Workflow Management vs Project Management

Pipefy lets you optimize business processes through smarter workflows. It brings customers, vendors, and partners onto the same platform as your internal team, making it easy to collaborate and track a process from start to finish.

Nifty as workflow management software

Workflow management is part of project management, but they’re not interchangeable terms. Project management is done over a specific duration of time that ends with a deliverable, either a product or service. Workflow management, on the other hand, is optimizing a sequence of tasks or processes necessary to complete a task.

That doesn’t mean that the two are completely different—in fact, the two are complementary to one another. Both serve to deliver a specific outcome. Workflow is part of any project, and without workflow management to keep that process running smoothly, projects will fall behind schedule and costs will balloon.

While there are similarities between workflow management and project management, there are also differences. Projects end, but workflow repeat, as it’s a function within an organization. It can even be a standalone process, such as creating documentation or scheduling appointments.

Projects are about plans, overseeing processes and teams and managing tasks, while workflows are focused at the task level, connecting tasks to optimize the process and deliver greater efficiency. But both can be served with project management software.

ProjectManager is cloud-based work management software that helps manage workflow. Build automated workflows, create task approval processes and ensure everyone is being productive while maintaining quality processes. Try ProjectManager free today!

ProjectManager

Workflow Management vs. Business Process Management (BPM)

Though workflow management and business process management (BPM) are similar, there are differences in the type of process management. A workflow management system is a tool that helps you set up and monitor the execution of your tasks. It’s usually formatted like a flowchart. It’s often not detailed, but clear enough for teams to follow.

Think of workflow management as a less involved form of BPM. Workflow management captures the workflow process, and some tools will even let you automate basic workflows. You can use this for a variety of workflows, such as onboarding a team or document management. Workflow management tools are people-focused rather than process-focused. BPM tools are more process-oriented.

BPM is about capturing and improving business processes. It’s used to improve the efficiency of an organization. First, you need to identify the current state of the business processes and document these actions. Once the company’s full processes are mapped out, you can analyze the BPM. This should expose bottlenecks in your process and help you reduce costs and improve processes by making insightful changes.

The difference between workflow management and BPM is that the former is more geared towards organizing people and documents, following the right steps at the right time. The latter is about business processes and how to improve them. Workflow management coordinates people and software systems, while BPM coordinates how resources in an organization interact. BPM systems are more complex and involved in continuous improvement, while workflow management tools just automate steps in a process.

What are the key components of workflows?

These components can be translated to objects, rules, and events that make up the language of a workflow automation system. They can be assembled into tasks, assigned to users, and tracked to completion, taking them from concepts to real, actionable work.

A workflow management system allows organizations to define and control the routine, repeatable activities associated with their business processes. Today’s best workflow management systems are software-as-a-service (SaaS) products that make it easy and affordable to automate these activities, even when they involve both internal and external stakeholders.

Workflow management vs. business process management (BPM)

Workflow management is an element of a larger area of focus: business process management. The two terms are often used interchangeably. Business process management focuses on optimizing an organization’s entire set of processes as well as individual ones—it’s a high-level look at how effective and efficient an organization is. Workflow management is part of this, but zeroes in on clearly defined steps and tasks that make the bigger picture possible.

List of Top 14 Workflow Management Software

1 . ProofHub

Workflow management tool ProofHub

ProofHub is an intuitive project management software that brings flexibility to the way project managers and teams manage their work. It is without a doubt one of the most versatile software solutions for project management and team collaboration.

Why use ProofHub?

The best part about ProofHub is that it works for any business or team. That means whether you’re a part of a small team or a large enterprise, you can trust ProofHub to help you bring sanity to your projects, teams, and communications.

Visualize and prioritize tasks

Collaborate seamlessly

Keep track of progress with ProofHub custom reports

2. Nintex

Nintex as a Workflow Automation Solutions

Nintex is a top workflow management software solution for companies. The aim of this solution is to help businesses automate their processes easily and quickly. It helps to automate the processes of widely used collaboration and content management platforms, linking cloud workflows, on-premise systems, and mobile users.

