What Is Work Management Software and How It Can Help You
If you work on both project and non-project tasks but you still haven’t found the right piece of software yet, you might be looking in the wrong places.
While advanced task or project management software might help you to a certain extent, to manage non-project activities like attending conferences or answering emails you’ll need to consider a more versatile solution: work management software.
What is Work Management Software?
You might have heard this term a couple of times before — and probably just as many definitions — to the point where you’re wondering if it’s just another buzzword or something you really need.
Work management software is a digital tool that allows you to plan, track, organize, and review both projects and non-project tasks with the goal of improving your business results and team performance.
But where did this need for work management software as a distinct tool come from?
People commonly search for project management (PM) software as a way to manage all their professional work. The catch is that most of them actually have other activities besides project-related tasks. What they want instead is an app that allows them to plan, track, manage, and organize all their work, including what’s out of project management software’s scope.
In this case, they need a tool that can help them take their work outside of the rigorous structure of a project. Work management software provides this flexibility, allowing work to be done and tracked beyond the limits of a project or methodology and without having to depend on clients, strict budgets, or other tasks.
NOTE
There are teams or freelancers who only need an advanced task management software to help them sort out their duties. These teams and individuals might not require to track their time, invoice a client, or create reports — modules you’d otherwise find in a project management or work management software. If you work in one and want to save money, use a single task management software separately without depending on multiple complex workflows, projects, clients, or resources simultaneously in their work process.
Work Management Software Features
As mentioned before, a work management tool reunites all the functionalities you need to execute and monitor your work from start to finish and keep your resources, costs, and time frames balanced. Common work management software features include:
- Advanced task management — Create and assign tasks, manage priorities, and track your team’s work to stay within budgets and deadlines.
- Centralized communication — Collaborate through message boards or discussion threads, leave comments, and receive notifications whenever a change occurs to a task to stay up-to-date.
- File storage and sharing — Use the tool as a centralized place to securely store all of your documents and images and access them whenever you need to.
- Time management — Track work hours, create timesheets, and share time reports to identify potential bottlenecks in your workflow and keep your clients in the feedback loop.
- Resource management — Schedule out your team and see who’s working on what to avoid distributing more work that they can chew.
- Kanban boards — Create workflows to manage work on a visual board through a series of sequential steps.
- Reporting capabilities — Create and send reports on time, costs, and resources to oversee progress, spot potential problems, and update your clients.
Certain work management software options also offer modules or features that are specific to your industry like proofreading, prototyping, CRM, invoicing, or integrations with third-party tools.
How Is Work Management Software Different from Project Management Software
Work management software is a relatively new type of digital tool that is still being confused with project management software. Some don’t notice any difference between them, others regard project management tools as just another type of work management software.
To handle work in general, you commonly need all of the essential features mentioned above. Here’s a graphic to help you see exactly where each functionality stands:
As you can see most of these features are useful for handling both project and non-project activities. Gantt Charts though are specific to project-related work and don’t have much use for other activities since their focus is on tracking project schedules while non-project work is commonly not restricted by set schedules or dependencies.
The real difference between how you use a feature for project or non-project activities lies in your approach to work.
Work management software helps you tackle both your project and non-project duties at the same time. It offers more flexibility, allowing you as a manager and your team members to handle both project and non-project activities through your own workflows.
Project management software, on the other hand, is based on a set of rules and is usually paired with a project management method, methodology, or framework, following a rigid structure that doesn’t always allow room for work that’s not related to a project.
When it comes to work, you don’t always start with a plan. Sometimes you don’t even have a clear deadline or time frame in mind. Project management though always requires structured planning. This means you’ve got a clear deadline, budget limit, activity list, documented plans, and resources that are scheduled out from the beginning.
Work management software gives you the freedom to start with just one individual task, work on it, develop it in time, or even turn it into a project if it requires more steps to complete. Answering emails daily, sending out invoices, or buying new office supplies will never become a project.
