Managing the flow of information in your organization is a vital part of your business’s success. Workflow management involves organizing and tracking your workflow to ensure the desired results are produced as smoothly and effectively as possible. Workflow management captures your workflow process, and some tools will even let you automate your basic workflows. You can use this for various workflows, such as onboarding a new team member or managing documents.
What Are Some Best Practices For Business Workforce Management?
Let’s talk about some do’s for your workflow management:
- Start with your end goal in mind. Look towards your end goal and work backward to determine your best path. Create a checklist, note who you’ll partner with, and decide what leadership team will drive the endeavor. Consider these points:
- What are the processes, workflows, and systems needed to reach the endpoint in the project?
- What are the best practices to employ?
- Define your workflow. Create a realistic workflow diagram and involve all the people who will be doing the work. Ask for agreement from the team, have them sign off on it, and adopt the plan for the project. Match your workflow process to a tool functionality so that your workflow process drives your tool selection and not the other way around.
- Identify trends in the performance of your workflow by looking at your teams and team members involved. By identifying the process redundancies and eliminating them, you can perfect your workflow management processes over time.
What Are Some Workflow Management Practices To Avoid?
Now it’s time to talk about the don’ts! Avoiding these workflow management practices will help you achieve your business goals:
- Don’t Neglect Documentation. Taking control of your workflows starts with establishing a foundation that tells the story of what they are in the first place; this means writing them down. Start simple; you can add in details later. Ask yourself questions like:
- Who will complete tasks? Will there be multiple task owners? Are there any bottlenecks or dependencies to consider between owners?
- When. What are the hard deadlines and will you be working in iterations?
- Don’t be afraid to be flexible in finding the best possible way through your project. There are always some things that can be changed, such as timelines or responsibilities, that can make your workflow management even better. Evaluate any issues that arise and take steps to fix them as soon as possible.
- Don’t forget to consider the relationships and dependencies involved. This means both between the tasks and the team members completing those tasks. These relationships are known as dependencies, where one stage of the workflow can’t begin until another has ended; they can’t be worked on simultaneously. Such dependencies are crucial to a smooth workflow.
Workflow management is just one piece of the business success puzzle. Here at Piccolo, we know you’re busy doing what you do, so we’ve dedicated ourselves to helping business owners like you perfect their systems and processes, saving you time and energy and freeing you to handle everything on your plate. We are experts in project management and operational services, as well as digital marketing. Call us today at (615) 348 7768 or contact us online to schedule a consultation. We look forward to hearing from you!
