Team Leader’s Guide to Work Management

Work management is a term used by many business professionals to describe their processes. However, it is also often confused as being the same as project or task management. To make sure you know the difference and use the terms correctly, we have prepared a short cheat sheet to explain it all.

You can download the ‘Team leader’s guide to work management’ by filling in the form below.

If you would like some more information before moving on, let’s see what work management entails.

What is Work Management?

So, without further ado, let’s see the definition.

Work management is a set of tools and practices that help you organize the team processes, communication, and flow of information to increase success.

Team or company leaders usually use work management to set up efficient practices outside the scope of projects. We are all used to having certain processes and practices when it comes to executing a project and work management aims to bring the same approach to other company activities as well. This allows making them more efficient and easier to estimate.

Tools

To execute an efficient work management process, team leaders use a variety of tools. Here is a list of the most common choices:

• Resource management – to effciently utilizes resources.
• Collaboration – to encourage the team memebers to work together.
• Project management – to deliver results on time and on budget.
• Customer relationship management – to ensure the results client expectations and needs.
• Reporting – to track achievements and performance.
• Time management – to reduce waste and estimate accuratelly.
• Task management – to give the team everything needed for task execution.

Work Management Process

Thi type of management is usually executed in 6 specific steps. Depending on the work in question these steps may vary a little, but most teams use the following process:

1. Work identification – identify what needs to be done, how will it be achieved and when it should be completed.
2. Work planning – Create a plan to execute the work, see what resources will be needed and provide time estimates.
3. Work scheduling – Make a schedule (Gantt chart) for the planned tasks and estimate the excution timelines.
4. Work execution – Get the team working on the planned tasks.
5. Work review – Review the team’s progress and identify any potential bottlenecks.
6. Work analysis – Review your process and identify what can be improved in the future efforts.

How to Implement Work Management

Work management implementation is a continuous effort that cannot be just done one time. It will require constant improvement and effort from the team/company leader and the team itself.

It is usually best to start with one or two successful practices and then start adding to that process. The ideal setup will be slightly different for each team but that does not mean you cannot copy an example and then make it your own. Download the ‘Team leader’s guide to work management’ for a quick review of the practices anytime you need them.

Lastly, good work management tooling will help you implement good practices more seamlessly. A tool like Teamhood will help you keep track of the ideas, plan, execute and then review performance with various built-in reports and features.