Published 22
October 2019 - ID G00355467
Collaborative work
management plays a prominent role in the new work nucleus. We drill down into
the details to offer application leaders guidance on its evolution and its
impact on how work gets done.
·
Coordinating teamwork
that involves changes in plans, priorities, or resources is a challenge both
for team members and managers. Communication and information sharing tools are
not enough.
·
Team members and
managers find it difficult to have a comprehensive and common view of current
plans and the state of execution of collaborative work when context and
artifacts (that is, documents, conversations, plans, workflows or work status)
are spread in different applications.
·
Sophisticated planning
and execution tools do exist, but are not flexible or easy enough for business
users in their everyday work.
·
Use of collaborative
work management tools raises important governance issues as well as acceptance
and comfort with open and transparent ways of working. This may be incompatible
with personal habits, preferences, and with organizational culture.
Application leaders responsible for digital
workplace programs should:
·
Make collaborative
work management a core capability of your new work nucleus by exploiting new
feature sets in specialist applications and cloud-based suites.
·
Ensure business
alignment of collaborative work management tools by working together with
relevant business stakeholders to prioritize use cases, participants and
context.
·
Minimize the
challenges from culture, behavior and skills requirements by starting with
deployments where working transparently and collaboratively are already the
norm. Where transparency and collaboration do not yet happen naturally, make
CWM deployments part of a broader digital workplace program. In this way, it is
possible to deal systematically with work design and change management around
the new work nucleus.
·
Address governance
questions by determining access rights to work management capabilities in order
to ensure consistency, quality and reuse. From a governance perspective, CWM
should be treated as “citizen development.”
In the midst of a profound transition to
digital business, the tools we use every day — for working together, creating
content, analyzing data and consuming information — are transforming.
Three-decades-old collections of locally deployed personal and team
productivity applications are being replaced by ever-changing cloud-based applications
with substantially new capabilities which we call the New Work Nucleus (NWN).
These applications are inherently mobile, collaborative, analytical,
integrated, and increasingly imbued with artificial intelligence (AI) — a sharp
departure from their predecessors. These attributes drive individual and team
accountability, transparency, effectiveness and autonomy.
The New Work Nucleus is a collection of
ever-changing, multivendor, SaaS-based personal and team productivity
applications that replaces decades-old on-premises applications centered around
Microsoft Office.
This dramatic change in tooling provides
organizations with a unique opportunity to substantially improve business
outcomes by making the workforce more digitally dexterous. Digital dexterity is
the ambition and ability to use technology for better business outcomes.
Organizations that fail to exploit the new work nucleus and foster workforce
digital dexterity are at substantial risk of falling behind.
Figure 1 shows the basic
dynamics of moving from an on-premises stack of personal and team productivity
tools to their SaaS equivalents.
While the tooling in the new
work nucleus is enhanced, full power to drive workforce digital dexterity is
delivered with the underlying augmentation services that come with it. These
augmentation services turbocharge its ability to support new ways of working
and talent transformation. The augmentation may include AI services (like
virtual assistants and recommendation engines), easy application integration
and development, and the ability to use data and content analytics. Each of the
new work nucleus applications is targeted at a specific type of activity, such
as meetings or working with content, or coordinating collaboration — while the
augmentation services enrich them, as shown in the gray boxes in Figure 1.
In this report, we drill down
into the important collaborative work management component. We offer guidance
on its evolution, its symbiotic relationship to augmentation services, and its impact on how work gets
done. We also discuss governance questions on access rights, quality, and
reuse.
Make Collaborative Work Management a Core Capability of NWN
Rollout by Exploiting Specialist Applications and Cloud-Based Office Suites
Collaborative work management tools are
task-driven workspaces that support business users in planning and coordinating
their work. They combine task, project, workflow, and automation capabilities
with conversations, content publishing, reporting, analytics and dashboards.
Collaborative work management tools support high-level, top-down planning. At
the same time, they support flexible, self-organizing, and open-ended
collaboration with reshaping as needed. This is suitable for an agile and
iterative approach to work execution. It is not an accident that some CWM tools
came out of the experiences of software and DevOps teams, which increasingly
rely on self-organization and self-management to boost agility in complex
coordination projects. Collaborative work management popularizes and makes this
way of working accessible to teams of business users.
