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.
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.
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.
