What is Work Management Software and What It Is Used for?

Work Management Software

As we live in the 21st century, we are all aware of the fact that programs and systems are developing way faster than people. We should admit that not everything can be kept under the control of even the most demanding manager. However, there is a solution – work management software, that provides advanced task management tools.

You have all heard of Gartner, one of the leading companies in the field of information technology, research and advisory. The company suggests the definition of work management software as a set of different services, which adjust workflow to the information flow and establish interaction between business processes and people involved. Basically, you may manage your team and their workloads not only within a project but also in terms of all organizational functions.

Intelvision team is well aware of the need for a proper work management system software and has expertise in this matter.

Later in this article, we will tell you more about the custom software project, which is fully revealed in a specific case study.

What is Work Management Software?

Of course, you may still ask a question “what is work management software?” There is a simple explanation. It:

Identifies work -> Plans -> Schedules -> Carries out -> Follows up -> Analyzes

Let us explain. Work management software conducts all these six steps for any business process. First of all, no project can operate without teamwork and cooperation. Not only people may set up the latter.

The project management system we are talking about is aimed to identify the tasks needed for that or another project’s functioning. It may also plan the whole workflow dividing and sharing appropriate tasks among team members. It is no wonder why some people call it teamwork management software.

The next step is scheduling. Our dedicated software development team is convinced that time management brings almost half of the success to your project.

After rigorous task planning and scheduling work management software helps your team and your business in general with conducting all the needed project tasks identified earlier. Throughout the process, the system may check everything out and follow up on the task that is at the stage of completion.

Afterward, you receive the result of the analysis, and then you understand what workflow and indicators should be involved. With the help of such a software, it becomes easier to plan work, manage a team, as it uses a holistic approach to both project and task management. In other words, it creates the digitalized workplace of all departments at one platform working at the same place even if your team is scattered around the world.

Difference between Work Management Software and Project Management Software

Work management software is often mistaken for project management software. We are not surprised about that as work management software is a relatively new tool available for businesses. Most project managers are used to exploiting project software as well as task, business and other types of work management tools. Nowadays, there are so many of them that we have forgotten that all of them appeared at that or another time for those or other purposes.

According to project management methodology, project management software is a tool to control and manage a single project. What lies behind such an approach? It is strictly related to a specific project your team is working on. And, as you know, any project requires a plan beforehand. This project management tool is mostly based on defined rules and is aligned with principles of project management. It means that you have to structure work clearly, which you need to follow. However, we all know that things at work do not always go so smoothly.

Moreover, you cannot always plan everything, not speaking about overseeing things. That is the first and, probably, the most crucial difference between them. As the work flow management software may adapt to your needs one way or another.

What is more, with work management software you may begin even with one single task, which eventually, may turn into the whole project. You never know! On the other side, some tasks may never become projects themselves or you may never create projects out of them. For example, creating and sending invoices. It is not a future-to-be project. It is just a working task that is repeated with some regularity. Another example is responding and sending emails. For sure, you do not expect this daily task to be a project.

When using project management software remember that there is not much room for improvisation or flexibility. Of course, there are different types of software now, though, it will never be able to serve you with daily work needs as work management software does.

• Nevertheless, both project management tools and work management tools are there to help you organize tasks easily and effectively, saving your time and money, and health, obviously. Both systems will help you establish and manage cooperation, schedule resources (that is resource management), manage tasks, create a Kanban board, track progress and track time, create Gantt charts and share and store data.
• The only tiny difference here is Gantt charts since they are compatible only with project management software; hence these charts are common only to tasks related to project workflow.

So, when choosing the software you should be aware of the activities involved and the results you anticipate. As it may define the choice of software for those or other purposes. And keep in mind that non-project activities are not always bound in time, and it may be a crucial feature to determine your choice.

Work Management Software Features

When comparing work management software, we have already mentioned the key features of this tool. Intelvision team believes that knowing those features is not enough. First of all, you should analyze the company and business itself. The whole point is to choose and develop the software that would fulfill your company’s objectives and needs.

As it follows, let’s discuss the main features of such a software and give some examples of management software based on your company’s needs.

One of the first features we have mentioned is managing cooperation. This feature consists in holding all units involved in team collaboration in one place. With this feature, one may easily message boards, tag anyone they need, share information and files, and all these may ease the whole work management process.

