ENTERPRISE WORK MANAGEMENT: How to Slay the Dragon of Enterprise Work CONTENTS The Dragon of Enterprise Work 3 The Complete Enterprise Work Lifecycle 17 The Ugly Face of the Dragon 5 The Enterprise Work Management Approach 19 When the Dragon Breathes Fire 7 Now You’re Ready for Battle 21 Don’t Just Treat the Burn 9 Lifecycles Aren’t One-Size-Fits-All 22 The Problem is Bigger than You Think 11 The Rewards of Slaying the Dragon 23 “Pet” Dragons Cost You, Big Time 13 Your Ultimate Weapon 24 15 THE DRAGON OF ENTERPRISE WORK 3 THIS MEANS WAR If you’re reading this eBook, it’s probably because you’ve got a pest control problem. This isn’t just an irritating lizard infestation, though. This is larger and nastier than lizards; it’s a huge, nasty, fire-breathing, hard to ignore, dragon. The dragon of work chaos. And you need to know how to slay it. Well, there’s no need to fear. This eBook will teach you the right—and necessary—weapons to help you extinguish the fire, examine your burn wounds, and exterminate the work chaos dragon for good. 4 THE UGLY FACE OF THE DRAGON Work chaos is the fiend that plagues enterprise teams. It emerges as a result of serious work mismanagement and it can take many forms, including: Random Input Wasted tIme. dIsconnected no adoptIon. pooR vIsIbIlIty pooR ResouRce Processes. Your team spends too actIvItIes. Project managers, Into WoRk. vIsIbIlIty. No one knows the much time on phone Your strategy direction team members, and Every person and team It’s difficult to know ‘correct’ way to make a calls, in email, making is disconnected from executives don’t engage is using different siloed how effectively or request, so requests desk visits, attending commitments, which in your tools because tools for work, like ineffectively resources come in at all times of status meetings, and are disconnected the tools aren’t relevant document sharing, are utilized to deliver the day, in all shapes trying to gather data from work, which is to their work, and PPM, spreadsheets, on your business and sizes—without the instead of actually disconnected from have terrible usability. email, whiteboards, commitments. key information you executing. performance tracking task management need. It’s insane trying and management, etc. tools, etc., which to keep up with them all. leads to scattered work data that takes hours to gather. All you really need is to know who’s working on what, if people are working on the right work, do they have the resources they need, and will work be completed on time. But every time you try, you end up getting burned by the dragon. 5 WHEN THE DRAGON BREATHES FIRE... Unfortunately, the effects of not exterminating the chaos dragon are that you and your team are: buRned out. The chaos and frustration of disconnected work leads to unhealthy stress, long hours, too many caffeinated drinks, and eventually, extreme dissatisfaction with your job. RunnIng with youR hair on fire. Work chaos and low visibility mean that you and your team members are always running around like your hair’s on fire trying to get the data that you need to appease executives and stakeholders. constantly facIng fire drills. Without the information you need for process improvement or the right amount of resource visibility, you have no way to justify priorities or timelines, which results in constantly putting out fires instead of doing strategic work. 6 EVERYTHING YOU’VE TRIED moRe people. ONLY TREATS THE BURN “If we just had a few more headcount, that would solve all our problems.” Managers have tried all kinds of things to help slay the chaos dragon that plagues them. Unfortunately, these things merely treat their burn wounds instead of slaying the actual problem: the dragon. busIness books. methodology meRRy-go-Rounds. “Maybe if everybody reads this revolutionary new book, it will “Maybe going Lean this month will change everything.” help us function better...” neW poInt solutIons. IndustRy Trends. “We’ll just use another free tool to “The blogosphere is saying that all we patch that hole in our process.” have to do is empower people more.” consultants. If you’ve ever tried any of those things, then you get the idea. Here’s the thing, every single one “All we have to do is get an expert in here of those “helps” costs money. And that’s an awful to teach us how to be more organized.” lot of money to spend on temporary fixes. Now, there’s a reason their effect isn’t permanent. It’s The average consultant charges $125 per hour. (That’s $1000 because we have a bigger problem on our hands per day!) 1 that they fail to address. 