Collaborative Work Management in the New Work Nucleus

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.

Overview

Key Challenges

·        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.

Recommendations

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.”

Introduction

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.

Figure 1. Transition From Old Work Nucleus to New Work Nucleus

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.

Analysis

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.”

Figure 2. Capabilities Supporting Collaborative Work Planning and Execution

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.

Address Inevitable Governance Questions in Order to Ensure Consistency, Quality and Reuse

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.

https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-1XRFSPHQ&ct=191113&st=sb