An organization can involve multiple business processes running simultaneously, often composed of various complex projects running simultaneously.
This is where enterprise work management’s implementation comes in, which can lead to the difference between the success and failure of projects, business processes, and the organization in general.
This guide will share some critical knowledge of using enterprise work management concepts, its implementation, and its benefits.
Table of Contents
What Is Enterprise Work Management?
Enterprise Work Management (EWM) or Enterprise Project Management (EPM) manages projects and tasks that run on an organization-wide scale. In a larger organization, these projects can involve many (often hundreds of) stakeholders and team members.
With the scale of the projects and the complexities involved, implementation of enterprise work management is critical to improve the effectiveness of each project by streamlining the tasks involved.
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Enterprise work management can involve many different aspects of managing and running business processes:
- Schedule management
- Digital asset management
- Financial management
- Risk mitigation
- Collaboration
- Analytics, reporting, and business intelligence
- Demand management
And other aspects depending on the organization’s business model and objectives.
Enterprise Work Management Software
Implementation of EWM can be extraordinarily complex and might require an experienced project manager and team members with the skills necessary to deploy the necessary management processes.
A more accessible, often more cost-effective approach is to use a inventory management software that can help project managers and team get better insights by correctly visualizing all the different processes in a single place. This, in turn, can help in making better decisions and streamline the tasks in each project.
There are now various enterprise work management solutions available in the market, each offering its advantages and disadvantages. Also, a solution that works well for one enterprise might not be ideal for another organization. Some solutions are developed to suit a certain industry/niche better, and obviously, it might come down to the project manager’s preferences.
However, below, we will discuss some important factors to consider when choosing between different enterprise work management solutions.
Choosing an EWM Solution and Implementing Enterprise Work Management
Below, we will discuss some integral considerations and steps you should take in choosing different enterprise work management solutions and implementing EWM in your organization.
Know your organization’s needs
Different organizations have different needs when implementing enterprise work management. In general, there are three key factors to consider when deciding between the different available approaches in implementing enterprise work management:
- Identifying key processes that need to be streamlined/improved by implementing EWM in achieving the organization’s objectives
- Identifying whether key people involved are going to be ready in adapting to the changes
- And also, identifying the objectives of different business aspects and the priorities in implementing EWM
Suppose you have identified that implementing EWM is a priority, but you’ve also determined that employees might not be ready for a new way of working. In that case, you might want to get a more user-friendly enterprise work management solution. This allows your employees to adapt to the platform quickly. The solution should also offer analytics and reporting features so you can monitor the before-after progress of implementing EWM.
Standardize your business processes
When implementing enterprise work management, it’s essential to first develop standardized business processes according to its needs and objectives.
Developing standardized processes can be complicated and can take a significant amount of time before you can implement them, but they can be well worth it in the long run. You can start this process by identifying repeatable tasks and creating templates. If necessary, you may want to automate some of the repeatable processes, especially those relatively simple and repetitive.
Doing this can help your organization save more time and resources while eliminating possible errors as you implement your enterprise work management.
Your solution should be capable of managing every step of the business’s lifecycle
A prevalent mistake in implementing enterprise work management is to have disjointed workflows not correctly integrated, so it isn’t easy to scale them to achieve a continuous business process.
This is where the right enterprise work management solution that can adequately provide clarity and visibility with each business process is essential. Solutions like Aproove can provide an easier way to collaborate across the entire organization while also offering a single dashboard where all stakeholders can monitor different aspects of the business process.
Doing so can ensure all workflows remain consistent in achieving the objective while also providing users with the versatility to manage their work.
Working with users and stakeholders
It’s important to remember that enterprise work management gets deployed to help make people’s tasks easier, and not the other way around. Yet, communicating this fact to all employees can be tricky since most of us naturally resist change.
The right approach here is to start implementing the EWM practice with a user group that can be advocates for the practice across the organization. Once this test group has experienced the EWM practice benefits, they can then share the benefits back with their team and other people in the organization.
The goal is to have all the different departments collaborating on a shared EWM platform. Only by doing so that the tasks and processes can become 100% transparent and visible across the whole organization will improve accountability and productivity.
Integrating business process, people, and technology
Implementing enterprise work management aims to ensure that people (employees and stakeholders), business processes, and technology get integrated into the EWM solution. If not, we’ll completely miss the objective of implementing EWM in the first place.
This requires a proper EWM solution that can allow integration between departments and business processes and the participation of different departments, especially in the willingness to share data and information for use in the decision-making process across the whole organization.
Conclusion
With the increasing complexities of implementing enterprise work management as your organization grows, proper project management software like Aproove can be a great solution where project managers, team members, stakeholders, and clients can easily visualize every project step.
In turn, it will allow proper monitoring of whether schedule, budget, and requirements are met throughout the project, allowing more efficiency and productivity.
