A fashionable buzzword in the corporate world is ‘work management’. More and more people are starting to question the comprehensiveness of the terms project management and task management, and suggest that work management is the umbrella that contains the other two. Before we get into work management, however, let’s think about project management and task management.
In project management, the project is inevitably at the core. Each and every discussion, meeting, and deadline revolves around the project. And within each project, you manage tasks. Whether you delegate or assign them to yourself, you have deadlines and a million other things that revolve around your tasks.
With work management, you manage everything – the project, the tasks and the deadlines – together. Most do this via email and various documents. And, of course, managing both projects and tasks also involves countless meetings – for planning, briefings and review.
Meetings are beneficial, because it’s via that interaction that you get real-time engagement from the stakeholders involved. However, before every meeting (whether at your office or online) you spend time preparing; collating notes, locating documents, and so on. If you multiply that time by the number of meetings you hold to manage your collective work, it’s highly possible that you’re spending an entire day – if not more – every month just preparing for meetings. Crazy, right?
In a typical work environment, we manage all kinds of things – documents, images, spreadsheets, presentations, calendar appointments. These are usually sorted into folders – probably by client, project or task. Many of us think this is the only way to organise these items. But then, inevitably, we all find ourselves wasting time looking for a file on a server, going through a seemingly endless list of folders in a multi-level folder hierarchy. So while sorting documents into folders on your server seems logical, you end up spending way too much time trying to find that document that you urgently need. With the advent of cloud technology, we now have the ability to store our documents in the cloud with applications like DropBox. But the trouble with these applications is that you still have to sort them into folders.
What we really need is an infrastructure that can help us sort through documents, tasks, links and calendar events by topic. This is where collaboration applications really come into their own. Within the context of work management, collaboration applications are invaluable because – by their very nature – they bring projects, tasks, documents, calendar events, and stakeholders together in one place. Topics enable you to outline the tasks associated with a project, send the relevant briefing document, assign tasks to owners, exchange information, collaborate, and monitor progress – all through a single application, where everything is saved on the cloud.
CORUS is one such application. Not only does it do everything that a typical collaboration application does, it also lets you sort everything by topic. A topic can be a project, a specific task, or general work management. And within each topic, you can sort messages and tasks by tagging them. Tags can be anything from priority levels, scale of urgency, or you can create your own custom tags to sort information as you wish.
This means that instead of having to search through a 7-level hierarchy of folders to find a file, with CORUS you simply go to your topic, and then drill down via the tags you’ve created. And this makes the end-to-end process of work management far more efficient.