A Quick Guide to Understanding Workflows – Definition, Types, Examples
Table of Contents
Even with the most diligent workers, organizations around the world often grapple with missed deadlines. What could be going wrong? According to the Anatomy of Work index, workers spend 60% of their time at work doing work – mundane, repetitive tasks that eat up time that could be spent on skilled work.
This is where workflows help. Defining tasks, assigning responsibilities, and setting deadlines help teams collaborate, meet project goals, and enhance efficiency.
What is a Workflow?
Workflows are a pre-set series of steps that execute a process from the start to its end. Workflows allow stakeholders to keep track of tasks, increasing visibility and efficiency across teams and eventually the organization.
Let’s look at the different types of workflows.
Not all workflows are created equal. Every organization has its own unique needs and processes, which require different workflows. Before creating a workflow for your organization, it is important to understand the different types so you can choose the best one for your needs.
- Sequential workflows: These workflows operate in a specific order where each new task depends on the previous one. Such workflows are used in processes like approvals or employee onboarding.
- Parallel workflows: Here, all tasks occur at the same time, without any of them depending on the previous one. These are perfect for projects, such as marketing campaigns, where multiple tasks can happen at the same time.
- Conditional workflows: These workflows change according to pre-set rules, triggers, or decisions. The next task depends on the outcome of a previous task. For instance, a support ticket can flow to IT for technical issues and to accounting for billing queries.
- Case workflows: Processes that don’t follow a rigid sequence require flexibility that case workflows can offer. These are usually found in healthcare, legal, and customer support industries that deal with individual cases.
- Automated workflows: Repetitive tasks, such as generating reports, sending reminders, etc., can benefit from automated workflows, keeping your team focused on critical issues.
- Digital workflows: These reduce paper usage and make it easier for diverse teams to collaborate across time zones and give equal access to information.
What are the Benefits of Using Workflows?
Even with a wide range of workflow types, the principal thought behind setting up workflows is the same – to establish a clear path and to ensure everyone knows how the business operates. Besides making work smoother and running an efficient team, setting up a workflow at the workplace offers several more benefits, including:
- Enhance Efficiency: Templates and business process automation can help move things faster and in alignment with operational processes.
- Improve Collaboration: Even with a geographically diverse team, teams can stay connected and on the same level without relying on meetings or calls.
- Achieve More: Improve resource allocation and utilize time, people, and tools efficiently to boost productivity.
- Make Smarter Decisions: The complete transparency of a project makes it easier to make smarter decisions, faster.
- Optimize Tasks: Workflows can help automate repetitive tasks, reduce back-and-forth communication, and eliminate silos.
- Ensure Seamless Operations: Workflows remove approval roadblocks and bottlenecks, ensuring work continues uninterrupted.
But how does an organization recognize processes that can benefit from a workflow? Let’s look at some typical organizational tasks.
Identifying Workflows in Your Organization
Consider all the processes in your organization. Do you spot any repetitive tasks? Such processes usually cross into various departments and are crucial for seamless day-to-day operations. You will notice these tasks require flawless coordination, many levels of approvals, and back-and-forth communication.
Do you recognize any of these workflows in your business?
Product Feature Requests: New product ideas, changes, or updates undergo rigorous checks, including prioritizing, reviewing, and implementing before being finalized.
Document Approvals: There is often a hierarchy that ensures the right stakeholders review and approve crucial documents before finalizing them.
Sales Order Processing: A series of tasks are undertaken – order creation, approvals, inventory checks, and fulfillment – before a sale can be processed efficiently.
Travel Request Authorization: Employee travel requests go through various stages of approval, based on budget, necessity, and availability, to ensure policy compliance.
Purchase Order Workflow: This task involves approval from multiple departments, taking into account budgets and prioritizing organizational needs.
New Employee Onboarding: Ensuring a new employee gets off to a smooth start requires a series of coordinated tasks – collecting documents, setting up accounts, assigning training programs, etc.
IT Bug Tracking: From registering a bug to assigning a team and finding a fix, IT departments require a workflow that ensures issues are handled systematically.
Now that you know how to recognize workflows, let’s look at creating them for your workplace.
7 Steps to Creating a Workflow
Workflow planning is a skill that can be acquired with a little practice. The idea is to create a workflow template that will identify and set clear priorities and deadlines. It should be designed to help eliminate time wastage and also reduce redundant meetings and information overload for your employees.
Step 1: Ideation and Information Gathering
Every workflow is founded on an idea. Sometimes the idea arrives packaged and ready to be implemented. At times, you need to work on the idea to give it a better shape. This is where guiding principles can help.
The first step of the workflow process is to gather raw information and brainstorm ideas with the team. Look for project limitations, restrictions, or specific requirements, if any, before moving on to the next step.
Step 2: Craft Details
The second step is where you flesh out details. Gather all relevant data, information, or business needs. This helps in defining project objectives and identifying key stakeholders. With the right information, it becomes easier to create and share the project plan with stakeholders. Next, schedule the project kick-off meeting and define the project scope. Finally, outline milestones and project deliverables.
Not every workflow requires these details, but it helps to get everything ready before progressing, as it eliminates the constant back-and-forth of asking for more information or clarity at every stage.
Step 3: Prioritization and Resourcing
The next step is workload management. Allocating resources smartly and creatively requires understanding your team’s capacity and existing priorities.
Done correctly, an effective workflow helps maximize employee performance, reduces uncertainties, and encourages creativity. At the end of the day, your employees must feel satisfied with a job well done rather than be overwhelmed by it.
Automation is a great way to ensure work is accurately routed to the right member automatically. Give team members the freedom to make adjustments, if necessary.
Step 4: Development and Review
We’re now at the main section of the workflow. This is where project deliverables are developed, reviewed, revised, and finally approved by the right stakeholders.
Without a streamlined workflow, this work is manual and a lot of time is wasted in simply getting the right information at the right time, whether it’s documents or approvals. Consider a central repository that makes it easier for everyone involved in the project. This way, team members spend less time on work, and utilize their time more effectively in the actual responsibilities.
Step 5: Progress Tracking
Project transparency is a crucial factor in ensuring timely completion. It is important to make sure everyone involved in the project is on the same page about the status of the project. Data and information are often scattered and team members waste a lot of time in collecting information or duplicating efforts.
Sharing project status lets everyone connected with it understand where work is happening or getting stuck. If there is any delay, the status report ensures stakeholders are aware of it – and the expected timeline to resolving it.
Step 6: Approval
Even with everything else on track, sometimes a project can be held up because of a simple thing – a final approval. But getting that can be challenging if leaders are busy and not accessible.
Putting in an approval workflow can automate this step and make it easier for senior stakeholders to give their go-ahead to the project.
Step 7: Reporting and Learning
A project could have been managed effortlessly or it ran into several roadblocks. Either way, it presents itself as an opportunity to learn from the initiative. Reporting on the progress and the outcome of the project gives the team and other members of the organization a glimpse into what worked and what didn’t. This is an excellent way to optimize future projects and to refine the existing workflow.
Wrapping Up
Workflows are important tools that help optimize operations in an organization. Whether you’re in the business of producing goods or offering a service, the right software for workflow can make a difference in how individuals and organizations complete their work.
Learn how ProHance can help
Piyush Gupta
Sr Vice President, Head - Research & Innovation, ProHance
