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Exclusive Q&A
What are the pressing challenges that executive teams should be concerned about as they consider strategies and plans to adapt to the changing dynamics of work management?
Organizations are finding it increasingly difficult to address the changing demands of work in a way that optimally utilizes resources to deliver improved results while controlling levels of financial investment. C-level and executive teams must ensure that the strategic projects and programs they launch to increase market and business potential are both well-designed and well-managed.
An additional challenge lies in the ongoing increase in the automation of business processes, which often leaves the unautomated balance of the work poorly defined. This has led to an intensified focus on unstructured work – what it means, how it is prioritized and how it is managed. It is essential that executive teams understand both how the work day is changing and how to develop a relevant approach in this changed environment – one that incorporates processes for continuous optimization rather than continuing to rely on the traditional reactive, episodic model.
The performance demands of today’s markets are elevating expectations of accountability and focusing sharper scrutiny on measures of outcomes, as well as the alignment of work to business strategy. Through the use of work automation and collaboration, the engagement of the workforce can be more immediate to the pressing needs of executives and managers.
What obstacles do executives face in trying to address these challenges?
Most organizations do not manage work and utilize resources in a way that is tightly aligned to the goals and strategy of the organization. The first obstacle is the silos that exist within organizations’ traditional departmental structure. The individuals fulfilling their daily responsibilities and goals typically do not have the visibility across the organization that would enable them to comprehend how they all need to work together to achieve more strategic outcomes.
Another obstacle to improvement is that non-repetitive or unstructured work has traditionally been managed ad-hoc, with processes ranging from task definition and tracking to completion largely left to managers. There are an array of different ways of tracking work, ranging from reliance on email and spreadsheets to more formal methodologies such as traditional project management and stage-gate systems.
Ad-hoc management compounds the negative impact of a siloed business environment, leaving an organization subject to uncertainties and dependent on intangibles such as the skills and effectiveness of its people. This certainly is not an environment that leads executives to feel confident that their organization can achieve efficiency and effectiveness.
The goal needs to be the sharing of resources and collaboration across projects and teams to get work completed in a more immediate manner. As organizations increasingly move in that direction, it is critical to ensure that the right work methodologies are used to help the organization achieve its objectives. The appropriate technology is one that empowers people to understand their work and track their progress.
Executives can deliver on the business strategy and overcome existing obstacles by directing their leadership to identify and acquire the tools needed to support such an interconnected and continuous approach to managing work and resources.
What new technology investments should executive teams consider to optimize effectiveness and alignment to expected outcomes?
Organizations need to look at how their business is operating to best identify and evaluate their requirements. Leadership teams should take inventory of their existing technology and applications to understand how they can better focus and use resources for managing work. They also need to look at how effectively they utilize their resources and what changes would meaningfully improve business outcomes. Then organizations can turn to evaluating options for technology that focus on work management.
In our view, work management is a set of unified and distributed, technology-driven business processes that define, document and execute tasks. These processes should use the most appropriate and most effective resources that are part of the strategic plan and roadmap. It is an approach that enables management to better understand how an organization operates and establishes a collaborative environment within which work is assigned and prioritized.
When evaluating potential tools, organizations should seek greater effectiveness by eliminating silos and developing an enterprise-wide approach. Many organizations rely on email and spreadsheets. These are useful tools for personal productivity but research consistently shows that they are terrible for business productivity. New standalone task-management tools are an alternative technology option, but because they’re still siloed, these systems cannot be aligned to the strategic imperatives of an organization.
Instead, leadership teams should seek out and deploy enterprise-wide approaches that will work not only within but also across departments. This becomes increasingly important as the virtualization of teams across geographic areas and time zones creates management challenges far different from those presented by traditional, centralized teams in one office location. Given these challenges, avoid the pitfalls of one-off approaches and using too many tools.
It’s important that executive leadership ensures that the process and technology investments it considers will improve both automation and collaboration and the effectiveness of work management across the entire organization; any investment decision should be driven by the conclusion that it represents a strategic step forward.
You have pointed out that embracing work management enables a more strategic focus. But what does that really mean and how does technology play a key role?
C-level and executive teams must realize that to achieve their strategic goals, they must focus on maximizing both the efficiency and the effectiveness of their work and best use of resources. Today’s management efforts to guide unstructured work are often inefficient. The technology systems in use today do not support effective management of work across the organization nor do they provide visibility to top-level executives.
