How to Slay the Dragon of Enterprise Work

ENTERPRISE WORK MANAGEMENT:
How to Slay the Dragon
of Enterprise Work

2
CONTENTS
The Dragon of Enterprise Work 3
The Ugly Face of the Dragon 5
When the Dragon Breathes Fire 7
Don’t Just Treat the Burn 9
The Problem is Bigger than You Think 11
“Pet” Dragons Cost You, Big Time 13
Slaying the Dragon Requires a Different Weapon 15
The Complete Enterprise Work Lifecycle 17
The Enterprise Work Management Approach 19
Now You’re Ready for Battle 21
Lifecycles Aren’t One-Size-Fits-All 22
The Rewards of Slaying the Dragon 23
Your Ultimate Weapon 24

3
THE DRAGON OF
ENTERPRISE WORK

4
THIS MEANS WAR
If you’re reading this eBook, it’s probably because you’ve got a
pest control problem. This isn’t just an irritating lizard infestation,
though. This is larger and nastier than lizards; it’s a huge, nasty,
fire-breathing, hard to ignore, dragon. The dragon of work chaos.
And you need to know how to slay it.
Well, there’s no need to fear. This eBook will teach you the
right—and necessary—weapons to help you extinguish the fire,
examine your burn wounds, and exterminate the work chaos
dragon for good.

5
All you really need is to
know who’s working on what,
if people are working on the
right work, do they have the
resources they need, and
will work be completed on
time. But every time you try,
you end up getting burned
by the dragon.
THE UGLY FACE OF THE DRAGON
Work chaos is the fiend that plagues enterprise teams. It emerges as a result of serious work mismanagement and
it can take many forms, including:
Random Input
Processes.
No one knows the
‘correct’waytomakea
request, so requests
come in at all times of
the day, in all shapes
and sizes—without the
key information you
need. It’s insane trying
to keep up with them all.
Wasted time.
Your team spends too
much time on phone
calls, in email, making
desk visits, attending
status meetings, and
trying to gather data
instead of actually
executing.
Disconnected
activities.
Your strategy direction
is disconnected from
commitments, which
are disconnected
from work, which is
disconnected from
performance tracking
and management, etc.
No Adoption.
Project managers,
team members, and
executives don’t engage
in your tools because
the tools aren’t relevant
to their work, and
have terrible usability.
Poor visibility
into work.
Everypersonandteam
isusingdifferentsiloed
tools for work, like
document sharing,
PPM, spreadsheets,
email, whiteboards,
task management
tools, etc., which
leads to scattered
work data that takes
hours to gather.
Poor resource
visibility.
It’s difficult to know
how effectively or
ineffectively resources
are utilized to deliver
on your business
commitments.

6
WHEN THE DRAGON
BREATHES FIRE...
Unfortunately, the effects of not exterminating the chaos dragon
are that you and your team are:
Burned out.
The chaos and frustration of disconnected work leads to unhealthy stress, long hours,
too many caffeinated drinks, and eventually, extreme dissatisfaction with your job.
Running with your hair on fire.
Work chaos and low visibility mean that you and your team members are always
running around like your hair’s on fire trying to get the data that you need to appease
executives and stakeholders.
Constantly facing fire drills.
Without the information you need for process improvement or the right amount of
resource visibility, you have no way to justify priorities or timelines, which results in
constantly putting out fires instead of doing strategic work.

7
EVERYTHING YOU’VE TRIED
ONLY TREATS THE BURN
Managers have tried all kinds of things to help slay the chaos dragon
that plagues them. Unfortunately, these things merely treat their burn
wounds instead of slaying the actual problem: the dragon.
Business Books.
“Maybe if everybody reads this
revolutionary new book, it will
change everything.”
More People.
“If we just had a few more headcount,
that would solve all our problems.”
Methodology Merry-Go-Rounds.
“Maybe going Lean this month will
help us function better...”
Industry Trends.
“The blogosphere is saying that all we
have to do is empower people more.”
New Point Solutions.
“We’ll just use another free tool to
patch that hole in our process.”
Consultants.
“All we have to do is get an expert in here
to teach us how to be more organized.”
The average consultant charges $125 per hour. (That’s $1000
per day!) 1
If you’ve ever tried any of those things, then you
get the idea. Here’s the thing, every single one
of those “helps” costs money. And that’s an awful
lot of money to spend on temporary fixes. Now,
there’s a reason their effect isn’t permanent. It’s
because we have a bigger problem on our hands
that they fail to address.

