Enterprise work today is much faster and much more complex than ever before.
It can be challenging for managers and leaders to monitor basic work management activities like tracking who’s working on what and whether it’s on the right track. Today, we use various software tools, hard drives, and traditional mediums like sticky notes in storing essential and sensitive information also contribute to the complicated work management process.
This is where enterprise work management comes in. An enterprise work management software provides leaders and managers with more transparency of work’s entire life cycle from planning to evaluation.
This guide will discuss a complete understanding of enterprise work management, its importance, and how we can use it to improve your business’s productivity.
What Is Enterprise Work Management?
Enterprise work management is a methodology for managing all work in the enterprise seamlessly through its entire process and workflow to achieve better efficiency in executing the tasks.
It helps the whole departments and teams discover (potential) bottlenecks, increase productivity, and focus on their core competencies to achieve organizational goals. Enterprise Work Management provides employees with freedom from time-consuming and repetitive administrative tasks so they can spend their time doing the work that matters.
Enterprise Work Management is made possible with the help of software like Aproove, allowing everyone involved in the business processes to change the way they approach, organize, and monitor work, eliminating typical redundancies and inefficiencies in enterprise work, such as:
- Using inefficient and messy email-based communications as the primary collaboration tool
- Manually using spreadsheets and word documents for reporting
- Relying on time-consuming status meetings
- Spending more time on administrative tasks, deviating critical employees from their core competencies
- Using too many tools that are disconnected from each other to organize work, resulting in difficult monitoring and processing of data
- Lacking a standardized set of processes for work requests, project planning, and monitoring
By eliminating these productivity barriers, Enterprise Work Management can allow companies to eliminate chaos, missed deadlines, and unnecessary burnout. Your team stays on time and budget with their work and improves their morale by promoting more transparency and trust, improved accountability, perceived value, and more time to focus on the tasks they can contribute to.
Core Elements of Enterprise Work Management
There are four core elements in implementing the Enterprise Work Management methodology:
Unifying Tools
While Enterprise Work Management is not solely about using a single tool (an Enterprise Work Management software like Aproove), an essential element is to eliminate as many unnecessary tools as possible while integrating all the tools required to be monitored and controlled seamlessly as possible. This ensures that information flow stays streamlined and easy to track.
1.Standardizing Workflows and Processes
Another critical element of implementing Enterprise Work Management is to standardize set processes for the types of work needed in the business processes, which is the key to improving productivity and efficiency. This is especially true for repeatable work the team frequently does: approval processes, invoice generation/processing, and others.
Instead of fiddling around with different methods with every new project for these processes, we should standardize them as much as possible. Good Enterprise Work Management software would allow us to capture the process’s workflow in a project template. We can also use standardized briefs to communicate the standard flow for each process.
By standardizing these repeatable workflows, we can allow employees to be more efficient with their time and spend more time on the tasks that matter in achieving the organization’s objectives.
2. Centralized Hub To Manage The Entire Lifecycle of Work
Enterprise Workflow Management’s core aspect is to manage all projects through the entire lifecycle of work seamlessly, from initial planning to on-time delivery to evaluation.
It’s widespread for businesses today to use more than ten tools to manage their work, and thus employees and stakeholders must bounce back and forth between tools, often multiple times per day. This will interrupt the natural flow of work, producing unnecessary delays, internal confusion, frustration, errors, and duplicated efforts.
With an Enterprise Work Management solution in place, we can consolidate the necessary tools to centralize all the workflows. The more centralized and more real-time the collaboration is, the more seamless the work management will be.
3. Transparent and Accountable Collaboration
An important consideration for any successful implementation of Enterprise Work Management is to ensure all work communication occurs in a documentable form that is also visible to all relevant parties if this can happen in real-time, the better.
When work-related communication only happens in back-and-forth emails, weekly/daily status meetings, phone calls, or instant messages, it can be challenging and time-consuming for team members to stay updated on changes and feedbacks.
Transparent, visible, and clear communication where all parties involved are accountable can ensure work-related discussions occur as collaborative efforts that are easy to find and track.
Conclusion
Enterprise Work Management will help teams that are not looking to manage the work processes from the top-down and encourage more effective work execution from the bottom-up.
By ensuring transparent and visible communication/collaboration process that happens in real-time, proper implementation of enterprise work management can help improve efficiency and productivity in executing work processes, helping businesses achieve their objectives while ensuring projects stay on time and budget.
While technology solutions like Approve are essential in the implementation of Enterprise Work Management, technology alone is not enough. Educating the team members to implement Enterprise Work Management best practices properly is very important if you want to maximize Enterprise Work Management’s benefits.
