5 Tips for Workflow Management Tools
A workflow management tool is a critical guide that gives teams the necessary visibility over their project activities and progress. But building an effective workflow is not a one-and-done situation. It takes multiple revisions before teams find the sweet spot where workflows run smoothly and are repeatable across different tasks.
Here are some quick tips to get your workflow management tool flowing effectively so your projects can keep moving!
What is a workflow management tool?
Workflow management is the act of organising, operating and optimising workflows. A workflow management tool assists in outlining a sequence of tasks that make up a larger task. The goal is to produce a desired result or achieve a specific outcome. It is often a set of steps, resources, and interactions that can be repeated to achieve the same result.
Workflow management involves identifying, improving, optimising, and automating workflows. The goal is to achieve project-wide improvements in productivity, efficiency and accuracy.
Read more: Introductory Guide to Workflow Management
Tip One: Map out your current workflows
To improve on something, you first have to understand it. Mapping out your current workflows and making sure that they can be easily understood by all team members is critical to making sure everyone is on the same page. One way to achieve this is by drafting your workflows in a workflow management tool that displays information clearly and in a visually appealing way. Establishing clear documentation lets everyone study, evaluate, and identify improvement opportunities within the pre-existing workflow.
Tip Two: Documentation is key
The next step to mapping out your workflows is to make sure that all your workflow-related documents are clear. Also, historic versions of the workflow must be properly stored, consolidated, and organised to act as your organisation’s ‘single source of truth’.
It is important that your workflow related documentation is as clear and specific as possible. Make sure that tasks, inputs, tools and people are clearly described and conditions or relationships between tasks are clearly established. Greater clarity makes it easier to implement and scale the optimised workflow across an organisation.
Tip Three: Regularly audit and adjust your workflows
Once you have your documentation clear, teams should be able to easily pull from your historic data. As a result, they will be able to track the effectiveness of their workflows and make adjustments that suit their specific needs and bring efficiency gains.
With a workflow management tool acting as a ‘single source of truth’, teams can easily schedule auditing sessions to discuss their current workflows. Here, they will review adjustments they have made and how these changes or optimisations can then be incorporated into newer workflows. A consistent schedule for workflow auditing, typically on a quarterly basis, makes sure that your workflows have time to be properly utilised before they are updated and ensures they are continually relevant for your teams.
Tip Four: Automate Automate Automate
With workflow management tools constantly evolving, their automation capabilities are also growing rapidly. Make sure your teams are up to date with your project management solution’s automation capabilities and check they are tapping into their full potential to further optimise your workflows. In addition, be sure to consider the different requirements of each of your teams and how new workflow automations can be introduced to facilitate their needs.
For example, a financial team could benefit from an automation that streamlines their expense approval process. An operations team could benefit from an automation that integrates their ERP and CRM within their workflow management tool. And an HR team can speed up their hiring process by automating their feedback and scheduling activities.
Tip Five: Provide training
New tools and new processes take some time to get used to. With the rate of technological advancement and software updates, organisations will need to be consistently updating and retraining their teams to be able to make the most of their solutions.
Consider investing in training resources and activities such as developing a workflow management tool handbook or producing interactive training videos. Interactive videos are particularly powerful. Surveys show that 82% of employees state that interactive videos hold their attention better than traditional videos. Keeping your training and resources up to date and engaging saves teams valuable time that is wasted looking for answers and information on their workflows.
Build your single source of truth with pmo365
Having a powerful workflow management tool on your side can make a big difference to your processes and business optimisations. Lucky for you, you can start building your ‘single source of truth’ with pmo365 right now! pmo365 consolidates all your workflow and project-related activities onto a single platform so your teams are as efficient and effective as possible. But the benefits don’t stop there. pmo365 helps you:
- Gain complete visibility and control over your portfolio
- Maintain ownership over your project management solution forever
- Grow as you grow by adapting and building solutions that accommodate your unique needs
- Maintain flexibility with transparent and fuss-free price packages
If you want to know more about how pmo365 can help take your workflow management activities to the next level, read more about how we work or book a demo with our experts to see the solution in action!
IIR: Introduce, Integrate, Replace
Step 01
Introduce
You cannot run a portfolio on Excel and PowerPoint alone.
Project portfolio management is the discipline of seeing every project in one place, prioritising the work that matters, allocating people against demand, and governing delivery with real numbers. It is not optional at any serious scale. The moment you have more projects than one person can hold in their head, you need a single, current view of status, schedule, cost, resource and risk.
Excel and PowerPoint feel free because there is no licence conversation. The real cost is elsewhere. It is the hours spent maintaining workbooks, the version confusion, and the numbers that go stale the moment they are pasted.
A spreadsheet cannot tell you, on demand, which projects are at risk, where your people are over-committed next quarter, or how much of the portfolio budget is actually spent.
Introducing a proper PPM platform is the first step. Not to add another tool for its own sake, but to give the portfolio one place where the data lives together and stays live.
Step 02
Integrate
The instinct after buying a PPM platform is to make everyone move into it. That is the fastest way to fail. Project managers already have tools they trust, and finance already has systems of record. Force a migration on day one and you get resistance, shadow spreadsheets, and a dataset nobody believes.
Integrate first. Meet the data where it already is. Two directions matter.
Direction 01
Enterprise systems
Connect to the finance or ERP layer so actuals, commitments and budgets flow in automatically. Reporting stops being a monthly reconciliation and becomes a live view. Nobody rekeys a spend figure again.
Direction 02
The tools PMs already use
The direction most platforms neglect, and arguably the more important. The portfolio should read from the PM's own tools, not force people to abandon them.
The reason this matters is simple. That data is already there, and it is kept current by the person closest to it. When the portfolio reads directly from these sources, the status report updates itself. No chasing, no copy and paste, no reporting lag. The PM keeps working the way they always have, and the board gets a live picture as a side effect.
Step 03
Replace
Integration buys you two things: trust, and live data. Once both are in place, you look at what can go.
Every organisation carries tools and spreadsheets that either do not do the job well or carry a heavy maintenance overhead. The classic example is the resource spreadsheet. It is a workbook someone maintains by hand to track who is on what. It is always slightly out of date, owned by one person, and impossible to reconcile against real demand.
Replace it with the equivalent function in your PPM.
A proper demand management capability does what the spreadsheet was reaching for, with none of the overhead. It models demand against capacity across the whole portfolio, updates as projects shift, and needs no manual upkeep.
Replace deliberately, one function at a time, and only after the platform has earned it. The test is simple: if a spreadsheet is high overhead or low quality, and the platform does the same job natively, retire the spreadsheet.
The payoff
You stop producing reports and start reading them
Follow IIR and the nature of reporting changes. The status view is current because it is fed by the tools people already use and the systems that already hold the money. The overhead that used to consume the last week of every month disappears, because there is nothing to assemble.
That is the whole point of real-time reporting. Not a prettier deck, but a portfolio you can look at any day of the month and trust, at a fraction of the effort it takes today.
Built on Microsoft 365. Native ground for IIR.
pmo365 integrates with the tools your teams already run in, so the path from Introduce to Integrate to Replace is a natural progression rather than a rip and replace.