Work management software should be easier to use and have a smoother learning curve. In reality, though, an advanced tool like this one has many more different features that can make it more difficult to use than simple PM software. Comparing them in this sense might not be the best way of deciding which tool of the two is right for you.
Work Management Software Benefits
We’ve already mentioned how work management tools reunite a variety of modules and features into one single system so, naturally, its benefits are both general and feature-specific.
In fact, its main advantages are just these: you no longer have to use multiple different tools and waste money paying for them since you’re only buying one solution and not 3–5 different ones.
But what are the extended benefits of these features when applied to work outside and on a project?
- Balance schedules — A resource scheduler, for instance, offers better transparency and visibility into your team’s schedule, besides projects. This way you can assign each team member to new tasks and still keep their workloads balanced.
- Maintain control of your time — Tracking your time on non-project work, besides your regular projects, allows you to be more productive and self-aware of your efforts, make better time estimates, and keep your team accountable for their work.
- Track your work — Creating a report for all your tasks lets you monitor work progress, spot issues, and share updates with clients or other stakeholders.
- Organize tasks — Then there’s task management. I can’t stress enough how important having structured task lists is when you’re working on multiple projects. Even more so when you’ve got additional non-project tasks just screaming for your attention. Most work management tools come with extra features to help you prioritize, track, and collaborate on each one of your tasks so none are left uncompleted.
- Visualize your workflow — If you’re not a fan of detailed activity lists, you’ll be happy to find out that certain work management platforms offer Kanban boards, a way for you to segment and visualize all your duties as they go through different workflow stages. Just move them with a simple drag and drop to the corresponding stage and you’re all done.
- Collaborate effectively — Perhaps the largest benefit that binds all the others together is the ability to collaborate freely across multiple projects, and tasks. Whether it’s sharing a file or just leaving a comment to offer feedback, work management apps extend collaboration opportunities beyond a project.
On a general level, choosing work management software in favour of a specific tool, let’s say a task management or time tracking one, will improve how you tackle your tasks and help you meet your client requirements whether these are related to tasks, projects, time, costs, or anything else.
Your entire work process will improve, allowing managers to see how work is distributed throughout the entire company, not just within projects or at a team-level. Implicitly, this increases your work efficiency and productivity so you can deliver higher-quality results.
Who’s It For?
Think about your daily work. Is it exclusively project-based? Does it focus mainly on non-project tasks? Or is it a mixture of these two?
Overall, work management software is the perfect solution for project-based businesses who regularly have additional non-project activities. However, if you’re only working with projects, choosing a PM software instead will be enough.
Move on to prioritize your needs, both general and particular. Are you paid by the hour? Make sure your next tool comes with time tracking. Do you use only software to collaborate? Aim for strong communication and sharing functions. Is more than one person going to be working on single tasks? Make sure you’ve got multi-user assigning.
If you don’t know where to start, have a look at the tools you’re already working with. See what features your team is using and which are never used. Also, ask yourself: Do you really need an additional tool? If you only need to work on a couple of non-project tasks and record your work hours, a task management tool with time tracking functions or integrations could be sufficient. If, however, you’ve got multiple tasks, projects, budgets, timelines, and resources all going on simultaneously, you’ll want to switch to a solution that reunites everything under a single platform.
Finally, consider your team’s size. As an individual, you’ll only need a simple tool to help you sort your tasks, track your time, and send out invoices regularly. There are a couple project management and work management options out there that are free so you won’t have to invest too much unless you’re looking for something that packs in more power.
For a small or medium team though, you’ll have to go through the other factors to choose a tool. Again, a project management tool is a good fit if your team mainly works on projects within a predefined method, methodology, or framework.
Work management software is better suited when you’ve got both project and non-project duties and several different teams collaborating across multiple tasks.
The moment you add a couple more teams, departments, and perhaps even company branches to your business, you’ll definitely need a work management tool.
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