Why use Nintex?

What makes this solution one of the top-rated workflow management solutions is the fact that its ease of use. Nintex enables teams to easily streamline work processes, integrate content, and achieve better outcomes. The application provides a people-driven design that is ideal for both everyday processes and complex elaborated procedures.

3. Bit.ai

bit.ai as workflow management

Documents are the lifeblood of a company. Agreements, proposals, plans, contracts, datasheets, designs – every company has an incredible amount of company knowledge it needs to keep track of. Luckily, with software like Bit.ai, you can take your document & workflow management to the next level and set your team up for maximum efficiency.

Why Use Bit.ai?

Bit.ai allows you to create, share, manage, organize and track all company documents and knowledge – under one roof! On this powerful platform, you can create smart workspaces around projects, departments, teams, and clients to keep your data organized. All your documents can be shared (or kept private) with anyone in or outside your organization. Moreover, Bit allows you and your employees to collaborate on the documents in real-time.

That’s not it! With Bit, you don’t have to spend hours jumping from one platform to another to find and share the right information. Bit seamlessly integrates with 100+ platforms, including OneDrive, Google Drive, Typeform, Tableau, & Airtable.

4. ProcessMaker

ProcessMaker - BPM & Workflow Software Solution

ProcessMaker is an open-source business process management (BPM) and workflow software. This tool is designed to automate form-based, approval-driven workflow and improve the way information moves between data and systems. It provides an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface that is easy to use and extremely cost-effective.

Why use ProcessMaker?

The quality that makes ProcessMaker an ideal choice for professionals is that it’s lightweight, extremely efficient, and has a low overhead. Today, a large number of business analysts and subject matter experts rely on ProcessMaker for automating workflow, communicating with their teams, and achieving more.

5. ProProfs Project

ProProfs

ProProfs Project is a smart workflow management software that focuses on work planning and team collaboration to help project managers and teams get to the finish line efficiently. You can easily create custom workflows and visualize the project overview using Kanban boards and Gantt charts. With actionable reports, teams can easily identify bottlenecks to make informed decisions for improvement in performance.

Here’s how we evaluated the best

First things first, the purpose of any tool is to make your life easy and save you a lot of time. So when you’re out there searching for a workflow tool (or any other tool), make sure that it eliminates all the manual labor and saves you time and energy. Apart from this, here’s the checklist we used to put together the list of best workflow management tools and apps for you and your team. Have a look.

The workflow management system you choose to use, will be an advanced platform that will help you improve the way you work. It gives you the ability to create and optimize your work processes in an ideal way, find redundant tasks and roadblocks, identify potential areas of improvement, and achieve new levels of efficiency.

That’s all folks! This was our list of best workflow management software platforms that every professional should consider using. Hopefully, we’ve helped you identify what works for your business (in every situation). Go ahead! Choose the one you want to use to handle the type of workflows you use every day.

Vartika Kashyap is the Chief Marketing Officer at ProofHub and has been one of the LinkedIn Top Voices in 2018. Her articles are inspired by office situations and work-related events. She likes to write about productivity, team building, work culture, leadership, entrepreneurship among others and contributing to a better workplace is what makes her click.

Authorship:

https://www.projectmanager.com/blog/what-is-workflow-management
https://www.pipefy.com/blog/what-is-workflow-management/
https://www.proofhub.com/articles/workflow-management-software
Workflow management

SLA indicators can let you know which ones are the most pressing, and which ones can wait while you handle other tasks. The dashboard of your WMS should use color codes or a similar tool to draw your attention to the most pressing workflows.

What is workflow management?

Workflow management is creating and optimizing the paths for data in order to complete items in a given process. Workflow management includes finding redundant tasks, mapping out the workflow in an ideal state, automating the process, and identifying bottlenecks or areas for improvement.

Predefined steps

Steps are a predefined framework of tasks in the workflow. They provide clarity on what happens at each stage of the workflow until the endpoint. Steps may be manual or automated based on different workflows.

