Throughout managing projects, a number of problems and issues may arise. Thus it is quite normal that at times the project managers are quite taken aback by the odds like missing deadlines of tasks, piling up of requests in the inbox and what not!
This is why whenever you are working with projects, you should create documentation on workflow management process beforehand. Without creating it, you can not have your projects done properly.
In today’s post, we will be discussing the benefits of the workflow management process and the various facets of it which can be streamlined with a project management tool.
Benefits of Creating a Workflow Management Process
If you make workflows for your projects, you will be benefited in many ways. Here are a few benefits:
- Decreases project risk: If you are dealing with projects, you might experience that sometimes, you need to redo the same tasks to settle the clients’ disputes.
For this reason, the project management becomes very complex and that certain project stands at stake. To tackle this hassle, you must keep a part of documentation mentioning the terms and conditions for your client. - Makes oversight easier: When you are creating an appropriate project the need to physically monitor each and every part of the project gets minimized as your entire team will work more cohesively according to the workflow provided by you.
- Optimizes your operational activities: Since you are documenting every part of the work procedures, you can adjust your workflow directly from the practical implementation effects. This frequent change in workflow documentation significantly increases the efficiency of operational activities with proper optimization.
- Keeps everyone on the same page: If you share your workflow with your teammates, you pave the way to connect everyone with each other. This is pretty helpful to reduce bottlenecks because everyone can get to know who is on what and this helps to share updates and information with one another.
- Sketches out work responsibility: Creating a workflow includes delineating tasks for different employees. It helps your teammates to be aware of their respective work responsibilities.
- Enhances projected timeline estimation: Workflow acts as the basis of timeline estimation and helps all to meet deadlines. Frequent project management with workflow allows a manager to assume the future of it more accurately.
- Visualization of the working process. Every stakeholder belonging to a project gets the opportunity to get a birds-eye view of the working process of a project.
- Provides an opportunity to focus on more strategic activities: With workflow as every member associated with a project moves with less friction, it enables the project manager to concentrate on other important managerial tasks rather than the same boring operational tasks.
- Maximizes the transparency: As everyone’s role is properly documented in a workflow, it provides the audit trails for the managers to ask the team members of how they carried out the duties and responsibilities.
Automating Workflow Process with a Project Management Tool
If you have created your project workflow documentation, you are already set to operate your projects. But this method can be accelerated with an automated project management tool. A project management tool can help you greatly with the following features:
Creating Project Categories
You may deal with a wide variety of project categories and your workflow documentation may include this. Luckily, with a project management tool, you can create unlimited project categories.
Creating Projects
According to the different projects of your workflow, you can create unlimited projects with an automated project management solution.
Adding Employees to Projects
After creating projects, you will want to use your resources like employees, assets and so on, right? By employing an automated project management software you can do so at great ease.
Breaking down Projects with Task Lists, Tasks, and Subtasks
As per your created workflow, you may need to narrow down your projects to a series of task lists, tasks and subtasks so that it becomes a matter of a few seconds to distribute the parts of projects to your workforce.
To this end, you can use an automated project management system that will allow you not only to create task lists and tasks but also to create subtasks.
Even some of the full-fledged project management tools enable you to assign users to the task lists, tasks and even to the subtasks.
Setting Milestone
As mentioned in your workflow, you can set milestones for a project so that it works as an incentive both to the whole team and to the client of the project.
Discussing Project Status
This is the coolest part of the project management because your team members may stay away from each other. Despite the distance, the team members can communicate with each other with this feature and thus collaborate more efficiently.
Setting up Recurring Tasks
Some projects may contain such kind of tasks as may need to be done on a regular basis. These type of tasks are known as recurring tasks which may be forgotten accidentally due to the oblivious nature of the human being.
But setting these type of tasks up automatically with a project management solution will remind the assigned users with notifications and it ensures that there is nothing amiss.
Getting Notified Automatically
Whatever takes place across the projects, you along with your entire team can get notified if you are deploying your workflows with a project management system.
Micromanaging Your Employees with Time Tracker
With some advanced project management solution, you can track your every employee’s required time to accomplish a task or subtask. This is pretty useful to micromanage each and every member of the project.
Managing Files
Whenever you are managing projects, your employees will need to share files with each other. However, if your employees are working remotely, it becomes imperative to have a file management feature built in your project management system.
Auditing Activities and Getting Overviews
Within your project, each and every one of your employee has to do a myriad of activities and the status of the project constantly changes. With a project management application, you can easily stay aware of them.
Getting Paid Directly from the System
A full-stack project management app will let you get paid from your client with its integrated payment system. A professional project management tool should help you with popular payment gateways like Stripe or PayPal.
Back to You
Regardless of the type of project workflow that you are going to use, you need to implement it on a more reliable, faster and easier platform.
Besides, in today’s competitive world, you can not go further if you only stick to the workflow process documentation. To make things easier and to skyrocket your efficiency and productivity you must use an automated project management solution.
