Integrating Work Management

I have found that work is managed at many levels in organizations and in the community.  A means to dynamically seamlessly integrate all management levels will provide a great leap forward.

In broad terms, the levels can be described as:

·         Strategic – This is generally managed at a high level in corporate and functional areas and provides direction, with a framework for initiatives and strategic organizational work.  It contains little detail.

·         Operational or project – This level generally provides the detail required to implement higher level strategies.  It aligns with, and fits into, the strategic framework and provides more detail.  It details what needs to be done in terms of large tasks, but doesn’t detail what each person needs to do to complete the tasks.

·         Tactical or Team – This level generally focuses on how teams need to work together to complete operational or project tasks.  It aligns with, and fits into, the operational framework and provides the detail of who needs to do what, when and with whom.

·         Personal – This level manages work from a personal perspective.  It aligns with, and fits into, the tactical and team level of work and provides the detail of what each person needs to do.  Personal work management often involves time management.

Each of these levels of work management is usually addressed in a different way, and this means that the levels are not effectively integrated.  So workflows between levels depend largely on manual integration methods.  These methods usually waste a lot of time and effort, and often miss important information.

Until all these levels of work management are seamlessly integrated, an effective global solution for work management is not possible.   Key processes at all levels need to be standardized and automated so people can still work together, even when they employ a wide range of management styles, or operate at different levels.

TASKey has spent over 10 years developing a solution to integrate all levels of work management.  Work frameworks at more aggregated levels provide the framework that is required for more detailed levels to be integrated.

This integration with the levels above required the use of web and mobile software to consistently allow strategic, operational and tactical work management to be integrated dynamically.

The most difficult feat was to link personal work management to organizational work management through team work management.  This is where, from a change management perspective, the most resistance is experienced: especially when people want to do their own thing, and are sometimes uncomfortable with being held accountable to get work done

The key was to develop a solution that provides both social and work benefits.  In this way people can initially manage the more social things they need to do without worrying about organizational issues.  When an individual is comfortable that the solution works for social activities, the step to incorporate work things becomes more manageable.

TASKey has developed a relatively simple method for people to manage the things they need to do over the internet and mobile web browsers.  A website will soon be available to make it easy for people to manage the things they are doing or need to do in a similar way to social networking.

When people start to feel comfortable with this social networking solution for managing work, the personal level will be hooked into the other levels of management to provide a complete integrated work management solution from the strategic level of management to the work people are actually doing.

This connectivity will allow managers at all levels to manage in close to real-time, on the basis of what is actually happening.  There are still many challenges ahead, but a working solution to integrating all work management will provide a great leap forward. Visit http://www.me2team.com and http://www.taskey.com for more information.

By,

Dr Neil Miller