• It may be useless to launch any tasks if there is no one to carry them out. That is why scheduling resources (in other words – resource management) is also on the list of top work management software features. It makes it possible to find out who is available at that or another point of time and how tasks may be divided among the team members and to track work hours and control labor costs in order to manage everything properly.

It can be difficult to manage one project of the team. So, can you imagine how challenging it may be to cope with a few projects simultaneously? That is when the task management system feature comes in handy. It helps to not only assign tasks but also to set priorities, track the progress and track tasks, and interact within each task. We think that you can estimate that you may spend ten times less effort to cope with the same scope of work, as it helps you to handle it.

That feature leads to the following one, which is Kanban boards. That is what we have already mentioned, as Kanban boards enable the whole team to see the status of each task related to the project (accomplishing task management purposes). People who are used to Scrum will appreciate such a peculiarity in your work management software.

• Moreover, completing and prioritizing tasks is not the only way out. You should remember that your resources have to be allocated in an efficient way. That is your team members are to spend a reasonable amount of time on that or other tasks. That is why time tracking features are useful. You may estimate how much time tasks of different complexity require and thanks to time tracking reporting becomes much easier to handle.

One more feature to simplify the working process is workflow visualization. It may seem corny but this characteristic ensures that all tasks are assigned and what their status is.

• We have already mentioned before that data sharing and storing are an inevitable part of any work management software. No matter the department or task, your team needs proper project management tools in order to upload, download, share and store data within and beyond a project as well as for any other work purposes.

Another thing to remember is that different work management software systems have different features. They all differ depending on the specifics of the software, your business needs and budget, of course. Sometimes your team will need some external tools to be involved in the work management system. However, most programs do have options to combine different programs with task management software.

Let’s have a look at some common examples of work management software systems.

• A lot of startups use such an application as Trello, which is featured by its capability to manage tasks, prioritize them, create and send reminders, set up Kanban boards, upload files, manage files and documents, integrate with third-party services, and the like. However, this software is not that capable to manage large-scale and multiple projects (that is why it is more common for startups, as mentioned before).
• One more work management tool, which many would call a “classic”, is Podio to help you organize your workload in a better way. Among its featured characteristics are data visualization, managing tasks, automation of different workflow stages, task scheduling and calendar, storage with no limits, CRM, dashboards, pricing features, application version for cell phones and completely customizable.

• When the goal is to establish cooperation between different departments and units, Wrike is a good option to consider. This cloud-based software can automate many working processes, establish team collaboration with other units and departments and have the work done as follows. 
• There is one more important range of goals for your business. It is to automate financial and operational activities. 1C: Enterprise is even more than a solution in this matter. It is the work management platform that covers many different business processes. For example, accounting needs, managing trade, creating and storing data, conducting payroll calculations, accumulating documents transactions, purchasing and ordering, and establishing team collaborations. These are not the only examples of its use, however, it for sure meets the needs of different types and sizes of businesses.

Of course, there are many other examples of useful work management software. Nevertheless, remember that they should completely meet your company’s needs. That is why you should better choose custom software or find a software development partner to create one for you. That is exactly the case study we have told you about.

Our Intelvision team has the expertise to develop and/or improve the internal work system for you as we did for our Vaillant customer.

A bit later in this article, we are going to tell you everything about this software.

Work Management Software Benefits

Speaking about the advantages of work management software, we can sum up the following:

• It helps you effectively schedule work. Everything starts with a plan, so it is significant to have a thorough team’s schedule.
• You become a better partner for your clients. With a proper work management system, it is easier to meet your customers’ needs and requirements.
• The performance of your business is directly dependent on people’s factors as well.  That is why one more benefit of such work management systems is that you can easily allocate your assets and manage resources as well as assign team members to that or another task.
• When conducting all of the abovementioned, you may easily evaluate all the work done and get a corresponding stage analysis. Performance review is crucial for both work management processes and people. It always prompts further development and improvement
• When using all the above-mentioned benefits of the work system software, your business improves its agility. It is no wonder as with the help of such software all the work is done faster and better.
• All your key performance indicators also get better and, relatively, business results are improved. This benefit works as a progression with every task lists completed.
• As you effectively exploit your resources, you also minimize redundancy. You assign tasks in the right way and all your major team members perform the appropriate tasks and sub-tasks and the outcomes are better consequently. Along with it, people are much happier at work, as they feel the sense of accomplishment and responsibility, they know for sure they bring some benefit and it brings them pleasure.
• The issue of budgeting is crucial for any business or project. With the usage of the right work management software, you may significantly reduce costs and eliminate wastes at all.
• Finally, yet importantly, all these benefits contribute to higher work efficiency of any task and work you perform.