8
THE PROBLEM IS BIGGER
THAN YOU THINK
The truth is, the dragon you’re facing isn’t actually the
chaos or the project failure or the inefficiencies. The real
dragon is the creator of the chaos: a nasty thing called
disconnectedness.
Disconnected tools.
How many different tools are you using to manage your work? Several? More
than five? Yeah, that’s nuts! And chances are, you use your own “favorite tools”
to manage your work life while each individual on your team is using their own.
No wonder it’s next to impossible to get updates on what’s really going on.
Disconnected processes.
With everyone using different tools, it’s chaotic trying to get everyone on the
same page and using the same processes. Because most of the time, different
tools don’t play nicely with one another. That means getting project and work
data has to happen manually, which wastes a ton of time.
Disconnected people.
With disconnected tools and processes, not only are team members in the dark
about what the rest of their team is doing and where dependencies are, but
other departments in the organization are having the same problems, so trying
to stay connected interdepartmentally is just…(you guessed it!) more chaos.

9
PET DRAGONS COST YOU, BIG TIME
What organizations fail to realize is how much all this disconnectedness is costing
them, in dollars, efficiency, and productivity.
Silos.
Individuals working in different,
disconnected tools inevitably
results in team silos and little-
to-no work visibility.
“As systems fail to interact
and data becomes trapped
and unavailable to deci-
sion-makers outside the silo,
people are less likely to inter-
act…they avoid sharing data
and information outside of
their silos. It’s a vicious cycle,
one that can cost an organi-
zation in agility, productivity,
and responsiveness.” 2
—Evan Rosen
Lost work.
When you have work requests
flying at you from all directions,
sometimes they fall through
the cracks and time is lost. This
can hold back entire projects,
tangle up your resources, dis-
rupt strategies, and jeopardize
your competitive advantage.
Lost data.
Storing data in disconnected
tools with disconnected
processes is like playing
information hot potato. Work
data gets tossed around
from tool to tool and person
to person, making gathering
information and compiling
reports a time-consuming,
error-ridden nightmare.
Wasted time.
Disconnectedness means more
employee time is spent in status
meetings and emails while
everyone tries frantically to get
on the same page. It also means
that manual processes eat up a
ton of your average worker’s day.
Distractions.
Businesses lose $650 billion
a year related to the lack of
job performance and creativity
due to distractions. 4
Failure.
PMI reports that less than
two-thirds of projects actually
meet their goals and business
intent. In fact, it is estimated
that for every $1 billion spent
on a failed project, $135 million
is lost forever…unrecoverable.” 5
Frustration.
Disconnection causes individual
team members massive amounts
of stress because of low visibility
into work and dependencies,
inefficient processes, and
scattered work information. In
fact, three-fourths of American
workers describe their work
as stressful. 6
3 wasted worker
hours/day, at an
average salary of
$50k, costs you
$128/day, $638/week,
$2,550/month, and
$7,650/quarter.
Multiply that by 6
people on your team
and you’re wasting
$91,800/year! 3
Workplace stress costs U.S. employers an
estimated $200 billion per year in absen-
teeism, lower productivity, staff turnover,
worker compensation, medical insurance
and other stress-related expenses. 7

10
SLAYING THE DRAGON REQUIRES
A DIFFERENT WEAPON
The best way to eliminate disconnectedness and chaos is
to unify. Unifying, in the correct way, requires that you start
to look at the way you do work in a different way. There are
two crucial parts to unifying:
1. unify your tools.
Using five or more tools scatters your work data, low-
ers visibility, kills productivity, and increases chaos.
It’s time to stop disconnectedness once and for all by
implementing one unified, centralized tool for manag-
ing all of your work.
2. Unify your processes.
Disconnected tools inevitably leads to disconnected
processes, especially when you’re using separate
tools to manage different stages of the project life-
cycle and additional tools to manage the rest of your
work. The secret to unifying processes is to manage
the end-to-end lifecycle of enterprise work, not just
parts of the project lifecycle.

