Thinking of how your business can benefit from work management? It means you’ve just join the long line of business owners and entrepreneurs that are having such thoughts. However, most people think work management is the same as project management – they are completely different. Work management can solve many problems that companies often attribute to bad project management.
In this article, we are going to discuss work management, what it’s comprised of, how it differs from project management, and why it’s important.
What is Work Management?
Work management is the monitoring and oversight of tasks and to-do lists for all individuals and teams within a single project or during company operations. In other words, this is a way to manage your team and how they work, which can improve efficiency in your business.
The cycle of work management begins with identifying a task, planning and scheduling it, and the execution of that task. However, that’s not all – follow-up is important. Use analysis to see what is working and what isn’t.
Difference Between Work Management and Project Management
People often intermingle work management and project management. This confusion is quite understandable because, in business terms, you often think that every business is made up of many smaller projects. So while work management may be called project management, in reality, the former is much broader than the latter.
Project management is the application of skills, knowledge, techniques, and tools to project activities to meet the requirements of a project. For example, if a client asks a marketing company to run a content campaign, the goal of the project is to complete the campaign.
Work management, on the other hand, is interested in the processes and structures that can be taken from one project; taking the unique qualities of that project and applying them to another project. Perhaps most importantly, the structure of work management can be adapted to fit internal needs. This is more difficult with a project management structure.
What Is Work Management Comprised of?
Work management consist of six business areas:
- Time management. Employees may not have enough time to complete their tasks every day. Hence, ensure you evenly distribute tasks among your team members to keep the project on schedule. In doing so, you’re respecting the work-life balance of your employees and you aren’t forcing team members to exceed their work capabilities.
- Project management. This is perhaps the largest component of work management. Basically, this involves the project manager coordinating and assigning work and deadlines and presenting the results to the client.
- Resource management. This is simply the creation, maintenance, and distribution of all of your company’s resources. These resources can include tangible items such as equipment and inventory, or intangible assets such as copyrights and patents.
- Business Intelligence. This is the use of technology to collect and analyze data to create actionable items. In the context of work management, business intelligence can include managing department performance or implementing new initiatives based on your competitors.
- Client relation management. While many business operations are related to internal operations, CRM includes all communication with existing or potential customers.
- Process management. Unlike resource management, process management is about resources because its primary use is to analyze, measure, and improve business processes.
Why is Work Management Important in Your Business?
The obvious answer is that work management is just as important as other management methods: it improves business performance. Whatever you can do to enable your team to deliver quality faster and with less investment will no doubt benefit your project.
Furthermore, work management not only streamlines processes and improves performance, but also reduces redundancy, which wastes valuable time and money. That’s why companies around the world adopt work management: it reduces waste.
Conclusion
The benefits of adopting a work management framework are obvious, but it requires a great deal of commitment. Therefore, you need to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your business processes and improve on them with the aid of work management software.