Of course, other benefits are also about easing other processes, like file sharing and storing, centralized communication, and cooperative task managing.

Case study: Custom work management software for Vaillant

Finally, we have approached the case we were longing to share with you. Intelvision is proud to share the Vaillant project, which we have created and are proud of. We have developed an internal service system. What is it for?

As discussed earlier, managing all working processes may be challenging considering the fact how many employees of the company are involved. There could be a few work management solutions for such a purpose. However, just think about how many microsystems the company would need to fulfill everyone’s needs. It would also be difficult to unite all those services; even more, they would confuse everyone and puzzle the environment in general.

As in any other case, each project starts with a challenge. In other words, challenges are just tasks we have to accomplish as a result. When speaking about the Vaillant project, our tasks consisted in:

• Creating a work management platform that would enable to manage work, new tasks and orders via different devices with the help of desktop and mobile system applications.
• Sending notifications to employees depending on the tasks they carry out.
• Integrating the work management system with third-party software, in this matter, it is accounting software that is a 1C system.
• Developing the feature that would enable generating reports that hold the information about all orders in PDF format.

As you can see, the objectives were related to different and in some way opposite fields of business. Nevertheless, our team managed to accomplish this project in just five months. Such a duration is not that defining, however, this scope of work in the industry of manufacturing heating equipment is an amazing achievement.

The team that worked on this project consisted of one full-stack developer, one mobile developer, one quality assurance engineer and one project manager. Intelvision team worked hand-in-hand in order to make the most of this project.

When speaking about the technologies, our developers used .NET Core 2.1, Angular 2+< Xamarin Forms, and MS SQL. For such a work management solution, these technologies suit the best in order to fulfill the to-do list. When speaking about other work management tools involved in this project, we should mention

• Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code,
• Firebase, Docker, GIT,
• Google Maps and Azure.

This technology stack complemented all the solutions.

In terms of the Vaillant project, we provided our customer with services of software development consulting at first. As we had to find out the above-mentioned challenges and pick the best technology stack in this matter. Afterward, we, of course, provided them with web application development services as the core services in this matter. Having completed the project, we continue to support and maintain the project as it is important for the uninterrupted workflow of the application.

When it comes to solutions, we have reached even more than we planned.

• First of all, all the internal processes have been customized and automated. It means that the company may reduce the amount of manual work in this matter.
• Secondly, we have integrated the 1C accounting system into our solution as a third-party service in order to complement our work management software.

The possibility to generate PDF reports is now feasible and it provides information about all the orders required.

Depending on the task and need, employees receive push notifications thanks to our software solution.

Moreover, customers may now easily get access to reports on work and orders in PDF, download and share them.

As a result, it has become easier for all employees to conduct orders as they receive push notifications and may start interacting with that or another order seen on the map. In other words, we have improved the order of the work management system.

As we have just mentioned, orders are not just sent to employees but they can also see the location information of that order. There is a point they can click on and it takes them to the window with additional information about the order.

We consider the PDF generation to be a significant simplification of workflow, as it is done with no additional efforts, saves time and money but still provides clients with the information needed.

As we have noted in the beginning, the whole point of this project was to create desktop and mobile applications. One more feature we have integrated is that we made it possible to save orders on the phone and synchronize them whenever a Wi-Fi connection is available or stable. It reduces the risks of information losses and the whole work process is not interrupted.  

What is more, every employee can register and log in to this work management system and have access to the system at any time and use those credentials, which are assigned to them.

• Another interesting feature we have added is a QR code and an opportunity to scan it. So employees open the product catalog, scan QR code and they may find the needed information about the product.

As we have integrated the 1C system, our final work management software has an accounting tool synchronized in the internal system.

Last but not the least, our team has developed an administration panel, with the help of which system administrators have the ability to manage and control all orders, interact with customers and get PDF reports whenever they need.

Such an example of work management software shows that challenging is not the process of development but the process of defining the needed features and work management tools for your project.

Anyway, you may feel free to contact our Intelvision team, and we are eager to help you solve any task or challenge you have faced.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, work management software is an efficient way of automizing your business.

As we have mentioned before, some systems may be the best choice for businesses depending on their purposes. With an effective and experienced software partner, which is experienced in creating work management apps and software, such cooperation will serve you and your company well, and the workflow structure will be successful and beneficial.