Vendors such as Asana, Basecamp, monday.com,
Smartsheet, Trello, Workfront and Wrike provide specialist collaborative work
management products. They focus on support for planning and work modeling via
tasks, timelines, and workflows. But they also support conversations,
notifications, dynamic reports and information sharing during execution, to
ensure that every participant has an up-to-date view both of plans and the
state of execution.
In addition, vendors of conventional project
management and business process management products are adding more flexible,
dynamic and collaborative capabilities. However, the tools from the latter
group of vendors remain (for the most part) targeted at professional planners
and process modelers. Specialist collaborative work management tools often lack
the sophistication that professional project managers or business process
analysts require (such as resource and budget management or process modeling).
This trade-off however, is a defining characteristic of collaborative work
management tools. It makes their planning and execution functionality
accessible to nonprofessional business users.
Collaborative work management technology can
potentially be used by everyone. It can empower them to collaboratively carry
out the planning, execution, optimization and increasingly, automation of
day-to-day work. At the same time, it provides transparency for oversight, as
well as the ability to define and fix “guardrails” that represent constraints
on outcomes, timelines, budgets or resources. The core value proposition of
collaborative work management is to improve activity coordination in a flexible
and agile manner.
Collaborative work management tools combine
different capabilities as shown in Figure 2 below. These capabilities may come
as part of a single product or via integration with third-party products or
platforms. For details on the depth of support for different capabilities in
specific products, see “Market Guide for Collaborative Work Management” and “Toolkit:
Collaborative Work Management Vendor and Product Data.”
We see collaborative work management tools
filling a gap in how organizations plan and manage work:
·
High-value, routine
work can (or should) be supported with full automation or via off-the-shelf
business applications.
·
High-value but less
routine work with higher levels of uncertainty in terms of outcomes can be
supported with custom application development or via formal projects to control
timeliness, budgets, and accountability.
·
Every day, nonroutine
work that is difficult to plan is often handled via manual oversight and ad hoc
communication and information sharing.
Collaborative work management can play an
important role in improving the way the last category mentioned above is
managed by adding visibility, structure, operational governance and logistical
control.
Here are some core capabilities of
collaborative work management tools that help to achieve this:
·
Task and project
planning with team and project spaces
·
Creation and sharing
of relevant content
·
Flexible data
definitions and custom lists relevant to different work scenarios
·
Prebuilt and custom
forms to collect input
·
Live, interactive
reports and dashboards for different stakeholders
·
Notifications,
reminders, and customizable action triggers
·
Custom workflows and
scripts to automate sequences of actions
·
Conversations and
other social features around tasks, projects, or content
·
Curation and reuse of
previous work models
·
Integration with other
tools for communication, content, or transactional context
·
Prebuilt work
templates for specific activities, roles, or vertical industries
Recommendations:
·
Explicitly state the
strategic position of collaborative work management as part of the evolution of
your digital workplace technology “stack” toward a new work nucleus.
·
Identify components of
collaborative work management based on your requirements and be ready to use
either specialist products or multiple products together. Leverage technology
that you already have, such as cloud office, even for partial support. Both
Microsoft Office 365 (especially with Microsoft Planner) and Google G Suite
have good enough support for different aspects of collaborative work
management.
·
Test product and
vendor readiness with small, targeted deployments, to address specific use
cases and to test the product and vendor readiness. Repeat product and vendor
readiness assessments as you scale deployments in order to mitigate vendor and
product risk in this emerging market.
·
Test product and vendor
readiness by starting with small, targeted deployments, to make sure that
use-case-specific issues are addressed.
·
Mitigate vendor and
product risk in this emerging market by repeating product and vendor readiness
assessments as you scale deployments.
·
Create a strategic
plan for a collaborative work management capability to be available to most or
all employees as part of a digital workplace program.
·
Create a collaborative
work management community of interest and encourage managers to motivate,
recognize and promote best practice among participants.
Ensure Business Alignment of Collaborative Work Management Tools
by Working With Relevant Business Stakeholders
Collaborative work management tools are
general-purpose and can be used to support a broad range of business
activities. This makes them relevant in many contexts. However, it also raises
important questions with respect to recognizing and prioritizing deployments
that are more likely to succeed.
