What is Project Management Workflow? (Definition and Steps)

Maintaining the proper workflow can lead to project success and avoid costly errors or delays during your overall project. By using this complete guide to project management workflow to improve your processes, you will be able to eliminate wasted time and resources that result from poor project management workflow.

This guide will tell you how to create an efficient project management workflow and use software to help expedite your work and reduce time loss.

What is Project Management Workflow?

Project management workflow is the group of tasks that a project manager or team must complete in order to complete their work or projects. You can think of this as the breakdown of your project.

Another example is a recipe: What do you need to do to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?

Listing out the steps of this recipe is the same thing as listing out a project management workflow. One of the things that makes workflow efficient is that each step in the process is dependent upon the step above it. For instance, can you apply peanut butter to a slice of bread if you haven’t yet removed the bread from the bread bag?

But what is the difference between project management workflow and the project management that you know?

Project Management Workflow Vs Project Management

There is a clear difference between project management workflow and project management. That difference is that project management workflow is a part of project management. Workflow management is the specific focus on the assigned set of tasks that will eventually result in the completed project. On the other hand, project management as a whole concept is the planning, assessing, and monitoring of the project.

Project management focuses on the broad, birds-eye view of the project. For instance, are tasks getting completed on time? Is everyone assigned a task? Are the expectations being followed?

Project management workflow is paying attention to the actual processes themselves. For example, has step two been completed? Is step three ready to be started? Was step one completed properly?

It is a crucial thing to remember that project management workflow is a part of good project management. However, you may still be wondering, if I do all of the other project management things, why do project management workflow as well?

Why Is The Project Management Workflow Important?

Project management workflow is important for ensuring that your team is collaborating efficiently and effectively. When you are developing your project management workflow, you may find that you need to make a lot of changes to eliminate redundancies in the way that your team currently handles tasks.

You may have too many people collaborating on one task or not enough people on another. Figuring out the needs of your team can help to decrease your team’s overall workload by eliminating waste in the workplace. This will help boost the morale of you, your team, and your clients by finding a smoother way to get things done and deliver final products to your customers.

But where do you start?

How to Create Project Management Workflow?

Creating a project management workflow may seem like an unnecessary time sink, but it can actually be a pretty simple process. Follow these steps to implement a basic one to keep you in the know of your team’s task completion processes.

Start with a list.

Remember our peanut butter and jelly sandwich analogy from earlier? Turn your project steps into a recipe! What comes first? What comes next? And so on until you have a completed project from start to finish numbered out.

Choose a tool.

Using software to help you with project management is one of the best ways to improve your processes. This could be as simple as notating down your new project management workflow in an Excel document or it could involve a brand-new software purchase for your team. Be sure to check out our five recommendations below!

Assign tasks to employees.

In other words, create your assembly line. Breaking your project down into bite-sized pieces will help to take the pressure off of the backs of your team members. By splitting up the work, you will create a more efficient team and ward off burnout in one action.

Make it visual.

As we mentioned in Step 2, you should choose a tool to help you keep track of your new management workflow. Equally important, you should make it visual for your team! Having everyone be on the same page and aware of what everyone’s individual steps are is great for boosting morale and increasing the speed that your team works. So be sure to share that Excel document or add your team members to your new project management workflow software.

Test it out!

As they say, practice makes perfect. While you are new to project management workflow, so is your team. It will likely take a few tries to perfect your project management workflow and settle into your new routine both as a project manager and as a team of workers. Continue to perfect your project management workflow and eliminate redundant tasks or points of lag in your workflow.

Project Management Workflow Software

Are you looking for a new project management workflow tool so that you can begin focusing on the step-by-step processes of your projects? Look no further! Here are five excellent tools for implementing project management workflow in your workplace:

ClickUp

ClickUp is a product that is geared toward teamwork and progress tracking for your project management workflow needs. This software provides many different ways for you to view your project timeline and assigned tasks. Some of the 10+ views that ClickUp offers are Lists, Timeline, Gantt, Board, or Calendar view. You can also create wireframes or view analytical data that shows you your team’s project completion statistics. In addition to project management workflow tools, ClickUp offers other project management tools such as checklists, prioritization of tasks, and mind maps.

Reading: ClickUp VS Monday: A Complete Comparison

Monday

By using Monday.com’s Gantt charts, you can assign tasks to employees and view the timeline of your project. There are also time tracking capabilities where you can assign specific steps to specific workers and track the amount of time that they have spent on said task. When completed, you or the employee will be able to mark the step as “Done”. Monday is highly customizable and can be adapted into the perfect project management workflow software for the needs of your team. Take advantage of Monday.com’s many templates and eliminate unnecessary time wasted on setting up your new project management workflow. By using calendars, Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and more, Monday is a great tool that can be used for project management workflow.

Reading: Airtable VS Monday: 6 Crucial Differences You Should Know

Asana

Asana’s slogan is to “make work work for you” which is exactly what creating a project management workflow is all about. Asana helps you stay organized by providing the ability to assign tasks and deadlines to individual employees in a visual way that can tell your team what tasks need to be done, what the deadlines are, and which tasks they need to prioritize. Like other project management workflow tools, Asana offers multiple views of this information including a list view, timeline view, and helpful boards. Asana also has over 200 product integrations so that you can access Microsoft Teams, Zoom, OneDrive, Slack, Salesforce, and Sharepoint, to name a few of their many offerings.

Reading: 6 Best Free And Paid Asana Competitors You Can Choose

NTask

NTask is a project management workflow and project planning tool that is all-encompassing. It allows you to plan, analyze, and manage your team’s tasks while also focusing on the bigger picture as well. NTask allows you to set weekly hour capacities for your team members and can even be used to designate tasks as billable or non-billable tasks. NTask features Kanban boards as one of their primary workflow management tools which allow your team to collaborate on tasks by marking them ‘Not Started’, ‘In Progress’, ‘In Review’, ‘Completed’, or even ‘Canceled’. NTask also features basic Gantt charts and can be a tool to track your team’s time for timesheet collection purposes.

Proofhub

Proofhub is an all-in-one team collaboration and project management software that promises to house all of the tools that your team needs to access within one tool. Proofhub allows you to plan out your project workflow with many different views, including table view, task view, Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and even lets you assign custom workflows and custom roles to your team members. Other offerings from Proofhub include a calendar, a chat feature, and project templates so that you don’t have to customize your new project workflow completely from scratch. Like other offerings on this list, Proofhub has the ability to visualize your team’s roles and workload and keep track of billable hours. You can even print off detailed project reports!

Final Words

We hope that this guide has enlightened you on the benefits of implementing a project management workflow into your overall project management tasks. By focusing on the fine details of the process, making this change can help result in a better product and faster project completion.

Be sure to try one of the five project management workflow tools that we recommend to make your team collaborate together more effectively and meet deadlines without a hitch!