This is a guest post by Unito.
Try to think of a recurring task that always gets groans from your team when it comes up. The kind of task that creates utter silence when you ask “any volunteers?” What if there was a way to make that task easier and more efficient? Enter workflow management.
Workflow management encompasses all the efforts you make to optimize your workflows and get more done. A workflow can represent the coordination of tasks for any business goal, from escalating a support ticket to completing cross-functional projects.
We've put together a list to show why your projects need this.
Audits keep workflows optimal
One of the first steps to achieving better workflows is knowing what’s going on. This can be done with a workflow audit. Broadly, this means examining your workflow to find its weaknesses and coming up with solutions. This audit can be performed in five steps:
- Map out every step of your workflow: How does a task move from point A to point B? How does it interact with other tasks? Who’s involved in each step? These are the kinds of questions you should be asking.
- Look for chokepoints: Are there places where teams seem to hit a brick wall? Maybe there’s a specific collaborator who’s overwhelmed or a tool that isn’t performing as it should.
- Find improvements: By this stage, you’ve figured out your workflow’s problems. This is when you try to come up with ways to fix them, like spreading tasks around or getting rid of a tool that isn’t doing what it’s supposed to.
- Implement your strategy: After figuring things out, it’s time to implement your changes.
- Review the results:The workflow audit doesn’t end when you change a few things. To make sure these changes were effective, it’s good to check in regularly to see how recurring tasks are going.
Workflow management means taking a proactive approach to your work. The audit is how you find out where the problem spots are.
Better workflows mean better alignment
Keeping teams aligned is crucial, and misalignment can directly affect your bottom line.
Creating alignment between teams isn’t an accident, though sometimes it feels like their workflows might be. When you’re not actively managing them, you’re inadvertently creating silos. That’s because every team — and potentially every collaborator — decides how they’ll work. Empowering different productivity styles is great, but it leaves little room for alignment.
With workflow management, you can put in practices that promote alignment rather than hindering it. You can set up guidelines so teams know when they have to communicate with each other. You can create interdisciplinary squads to tackle specific problems — and give everyone an idea of how other teams work. There are dozens of tactics, techniques, and best practices for improving alignment between teams. However, workflow management is how you make it all come together.
Not everyone works in the same tool
These days, it seems everyone has their favorite tool. Customers, in particular, expect you to work with tools they are using for their own convenience. Whatever the scenario, workflow management requires you to tackle the prickly topic of tool choice.
That’s where a tool like Unito comes in. Unito is a workflow management solution with the deepest integrations on the market for some of the world’s most popular project management tools. You can integrate these tools with Zoho Projects, so you can do everything from your favorite platform. With two-way syncing functionality out of the box, you don’t have to spend more than a few minutes to keep all your important data in sync. Zoho Projects tasks can easily become Jira or GitHub issues, Trello cards, Zendesk tickets, and more. That way, you can collaborate with anyone and keep teams aligned, no matter where they work.
Ready to get more out of your workflows?
Get better project reporting, optimize your workflows, keep teams aligned, and get more done with Unito for Zoho Projects.
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