Introducing Workflow in Project Management

The boundaries of modern project management are defined by its practicability: ideas requiring substantially more time and resources are silently disregarded. One of them is workflow.

90% of project managers consider project schedule and workflow identical as both talks about the sequence of processes (or activities) to be executed. Actually, the classic project management theory did quite well without the workflow definition. Until digitization came into play and bumped into the unknown. Crenger.com dubbed it the job workflow.

The key differentiator between the schedule and the workflow is the sequence, not the process. Workflow deals with the different sequence tied to the project team member or a company employee. Workflow is always personified: it is the employee's perspective on the project or business.

?Workflow vs Schedule ?

In a trivial case of a one-man project, workflow equals schedule. Bigger team and collaboration move both apart.

Being made of the same "bricks", workflow and schedule do not overlap. The workflow may cross a number of projects, include unplanned issues like the change order, training, past project issues fixing, and business development – the biggest part of the company overhead. The schedule does not contain the mentioned activities.

The quintessence of the workflow "variance" is the domain expert multitasking. It is never confined to a single project.?

The schedule is planned and targets project execution, and workflow – planned on the spot and aims at the resources' optimal use. Workflow is a cause, while a schedule is its effect. Workflow is a journey, schedule is a destination. How we handle the journey, will determine the destination.

From a math point of view, workflow is an ordered list of activities, while a schedule is a unidirectional graph.

The schedule activities are long – from days to months, and the workflow ones are short –from hours to a couple of days.

?Workflow & Business Sustainability

I worked for a number of companies that left the megaprojects business. It was a very painful decision, the root causes of losses were unknown. ?With the new knowledge gained, I can now say that these companies tried and failed in workflow management despite being strong in project scheduling.

The biggest hurdle to effective workflow management is the huge volume of information to be processed. It is roughly 10X bigger than the one needed for the project schedule. This information may explain why some tasks are behind the schedule or end up in the results rejection, or whether resources are underused.?Workflow is the actual culprit of the project failure's high rate. In other words, to advance in project management, first, we need to identify and solve the workflow management challenges.

Albert Einstein is quoted as saying "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them". This new thinking is now molded in the furnace of digital transformation.

?Resources' accountability

Workflow management focuses on two tasks – resources' accountability and optimization.

By Crenger.com, accountability is the ability of a person to quantify her/his workflow steps in terms of time spent and the solid results obtained.

The ability word in the above definition cannot be replaced with the responsibility, as the former is less dependent on the person's work ethic and more on her/his expertise and the software tools' friendliness. My past accountability experience is gruesome. I always cheated the software as my true answers were not covered by the available options. What if the other team members experienced the same? Without accountability, projects cannot be effectively controlled. In other words,

The opposite of the resources' accountability is the project's failure.

Digitization quantifies accountability and makes it fully transparent to businesses by turning it into a stream of personified business data. It is a solid foundation for short-term planning covering the project's current tasks, and for the long-term one aiming at identifying the recurring work patterns and workflow automation. Both are at the heart of Business Process Management.

Accountability data structure

In its simplest form, the accountability data represents the work hours spent on the execution of some task from the project schedule.?The user interface for daily reporting the work hours is shown above.

On the left-hand side, it contains a tree of work packages that may be expanded into the list of tasks. The work specifics are captured with the keywords and work hours which may be added in the right-side window.

Being sufficient for the project control, this data format does not say anything about the duration and status of the person's current assignment. So the resources planning for the coming activities is not possible.

To meet the duration and status requirements, the data format should additionally include the executed work description. It contains the textual part and the project scope object like the P&ID, its item, the group of items, drawing, document, alarm, interlock, terminal, outstanding issue, bid, purchase order, the vendor submittal, etc. ?The quicker the scope objects search, the better the project visibility for the project team is and the easier it is to describe the job assignments.

The graphical user interface allows the user to link assignments – a critical feature in dealing with workflows. The user interface for the advanced data format is shown below.

Workflow impact on schedule

Once the accountability data collected, it may be used for the next activity planning and execution. Both implies the workflow optimization.

Optimization deals with two tasks. First is to fill the schedule activity "jar" with the named workflow "bits". ?Second is to manage the scope object approvals. Both tasks are non-trivial for automation. It will be discussed elsewhere.

Reprinted from crenger.com