Workflow Management: Definition, Examples, & Key Benefits

The reality is most of us waste a ton of time each workday. How much of your day is spent in meetings? What about in your email inbox? Or even just jumping from tab to tab in your browser?

Many solutions to this problem focus on helping you manage those distractions. However, the vast majority of this inefficiency could be addressed before it happens by building better workflows, typically using workflow management software.

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What is workflow management?

Workflow management is the process of mapping out your workflows, tracking them, and then optimizing them, often through integration and automation.

A workflow is a way in which you complete a repeated task, and it's usually far from simple. Where a process is typically very linear, with something moving from A to Z, workflows tend to be more dynamic. They’ll often involve a lot of back-and-forth, branching paths, and many different tools and teams.

Workflow management is also often cyclical, meaning every time you update and streamline your workflow, you have to remap it and begin tracking it again until your next optimization.

Essential Parts of a Workflow Management System

Most of the time, you'll be using a workflow software tool to manage your workflows. If you go the manual route, I’d recommend dedicating an entire role to workflow management within your business (but ultimately I'd recommend digitizing your workflows instead).

The workflow management solution you choose needs to provide four key capabilities:

 1. Design

To optimize your custom workflows, you need to be able to map them out and visualize them, much like in a flowchart. This helps them feel less fragmented and ensures the different stages of your workflow aren’t siloed in a specific tool or team. Ideally, this functionality is as simple as drag and drop.

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 2. Integration

Next is workflow integration. Your system should bridge the gaps between your key work tools (e.g. collaboration tools, resource management tools, and time tracking tools), making them interoperable and allowing information to flow smoothly between them. A good workflow tool can also replace external automation software you might use for this purpose.

 3. Team Roles

Who are the people involved in your workflow? Are they constantly jumping between tools, signing in and out of accounts, struggling to remember handles and passwords? A good workflow management system helps the members of your team to easily manage a single identity, even across different work tools.

 4. Analytics

How do you know if your workflow optimization efforts are paying off? Where most of us look at the analytics provided by individual tools, a workflow management solution should look at performance on the workflow level. This tracking will provide deeper insights into how people work as long as the workflow exists.

Benefits of Workflow Management For Your Team

There are four main areas where workflow management can make a world of difference for your business process.

Individual productivity

Workflow management allows people to work from the tools best-suited to their job by identifying where your workflows intersect across teams and tools, and using integration to connect them.

You can also use workflow automation to eliminate menial tasks that take up time in your day, among many other benefits. Workflow tools can enable you to set up automated processes according to business rules so repetitive tasks are handled automatically through the workflow processes.

By making information more readily available to everyone within the tools they’re already using, workflow management can also drastically reduce the time you spend in your inbox or trying not to yawn on Zoom.

Team alignment

The number one challenge managers face is balancing their own work with their management responsibilities. Ensuring alignment is really difficult, especially if your team is working across multiple tools and locations.

A workflow engine allows you to optimize workflows no matter where you are, and integration empowers business leaders to monitor workflows in real-time, from their own tool, to ensure alignment. That way, when something seems out of place or the team encounters a blocker, you can quickly set things right.

Plus, the performance data surfaced through workflow management empowers team leads to revise and improve how their teams work, leading to better alignment and more agile workflows down the line.

Information transparency

Do you waste a ton of time trying to find the info you need? The average employee spends about eight hours each week locating information.

Workflow management breaks down tool silos that keep data locked away, while still providing access controls so you can control who can see or edit files.

Integration makes work accessible to everyone who needs it and provides managers with visibility. Increased transparency means individual contributors have the information required to prioritize work and speed up decision-making. All of this can happen asynchronously, meaning fewer messages and meetings.

Ease of collaboration

Collaboration is getting harder. As people shift from generalized tools to role-specific tools, there’s less and less overlap in where people work. Throw in the growth of remote work, and you’re left with a challenging environment in which to tackle cross-functional project management.

But workflow management eliminates key blockers by turning whatever tool you use into a collaborative platform. People can share feedback, move items through approval workflows, hand off work, and push projects to completion from whatever workflow software they choose. No sacrificing your work tools. No information getting lost in translation. And no endless meetings.

Workflow Management Examples

What does workflow management look like in practice? There are a near-infinite number of use cases, but let’s take a look at two different example workflows: team coordination and a cross-functional project.

A team coordination workflow

With that in mind, here’s an example of a common team coordination workflow:

1. Hold a stand-up meeting with your team every morning to discuss the previous day’s task assignments and plan for today.
2. Check your task management tool to see what tasks and projects are due today.
3. Check the work tools of your various team members to track progress on their tasks and ensure alignment. Reach out by chat or email to request updates, initiate an approval process, etc.
4. Host or participate in multiple meetings per day to get updates on projects or KPIs.
5. Distribute updates to the rest of the team through additional meetings, email, or chat.
6. Plan new initiatives and build them in each of your team’s tools.
7. Pull information from all of these different sources into reports for your board or executives.

This is a lot of work, and it neglects all the regular day-to-day work a team lead might need to accomplish themselves. Trying to make sense of how projects are progressing by jumping from a Gantt Chart in Asana to a Kanban board in Trello isn’t the best use of your time.

Here’s what a team coordination workflow looks like after optimizing your processes:

1. Build a centralized team project in your preferred work management tool.
2. Integrate your tools. A good two-way integration will allow information to flow between tools so everyone stays up to date.
3. Monitor your team’s tasks directly from your favorite tool each day. Updates are automatically made visible in your project. This allows you to quickly provide feedback, follow-up with questions, or step in to correct course.
4. Provide updates, delegate work, and spearhead initiatives all from that same project.
5. Integrate your team project with your work tools and sync important updates directly to them.

A cross-functional project workflow

When different teams need to work together on a project, communication is extremely important. Everyone needs to understand what their collaborators are working on, how the project is progressing, and whether there are any blockers along the way.

Traditionally, here’s what that project workflow might look like:

1. A kick-off meeting is held with all project stakeholders to plan the project and assign tasks.
2. Each person or team involved in the project will enter their tasks into their own work tools.
3. Each week, you hold a project meeting to update each other on the tasks that you own, ask questions, or provide feedback.
4. In between your meetings, chat and email are used to distribute information, get prompt answers to questions, or raise any time-sensitive issues.
5. If anyone encounters blockers that impact the project, special meetings are called to deal with the issue as a group.

When you rely on weekly meetings to get project updates, you risk spending five days working on something that doesn’t align with the project vision. Then there’s the potential for communication issues. Because Slack messages and emails are separate from your work tool, stakeholders might miss key discussions.

Here’s what the optimized workflow might look like:

1. A kick-off meeting is held with all project stakeholders. You create a plan and assign tasks.
2. Each person or team involved in the project will enter their tasks into their own work tools. Those tools are integrated and relevant tasks and projects are synced together.
3. Everyone involved in the project can track the progress of tasks, communicate, and collaborate from their preferred work tool. All information is immediately visible to stakeholders, and all discussions happen within the project, for everyone to see.
4. Real-time updates mean people can identify issues as they happen and feedback is received more promptly, reducing wasted effort and keeping the project on deadline.

What's Next?

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