ teams can plan auditing sessions to review their current workflows, the various adjustments they have made, and how these modifications or optimization may be implemented into their newer workflows.
A regular workflow auditing schedule, usually quarterly, ensures that your workflows have enough time window to use adequately before changing and is always relevant for teams.
- Automation is the key
Whether it’s workflow management or project portfolio management solution, they are always evolving, and their automation capabilities are increasing with time.
One effective strategy for improving your workflow’s efficiency is ensuring everyone on your team is up-to-date on the latest features and solutions’ automation capabilities.
Think about how new workflow automations can be implemented to meet the varying demands of your teams.
A financial team, for instance, may benefit from automation that speeds up their expense approval procedure. Automation that combines a workflow management system with ERP and CRM can be beneficial for the operations team. Automating the scheduling and feedback processes will help the HR team hire more efficiently.
- Train your team
It takes time to get adjusted to new tools and procedures. Due to the rapid pace of technological advancements and software innovations, organizations must regularly update and retrain their staff to make the most of these solutions.
Consider investing money in training tools and projects like creating an interactive training video or writing a manual for workflow management.
Interactive videos are particularly useful since, according to research, 82% of employees find them more attention-grabbing than regular videos.
Maintaining relevant and interesting training and resources also helps your staff avoid wasting important time on meaningless searches for information on their workflows.
Summary
Workflow management involves identifying, enhancing, optimizing, and automating existing workflows. It strives to boost productivity, efficiency, and precision across a project.
With a reliable workflow management solution, teams can easily schedule auditing sessions to evaluate their existing workflows.
A regular workflow auditing schedule, often quarterly, ensures that your procedures have sufficient time to be utilized before being modified and remain relevant for teams.