Traditional project management and the use of personal productivity tools to manage work do not enable management in accordance with the principles of work management. A dedicated, unified and technology-based approach to automate and manage the full scope of work will ensure that executives and managers can see how all the resources are interconnected and can then align those resources to the organization’s strategy and desired business outcomes. Furthermore, such an approach can provide a real-time view into the operations of the business and enable managers to assess and change direction where needed, thus providing better organizational agility. A modern and unified approach can help an organization be more responsive and utilize resources in a more automated and collaborative manner.
Embracing technology for work management means managing and assigning tasks and activities in a way that is simple and that allows people to both see how an assignment or request helps achieve organizational goals and derive a sense of accomplishment from their contribution. It is also critical to help executives see the progress that is occurring and align the organization so it better achieves its strategic objectives. Work management helps create a culture of engagement and achievement.
What makes a work management approach different from what organizations are already utilizing?
A dedicated and unified approach that delivers effective work management uses digital innovation to operationalize and automate the execution of the strategic plan, improving the time to value of all an organization’s work and resources. Using personal productivity tools such as spreadsheets and email, for example, creates decentralized silos of documents and conversations that are not easily reviewed and not aligned to strategy or outcomes in the way that executives need to effectively manage change and optimization in the organization.
A unified approach will enable every manager and worker to see what work should be done and what is required to achieve it, which is key to fostering not only alignment but engagement. When people are engaged and resources are optimally utilized, the resulting full utilization of the workforce will deliver a measurable improvement in productivity. This approach to work management will create an environment where executives can see and review details of the work management process and are thus better positioned to evaluate the performance of any strategic initiatives or other programs designed to improve the value of the organization.
How does a work management approach benefit the organization?
The deployment of work management will help the entire organization, no matter where or at
what level people work or where critical resources need to be utilized. Organizations can immediately benefit at the work-group or departmental level, but will realize perhaps more significant value where work crosses organizational boundaries and responsibilities, a situation where in many organizations both time and efficiency often are lost.
The approach provides significant benefits for C-level executives. With organization-wide visibility and reporting, they can have confidence that their strategies and initiatives are being executed within a dedicated technology-based approach designed for strategic operations. Such an approach can help an organization connect business planning and the portfolio of resources introducing and managing products and services to market, and providing the best possible customer experience. Most importantly, leaders in in every department are able to interact with and direct business-side and IT teams in a more continuous and efficient manner, an approach that is more agile and outcomes- focused but also faster in the delivery of work.
How does work management align with other digital-transformation priorities of executives?
Executives know that it is critical to prioritize investments in digital innovation that help the organization utilize its work and resources more effectively. But knowing has not always been the same as doing: Organizations have for quite some time now been making business and technology investments into digitally transforming their business processes and operations, but have mostly failed to invest in their people and how they work. For this reason, work management is an area that has lagged in investment until now.
Embracing work management means prioritizing digital transformation efforts that will deliver optimal performance while ensuring that the investments fully utilize all the resources of the organization. It helps ensure the timely and effective management of projects and resources. It helps executives make decisions about digital investment allocations guided by what can increase the engagement of people, regardless of experience or skills. Most importantly, a focus on work management improves both the collaborative planning of operations and time to market for products and services. Work management significantly improves accountability and productivity for work assigned and the efficient and effective use of resources – a yardstick that C-level executives value and will appreciate, since organizations that fail to use resources well risk being left behind by competitors. To increase the engagement and satisfaction of the workforce will require a focus on the work experience that can be achieved when the proper technology is selected and effectively used across the organization.
What do you recommend as the first steps to get started with work management?
Start with an analysis of how things are done now. Garner input from your executive and leadership teams and consider their concerns and recommendations. Discuss with your technology and program management leaders how they might support a transformational approach. Assess how strategies and initiatives guide what work is done and how it is done on a detailed (monthly, weekly, perhaps daily) basis. Then examine how resources are used and how effectively they are being used to meet the executive team’s expected outcomes.
Executives should outline a vision for delivering on a plan to more effectively use resources to meet expected outcomes. In doing this, they should take care to consider the extent to which existing applications and technologies are enabling work management. Executives should also consider how they might be used to improve the collaboration and experience of work that can optimize performance across the organization, from executive to worker levels. Identify concrete steps forward and possible deployments that will improve the potential for work management. And use this as an opportunity to ensure executive-leadership-driven, continuous improvement that optimizes the work, resources and responsiveness of the entire organization.
Exclusive Q&A
What are the pressing challenges that executive teams should be concerned about as they consider strategies and plans to adapt to the changing dynamics of work management?
