Using the right applications to become more agile and innovative is everyone’s business.

Each year businesses invest IT budgets on a range of software tools and applications to manage specific tasks like customer relationships and financial accounting. But what about the process of managing work itself? It’s time to review how well work is managed and the options for modern tools that can deliver a positive outcome for any type of task.

A recent report by the Harvard Business Review identified poor processes and bureaucracy could be costing the US economy as much as 17 percent of its GDP. Even in a smaller economy like Australia, the cost of dealing with public and private sector bureaucracy is estimated to be $250 billion every year.

In this blog, we’ll look at five reasons why using modern work management software makes good business sense.

1. Apply it to any task

Using a dedicated application to manage work packages and projects is not specific to any type of task. Need to change a materials supplier? Host an event? Upgrade your notebooks? Want to acquire another company? The list of what a work management application can help with is limitless. Business leaders are used to seeing one type of application for one type of task, but work management software is across everything and helps all areas of the business. Use it to improve marketing as much as product development.

2. Collaboration

Businesses have an old habit of relying on email and phone calls for collaboration. Today’s workflow management applications can empower people and teams to join forces and collaborate ensuring outcomes are continuous and any problems are quickly identified.

3. Knowledge sharing (and transfer)

Like collaboration, knowledge sharing is vital for ongoing productivity and enabling it has the added advantage of unlocking latent intellectual property present in all staff. With knowledge sharing comes better ideas and process improvement. A structured work management app helps capture people’s knowledge as it directly relates to specific tasks. And if a team member leaves the organization there’s less sifting through someone’s email and documents to learn how they performed something.

4. Accountability and compliance

One of the biggest problems with email – a topic we will cover in another blog – is the lack of accountability, transparency and general “ownership” over tasks. Simply sending an email to a person or team does not automatically transfer accountability of a task. In a work management system everyone has clear directives for what they are responsible for. This is also useful for compliance reasons as the business can review an audit trail to uncover flawed procedures or, however unlikely, acts of negligence.

5. Progress and outcomes

Keeping track of tickets is important for reaching milestones and help the business review progress and eventually outcomes and benefits. Even if a project doesn’t deliver its intended expectation the team can review the outcome in the work management application and approach things differently in the future.

With each of our reasons for using a modern work management capable of delivering an immediate ROI, ServiceRocket can help make the business case for adopting new tools to drive new ways of working very compelling.

Not just for IT anymore

Many tools for issue and task tracking have their origins in IT where they are widely used for managing a support service (like an IT helpdesk) or software development project. This has changed quickly in recent years and the concept of a “helpdesk” is now used by all kinds of non-IT business units and teams. Find out how ServiceRocket can help modernise work management for your teams and help realise more innovation and process improvement.