Conversations with Gartner clients and vendors
suggest that collaborative work management tools are beginning to be used for:
·
Executive work such
as manager-team communications, roadmaps and initiative launch, business case
construction and communication, executive dashboards.
·
Function-specific work such
as marketing and PR campaign tracking, product management, agile application
development, engineering project management, candidate tracking and onboarding.
·
Vertical-specific work such
as venture portfolio management, editorial calendar, event management, product
launches, campaigns, tour management.
·
General-purpose work such
as “lightweight” ad hoc project support, request pipelines, issue tracking and
scheduling, case management, stage-gate pipelines, general surveys and forms.
Collaborative work management deployments are
still largely small scale and experimental. Large enterprisewide deployments
covering a broad range of use cases are the exception rather than the norm.
Recommendations:
·
Target the use of
collaborative work management tools by identifying a decision maker or business
owner with a use case that is directly relevant to them in order to overcome
skepticism and resistance to change.
·
Assess pent-up demand
for collaborative work management by identifying groups of users within your
organization already using such technology. Remember that several vendors
target function leaders and budgets directly, as well as end users. Vendors are
using freemium versions in order to demonstrate value and generate demand for
their products.
·
Minimize the challenges
from culture, behavior and skills requirements by starting with deployments
where working transparently and collaboratively are already the norm. Where
transparency and collaboration do not yet happen naturally, make CWM
deployments part of a broader digital workplace program. In this way, it is
possible to deal systematically with work design and change management around
the new work nucleus.
·
Have a deeply
motivated champion and executive mandate to drive any required changes in ways
of working. Ideally, these issues need to be addressed within a broader digital
workplace program that deals systematically with work design and change
management.
·
Look out for, and
address mismatches with culture, behavior and skills. Not everyone will be
comfortable or willing to “work loudly” and transparently. Not everyone will
welcome the degree of autonomy that CWM tools can support; and some individuals
may not have the digital skills necessary to work in this way.
Collaborative work management tools raise
important governance questions that need to be addressed as usage grows.
Governance for collaborative work management
should, at least partially, mirror the way other collaboration applications are
governed such as workstream or content collaboration, or even email. All of
them, including collaborative work management, generate and provide access to
content and conversations.
Relevant governance questions that must be
addressed include:
·
who has access to the
applications and to any generated content or conversations;
·
how these artifacts
are organized, maintained and curated in order to facilitate and promote access
and reuse; and
·
how to manage risks in
terms of compliance or legal discovery.
The recommended approach to governance of
collaborative work management tools with respect to these questions is that
they should be handled within a common governance framework along with similar
applications. Access rights, content organization guidelines, and archiving
rules should be similar across applications for content or workstream
collaboration, as well as for collaborative work management. (See “Design
an Effective Information Governance Strategy,” for an example of a
governance framework in a related area.)
There is however, one additional set of
governance considerations resulting from the richness and power of
collaborative work management tools. This is because they make it possible for
non-IT business users to model and automate work processes. These models embody
timelines, resource allocation options, notifications and execution workflows,
analysis and dashboards for decision support, as well as the creation of
collaborative workspaces. In other words, these tools empower business users to
create ad hoc, reusable business applications. These applications may support a
one-off activity, or may be used repeatedly to fully or partially support or
even automate other business activities.
It is this potential to model and automate
business activities that calls for additional governance guardrails in order to
take advantage of it safely. In this respect, the use of collaborative work
management tools should be treated more like application development by non-IT
business users. This is akin to “citizen development,” where non-IT business
users are empowered to develop applications via low-code or no-code development
tools. The recommended approach to governance with respect to building work
models with collaborative work management tools is to treat them in the same
framework that is used for other citizen development activities. Although many
organizations do not yet promote or support citizen development among their
employees, and do not have an explicit governance framework, we expect this to
change (see “Maximize Digital Dexterity by Cultivating Citizen IT”).
Recommendations:
·
Application leaders
should work with business colleagues to “co-own” development and governance by
providing clear guidelines on who is allowed/encouraged/prohibited to do what.
·
Initially, align the
governance framework for collaborative work management to the one you have in
place for other content-generating applications, such as those for content and
workstream collaboration, or email.
·
As the use and
mission-critical capability of collaborative work management grows, ensure
safety and quality control over reusable work models to treat usage of CWM as
citizen development.
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