7 THE PROBLEM IS BIGGER THAN YOU THINK The truth is, the dragon you’re facing isn’t actually the dragon is the creator of the chaos: a nasty thing called disconnectedness. than five? Yeah, that’s nuts! And chances are, you use your own “favorite tools” to manage your work life while each individual on your team is using their own. No wonder it’s next to impossible to get updates on what’s really going on. tools don’t play nicely with one another. That means getting project and work data has to happen manually, which wastes a ton of time. With disconnected tools and processes, not only are team members in the dark about what the rest of their team is doing and where dependencies are, but other departments in the organization are having the same problems, so trying to stay connected interdepartmentally is just…(you guessed it!) more chaos. "PET" DRAGONS COST YOU, BIG TIME What organizations fail to realize is how much all this disconnectedness is costing them, in dollars, efficiency, and productivity. Silos. lost data. faIluRe. Individuals working in different, Storing data in disconnected PMI reports that less than disconnected tools inevitably tools with disconnected two-thirds of projects actually results in team silos and little- processes is like playing meet their goals and business to-no work visibility. information hot potato. Work intent. In fact, it is estimated data gets tossed around that for every $1 billion spent “As systems fail to interact from tool to tool and person on a failed project, $135 million 3 wasted worker and data becomes trapped to person, making gathering is lost forever…unrecoverable.” 5 hours/day, at an and unavailable to deci- average salary of information and compiling $50k, costs you sion-makers outside the silo, reports a time-consuming, $128/day, $638/week, people are less likely to inter- error-ridden nightmare. FrustRatIon. $2,550/month, and act…they avoid sharing data $7,650/quarter. and information outside of Disconnection causes individual team members massive amounts Multiply that by 6 their silos. It’s a vicious cycle, Wasted tIme. people on your team one that can cost an organi- of stress because of low visibility and you’re wasting Disconnectedness means more into work and dependencies, $91,800/year! 3 zation in agility, productivity, employee time is spent in status inefficient processes, and and responsiveness.” 2 meetings and emails while scattered work information. In —Evan Rosen everyone tries frantically to get fact, three-fourths of American on the same page. It also means workers describe their work that manual processes eat up a as stressful. 6 lost WoRk. ton of your average worker’s day. When you have work requests flying at you from all directions, sometimes they fall through dIstRactIons. the cracks and time is lost. This Businesses lose $650 billion Workplace stress costs U.S. employers an can hold back entire projects, a year related to the lack of estimated $200 billion per year in absen- tangle up your resources, dis- teeism, lower productivity, staff turnover, job performance and creativity worker compensation, medical insurance rupt strategies, and jeopardize due to distractions. 4 and other stress-related expenses. 7 your competitive advantage. 9 SLAYING THE DRAGON REQUIRES A DIFFERENT WEAPON The best way to eliminate disconnectedness and chaos is to unify. Unifying, in the correct way, requires that you start to look at the way you do work in a different way. There are two crucial parts to unifying: 1. unIfy youR tools. Using five or more tools scatters your work data, low- ers visibility, kills productivity, and increases chaos. It’s time to stop disconnectedness once and for all by implementing one unified, centralized tool for manag- ing all of your work. 2. unIfy youR pRocesses. Disconnected tools inevitably leads to disconnected processes, especially when you’re using separate tools to manage different stages of the project life- cycle and additional tools to manage the rest of your work. The secret to unifying processes is to manage the end-to-end lifecycle of enterprise work, not just parts of the project lifecycle. 10 MANAGING THE COMPLETE Most PPM tools fail to accommodate work other than ENTERPRISE WORK LIFECYCLE projects (i.e. unstructured work, everyday“lights on” work, ad hoc Unfortunately, most of the solutions available to help requests, etc.). And PPM tools manage work, fail to manage it through the end-to-end work may work fine for project planning and coordinating, lifecycle. At best, they only focus on one or two stages.. but they leave you with gaps to fill for the rest. There are thousands of task management tools out there for you to choose from, but they are usually as simplistic as apps and they only help manage work execution; you’ll ENTERPRISE have to find other tools to help you plan, prioritize, collabo- WORK rate, and measure.