Organizations are finding it increasingly difficult to address the changing demands of work in a way that optimally utilizes resources to deliver improved results while controlling levels of financial investment. C-level and executive teams must ensure that the strategic projects and programs they launch to increase market and business potential are both well-designed and well-managed.
An additional challenge lies in the ongoing increase in the automation of business processes, which often leaves the unautomated balance of the work poorly defined. This has led to an intensified focus on unstructured work – what it means, how it is prioritized and how it is managed. It is essential that executive teams understand both how the work day is changing and how to develop a relevant approach in this changed environment – one that incorporates processes for continuous optimization rather than continuing to rely on the traditional reactive, episodic model.
The performance demands of today’s markets are elevating expectations of accountability and focusing sharper scrutiny on measures of outcomes, as well as the alignment of work to business strategy. Through the use of work automation and collaboration, the engagement of the workforce can be more immediate to the pressing needs of executives and managers.
What obstacles do executives face in trying to address these challenges?
Most organizations do not manage work and utilize resources in a way that is tightly aligned to the goals and strategy of the organization. The first obstacle is the silos that exist within organizations’ traditional departmental structure. The individuals fulfilling their daily responsibilities and goals typically do not have the visibility across the organization that would enable them to comprehend how they all need to work together to achieve more strategic outcomes.
Another obstacle to improvement is that non-repetitive or unstructured work has traditionally been managed ad-hoc, with processes ranging from task definition and tracking to completion largely left to managers. There are an array of different ways of tracking work, ranging from reliance on email and spreadsheets to more formal methodologies such as traditional project management and stage-gate systems.
Ad-hoc management compounds the negative impact of a siloed business environment, leaving an organization subject to uncertainties and dependent on intangibles such as the skills and effectiveness of its people. This certainly is not an environment that leads executives to feel confident that their organization can achieve efficiency and effectiveness.
The goal needs to be the sharing of resources and collaboration across projects and teams to get work completed in a more immediate manner. As organizations increasingly move in that direction, it is critical to ensure that the right work methodologies are used to help the organization achieve its objectives. The appropriate technology is one that empowers people to understand their work and track their progress.
Executives can deliver on the business strategy and overcome existing obstacles by directing their leadership to identify and acquire the tools needed to support such an interconnected and continuous approach to managing work and resources.
What new technology investments should executive teams consider to optimize effectiveness and alignment to expected outcomes?
Organizations need to look at how their business is operating to best identify and evaluate their requirements. Leadership teams should take inventory of their existing technology and applications to understand how they can better focus and use resources for managing work. They also need to look at how effectively they utilize their resources and what changes would meaningfully improve business outcomes. Then organizations can turn to evaluating options for technology that focus on work management.
In our view, work management is a set of unified and distributed, technology-driven business processes that define, document and execute tasks. These processes should use the most appropriate and most effective resources that are part of the strategic plan and roadmap. It is an approach that enables management to better understand how an organization operates and establishes a collaborative environment within which work is assigned and prioritized.
When evaluating potential tools, organizations should seek greater effectiveness by eliminating silos and developing an enterprise-wide approach. Many organizations rely on email and spreadsheets. These are useful tools for personal productivity but research consistently shows that they are terrible for business productivity. New standalone task-management tools are an alternative technology option, but because they’re still siloed, these systems cannot be aligned to the strategic imperatives of an organization.
Instead, leadership teams should seek out and deploy enterprise-wide approaches that will work not only within but also across departments. This becomes increasingly important as the virtualization of teams across geographic areas and time zones creates management challenges far different from those presented by traditional, centralized teams in one office location. Given these challenges, avoid the pitfalls of one-off approaches and using too many tools.
It’s important that executive leadership ensures that the process and technology investments it considers will improve both automation and collaboration and the effectiveness of work management across the entire organization; any investment decision should be driven by the conclusion that it represents a strategic step forward.
You have pointed out that embracing work management enables a more strategic focus. But what does that really mean and how does technology play a key role?
C-level and executive teams must realize that to achieve their strategic goals, they must focus on maximizing both the efficiency and the effectiveness of their work and best use of resources. Today’s management efforts to guide unstructured work are often inefficient. The technology systems in use today do not support effective management of work across the organization nor do they provide visibility to top-level executives.