Stakeholders

Conditions

Conditions are rules for the workflow. They determine when a particular step is completed and what the next step should be. Conditions are most useful for approval-type workflows where some steps are skipped based on the information.

Here’s an example of a workflow:

Example of Workflow

1. Clearly defined workflows

There are often hundreds of workflows in each team and department. These workflows are hidden among different tools and employees. The sign of good workflow management shows when the entire organization is aware of all these workflows.

2. Prioritized and streamlined workflows

For example, start with customer-facing workflows like sales processes and discount approvals, or employee-centered workflows like hiring and onboarding. These are crucial workflows that have a huge impact on an organization.

There are subsidiary workflows running inside these primary workflows. They should be given the next priority and always be focused on serving their primary workflows. For example, creative request workflows of marketing should be prioritized behind the important sales workflows.

3. Regular monitoring and optimization

The only way to have highly efficient workflows is through optimization. Your first attempt at building a workflow, no matter how smart and data-driven it is, will still be inefficient. Workflows on paper are perfect and inhuman. Workflows that run in real-time are imperfect and human.

Workflow: its origins and evolution

Frederick Taylor, a mechanical engineer, is credited with the scientific management theories that are foundational to workflows. He sought to increase industrial efficiency by analyzing manufacturing processes empirically with the goal of reducing waste and standardizing best practices.

His theories along with those of Henry Gantt—the developer of the popular Gantt chart— continue to inform project management and industrial engineering today. Workflows help to plan and monitor projects in a methodical and logical way, allowing teams to achieve important deadlines and milestones.

The concept of workflow has also been used within the related discipline of operations research, which applies analytical methods to examine the nature of work. In operations research, techniques from statistics, game theory, and artificial intelligence are utilized in combination with management science to solve complex real-world problems.

Benefits and Features of Workflow Management Software

Workflow software or workflow engines enable businesses to automate repetitive business processes guaranteeing the same (or very similar) results each time. Businesses and project managers need comprehensive, integrated software solutions that provide them with the flexibility and accountability to get their jobs done.

The best workflow management system is the one that meets your business needs. Some companies offer “lightweight” systems, which means that the program is simpler or faster and has fewer components than other offerings on the market. Some technology experts say that “lightweight” systems are easier to use and sometimes use less memory. Some workflow management systems are part of a larger systems overall, and are but one small part. Most technology experts say that regardless of your choice, users must have one platform that can manage all of their workflows.

The list below gives an overview of features that may be found in the currently available software. Technology experts recommend determining which features are critical for your business processes and basing your choice on which features are available in each.

  • Offers automatic processes
  • Adaptive and flexible (Can you change your workflow case to case?)
  • Offer unlimited dependencies
  • Allows parallel execution of steps and branches
  • Cloud-based
  • Grid-based (local only)
  • Kanban boards
  • Offers different ways to visualize your workflows
  • Leverages current infrastructure
  • Integrates with Microsoft Office Products
  • Integrates with SAP and other services
  • Integrates with Java/Unix/Oracle
  • Intuitive to learn/use
  • Modeling
  • Measurement- dashboard metrics
  • KPI-based – provides analytical reports
  • Notifications and alerts to staff
  • Role based access and controls
  • Audit trail
  • Cost and cost schedule
  • Open-source (options)
  • CRM
  • Time-tracking and timesheets
  • Resource management
  • Tracking profitability
  • Client Portal
  • Create invoices and forms
  • Saas based
  • Budget forms and tracking
  • Compatible document management software
  • Gantt charts

Authorship:

https://kissflow.com/workflow/workflow-management-system-10-must-have-features/
https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/workflow
https://www.smartsheet.com/save-time-taking-time-creating-workflows
Workflow management

Convinced that a workflow management system will help you run a more efficient project or organization? First, ask yourself this question – “how do I know which is the right workflow management system for me?”

ProjectManager

What is workflow management?