Traditional project management and the use of personal productivity tools to manage work do not enable management in accordance with the principles of work management. A dedicated, unified and technology-based approach to automate and manage the full scope of work will ensure that executives and managers can see how all the resources are interconnected and can then align those resources to the organization’s strategy and desired business outcomes. Furthermore, such an approach can provide a real-time view into the operations of the business and enable managers to assess and change direction where needed, thus providing better organizational agility. A modern and unified approach can help an organization be more responsive and utilize resources in a more automated and collaborative manner.
Embracing technology for work management means managing and assigning tasks and activities in a way that is simple and that allows people to both see how an assignment or request helps achieve organizational goals and derive a sense of accomplishment from their contribution. It is also critical to help executives see the progress that is occurring and align the organization so it better achieves its strategic objectives. Work management helps create a culture of engagement and achievement.
What makes a work management approach different from what organizations are already utilizing?
A dedicated and unified approach that delivers effective work management uses digital innovation to operationalize and automate the execution of the strategic plan, improving the time to value of all an organization’s work and resources. Using personal productivity tools such as spreadsheets and email, for example, creates decentralized silos of documents and conversations that are not easily reviewed and not aligned to strategy or outcomes in the way that executives need to effectively manage change and optimization in the organization.
A unified approach will enable every manager and worker to see what work should be done and what is required to achieve it, which is key to fostering not only alignment but engagement. When people are engaged and resources are optimally utilized, the resulting full utilization of the workforce will deliver a measurable improvement in productivity. This approach to work management will create an environment where executives can see and review details of the work management process and are thus better positioned to evaluate the performance of any strategic initiatives or other programs designed to improve the value of the organization.
How does a work management approach benefit the organization?
The deployment of work management will help the entire organization, no matter where or at
what level people work or where critical resources need to be utilized. Organizations can immediately benefit at the work-group or departmental level, but will realize perhaps more significant value where work crosses organizational boundaries and responsibilities, a situation where in many organizations both time and efficiency often are lost.
The approach provides significant benefits for C-level executives. With organization-wide visibility and reporting, they can have confidence that their strategies and initiatives are being executed within a dedicated technology-based approach designed for strategic operations. Such an approach can help an organization connect business planning and the portfolio of resources introducing and managing products and services to market, and providing the best possible customer experience. Most importantly, leaders in in every department are able to interact with and direct business-side and IT teams in a more continuous and efficient manner, an approach that is more agile and outcomes- focused but also faster in the delivery of work.
How does work management align with other digital-transformation priorities of executives?
Executives know that it is critical to prioritize investments in digital innovation that help the organization utilize its work and resources more effectively. But knowing has not always been the same as doing: Organizations have for quite some time now been making business and technology investments into digitally transforming their business processes and operations, but have mostly failed to invest in their people and how they work. For this reason, work management is an area that has lagged in investment until now.
Embracing work management means prioritizing digital transformation efforts that will deliver optimal performance while ensuring that the investments fully utilize all the resources of the organization. It helps ensure the timely and effective management of projects and resources. It helps executives make decisions about digital investment allocations guided by what can increase the engagement of people, regardless of experience or skills. Most importantly, a focus on work management improves both the collaborative planning of operations and time to market for products and services. Work management significantly improves accountability and productivity for work assigned and the efficient and effective use of resources – a yardstick that C-level executives value and will appreciate, since organizations that fail to use resources well risk being left behind by competitors. To increase the engagement and satisfaction of the workforce will require a focus on the work experience that can be achieved when the proper technology is selected and effectively used across the organization.
What do you recommend as the first steps to get started with work management?
Start with an analysis of how things are done now. Garner input from your executive and leadership teams and consider their concerns and recommendations. Discuss with your technology and program management leaders how they might support a transformational approach. Assess how strategies and initiatives guide what work is done and how it is done on a detailed (monthly, weekly, perhaps daily) basis. Then examine how resources are used and how effectively they are being used to meet the executive team’s expected outcomes.
Executives should outline a vision for delivering on a plan to more effectively use resources to meet expected outcomes. In doing this, they should take care to consider the extent to which existing applications and technologies are enabling work management. Executives should also consider how they might be used to improve the collaboration and experience of work that can optimize performance across the organization, from executive to worker levels. Identify concrete steps forward and possible deployments that will improve the potential for work management. And use this as an opportunity to ensure executive-leadership-driven, continuous improvement that optimizes the work, resources and responsiveness of the entire organization.
Mark Smith
Partner, Head of Software Research
Mark Smith is the Partner, Head of Software Research at ISG, leading the global market agenda as a subject matter expert in digital business and enterprise software. Mark is a digital technology enthusiast using market research and insights to educate and inspire enterprises, software and service providers.