Workflow management is creating and optimizing the paths for data in order to complete items in a given process. Workflow management includes finding redundant tasks, mapping out the workflow in an ideal state, automating the process, and identifying bottlenecks or areas for improvement.

Predefined steps

Steps are a predefined framework of tasks in the workflow. They provide clarity on what happens at each stage of the workflow until the endpoint. Steps may be manual or automated based on different workflows.

Stakeholders

Conditions

Conditions are rules for the workflow. They determine when a particular step is completed and what the next step should be. Conditions are most useful for approval-type workflows where some steps are skipped based on the information.

Here’s an example of a workflow:

Example of Workflow

1. Clearly defined workflows

There are often hundreds of workflows in each team and department. These workflows are hidden among different tools and employees. The sign of good workflow management shows when the entire organization is aware of all these workflows.

2. Prioritized and streamlined workflows

For example, start with customer-facing workflows like sales processes and discount approvals, or employee-centered workflows like hiring and onboarding. These are crucial workflows that have a huge impact on an organization.

There are subsidiary workflows running inside these primary workflows. They should be given the next priority and always be focused on serving their primary workflows. For example, creative request workflows of marketing should be prioritized behind the important sales workflows.

3. Regular monitoring and optimization

The only way to have highly efficient workflows is through optimization. Your first attempt at building a workflow, no matter how smart and data-driven it is, will still be inefficient. Workflows on paper are perfect and inhuman. Workflows that run in real-time are imperfect and human.

The 10 Best Workflow Management Software

At the bottom of the post, we include a table summarizing basic info about the tools described in this article as well as an explanation of our selection criteria, so you can understand how we made this list of workflow management software.

monday.com

monday.com, an award winning platform, is one of the few workflow tools that prides itself on ‘not being a project management tool’! They’ve done away with a lot of the trimmings of typical workflow tools and focused instead on a structure and views that help clarify the sequence of work that needs to be done.

You put tasks on a board, and then you add in the steps you’ll need to take to get it done. It’s vaguely similar to a spreadsheet (a nicer-looking one)— if you’re currently using spreadsheets for project management, monday.com is a good choice because it can round out your workflow with alerts, notifications, integrations, and automated processes. monday.com’s features include a customizable task board for managing task status, assignee, due date, hours spent, and more.

The tool offers multiple views of work—view by list, by geographical map, on a Kanban board, and others. It also offers a great project dashboard with a Gantt chart style overview for checking all projects that are underway.

Apart from that, monday.com enables big picture views using dashboards that collect data from multiple boards, allowing better tracking abilities of progress. It doesn’t offer much in the way of financial reporting, though, so for budget-related reports you’d want to look at 3rd party integrations.

monday.com’s integrations include Slack, Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, Jira, GitHub, Trello, Dropbox, Typeform, and many more that are accessible via Zapier. For help setting up integrations, the company’s customer support is available 24/7 by phone or email.

Smartsheet

Smartsheet is a spreadsheet-like project management tool. It has won a few awards for quickly becoming a favorite business app. It’s a nice workflow management software if you’re comfortable working in Excel but want a break from complicated formulas—Smartsheet performs all the calculations for you across multiple sheets. You can also add customized brand logos and set color themes for individual projects.

Smartsheet has useful features such as workflow automation and visualization of tasks in Gantt, calendar, and card views. Team members get notified of critical changes in real-time, and the tool provides shared views, detail history, activity logs, automated alerts, reminder, and status reports to keep everyone aligned and informed.

The Critical Path feature highlights all the tasks which directly impact your project completion date to keep an eye on important milestones. Reporting is a strong feature of this workflow tool, with editable summary reports that you can easily export to Excel.

Smartsheet integrations include Microsoft and Google apps, as well as development essentials like Jira, and useful business apps like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, Box, and Tableau. The platform is extensible through a REST API and webhooks.

Hive is a project management tool, collaboration platform, and workflow management software that powers companies like Starbucks, Uber, WeWork, and IBM. With AI-based analytics, thousands of integrations, flexible project views, and more, Hive streamlines your workflow in one centralized platform. Used by teams of varying sizes, from 10 people to 1,000, Hive is a great option for a diverse range of companies and work styles.

Hive’s time-tracking, analytics, and flexible view capabilities allow for a transparent understanding of other team-members work and upcoming projects. Hive also has one of the first full email integrations in any project management tool, which allows you to send and receive Gmail and Outlook messages from the app. Choose Hive if you’re in the market for a well-laid-out, comprehensive workflow management tool that can be scaled up or down based on team needs.

Summary of Hive:

Kintone

Kintone is a customizable workflow management tool used by teams at Volvo Trucks North America, Japan Airlines, Shiseido, LiveWell Colorado, and over 23,000 organizations worldwide. Their unique approach to workflow management lets you build a wide variety of customizable “apps” either from scratch, using templates or from your existing spreadsheets, for data management, business processes, and workflows. Kintone apps can be customized for project management, sales CRM, customer databases, expense reports, shared to-do lists, equipment management, product feedback, and much more.

Kintone lets you build custom workflow management apps by dragging and dropping elements that you want to see onto the page: rich text fields, date fields, drop-down menus, number fields with built-in calculations, spaces for attachments, user or group selection menus, related data from other apps, tables, and more. Your workflow management solution can look and work however you want it to.

Workflow Management Best Practices

  1. First, have a workflow plan. But more than that, have one that is written out or, better yet, visual. It’s better to prepare ahead and having a visual representation of that plan makes it easier to share and grasp.
  2. It’s also a good idea to think about things that could go wrong in your workflow system and how you’ll respond to them. Risk mitigation is always good practice because it’s inevitable that something will go wrong. Try to figure out where there might be delays or bottlenecks that will slow down production and how to resolve them quickly if they should appear.
  3. If you’re using workflow for a project, it can be helpful to apply the same workflow management to the whole organization. There can be issues in your project that are outside of your purview and part of a poorly thought-out workflow in the organization of your company.
  4. Make sure you’re using workflow management software and that it has tools that fit with your project or organizational structure.
  5. Also, don’t rest on the workflow once you have one set up and running, even if all is going well. Also, take time to do an audit, review the process and come back with ways to improve it. Workflow is not a once-and-done process but an ongoing and constantly evolving system.

ProjectManager is a cloud-based workflow management software that organizes workflow, connects teams and lets you build efficiencies and boost productivity. Teams can collaborate wherever they are in real time and stay updated with workflow automation tools, such as email notifications and in-app alerts.

Work in Multiple Project Views

Having multiple project views means that teams can work how they want, whether they’re remote or in different departments. Experts and newbies alike can visualize the workflow on ProjectManager’s kanban board view. Teams can take control of their backlog and manage those tasks. Then they can work together and plan sprints, while managers can transparency into the workflow and can reallocate resources to clear bottlenecks before they slow down work.

ProjectManager

Track Issues on Dashboards

Keeping an eye on the workflow is how you can catch issues and resolve them before they become problems. Using ProjectManager’s live dashboard is like having an instant status report. It captures project data in real time and then automatically calculates information in easy-to-read graphs and charts showing workload, tasks and more. Unlike other software that requires a lengthy setup, ProjectManager’s dashboard is ready when you are.

ProjectManager’s dashboard view, which shows six key metrics on a project

Improve Processes Through Reporting

To find ways to improve your workflow, use ProjectManager’s one-click reporting tools. They generate detailed data on time, cost and more. You can filter each report to let you focus on only the information you want to analyze. You can also share reports to keep your stakeholders updated.

ProjectManager

ProjectManager is the best workflow software with resource management tools to adjust workflows fast and easily. Our tool integrates with most apps and can help enterprise workflow management with portfolio management features. Get organized and try ProjectManager today for free!

Authorship:

https://kissflow.com/workflow/workflow-management-system-10-must-have-features/
https://thedigitalprojectmanager.com/tools/workflow-management-software/
https://www.projectmanager.com/blog/what-is-workflow-management