11
MANAGING THE COMPLETE
ENTERPRISE WORK LIFECYCLE
Unfortunately, most of the solutions available to help
manage work, fail to manage it through the end-to-end work
lifecycle. At best, they only focus on one or two stages..
PPM Tools.
Most PPM tools fail to
accommodate work other than
projects (i.e. unstructured work,
everyday“lights on” work, ad hoc
requests, etc.). And PPM tools
may work fine for project
planning and coordinating,
but they leave you with gaps
to fill for the rest.
Task Management
Tools.
There are thousands of task
management tools out there
for you to choose from, but
they are usually as simplistic
as apps and they only help
manage work execution; you’ll
have to find other tools to help
you plan, prioritize, collabo-
rate, and measure.
Social Tools.
Most social tools are apps
or add-ons that don’t even
allow you to collaborate in
the context of your work,
meaning that collaboration is
unconnected from the actual
work it’s related to. With these
social tools, collaboration
doesn’t flow through the entire
work lifecycle.
Your ultimate unification weapon is useless if it doesn’t unify the complete
enterprise work lifecycle.
PPM
Tools
Task
management
tools
Social
tools
ENTERPRISE
WORK
LIFECYCLE

12
THE ENTERPRISE WORK
MANAGEMENT APPROACH

13
NOW YOU’RE READY FOR BATTLE
The remainder of this eBook will walk you through each
stage of the enterprise work lifecycle and highlight what
needs to change, in conjunction with enterprise work
management best practices, so you can slay your work
chaos dragon for good.

14
1 IDENTIFY
Typical Situation:
Requests for work happen in more places and more
ways than ever before because of the structure
of enterprise/matrix organizations. They come as
emails, sticky notes, phone calls, conversations in
the hallway, instant messages, desk drive-bys, etc.,
and sometimes they come so frequently that it’s chaotic
trying to stay on top of them, let alone prioritize them.
Best practice: standardize.
Designate one place for inputs and requests, so
regardless of whether requests come from within
your team, clients, or other departments, they’ll
arrive in the same way, to the same place, where
they’ll never be overlooked or improperly prioritized.
Only 23% of companies use standard-
ized project management practices
throughout their organizations. 8
77+23+R23%

15
2 PRIORITIZE
Typical Situation:
There are two ways people typically prioritize their work:
The 1-2-3 Approach.
People work on requests from their boss first, requests
from other people second, and everything else last.
The pants on fire approach.
People work on whatever is going to bite them in the
butt next—usually whatever is due tomorrow.
Best practice:
There are three important best practices for prioritizing work:
1. Know when to say “No.”
It’s important to be able to say “no” to requests when:
∞∞ You don’t have time
∞∞ You don’t have resources
∞∞ They aren’t aligned with your organization’s
strategic objectives
∞∞ They won’t turn out acceptable ROI
2. Explain yourself.
Whenever you say “no” or “not right now” to a work
request, it’s imperative that you be able to explain and/
or show the requester why you’re saying no. For this,
contextual visibility is needed. You need to be able
to say, “I’m sorry, we won't be able to fulfill your work
request this quarter because we are already maxed to
capacity on projects more aligned with our business
goals,” and be able to show within your tool that what
you’re saying is true.
3. Stay aligned.
Work is pointless if it doesn’t benefit the business. That’s
why prioritizing work based on what will bring the most
ROI or benefit to your organization is vital.
“Without direct links to the strategic plan,
selecting the right projects at the right times
is more political than strategic.” 10
—Margo Visitacion, Forrester
“Saying no in business—to customers,
employees, vendors, colleagues, etc.—
is not only acceptable, it can even be
an action that saves your business.” 9
—George Roberts

16
3 PLAN
Typical Situation:
Without the visibility that comes from unified tools
and processes, work planning often includes overly
optimistic deadlines and a failure to account for all the
necessary requirements. With unstructured and
ad-hoc work, sufficient planning may not even happen.
Best practice: include the team early.
Getting input from those on the front lines will help
you forecast a more realistic timeline and scope, as
well as catch requirements you may have missed
otherwise. Additionally, this practice helps keep everyone
on the same page about process, expectations, and
dependencies, helping eliminate disconnectedness.
“If members are assigned tasks without their
input or agreement, it can cause dissension or
poor work performance within the group.” 11
—Rhonda Carlson

17
4 COORDINATE
Typical Situation:
Trying to coordinate work usually means disconnected
communication due to inefficient collaboration methods such
as time-sucking meetings, long email chains, and social tool
add-ons.
Best practice:
1. Get out of the way of work.
Give people the ability to accept work assignments,
make visible commitments, and make important deci-
sions. You will find that doing so increases their com-
mitment to the work, which will help unify your people
to your processes. Gartner Analyst, Robert Handler,
advises, “Experiment with self-selection, essentially
allowing resources to have some autonomy deciding
which projects they work on.” 12
2. Real collaboration.
First and foremost, status meetings and emails are
not “collaboration.” Second, unification comes largely
from learning how to collaborate on the right things at
the right times. However, don’t collaborate just for the
sake of collaborating. Too much collaboration can bog
down processes and create the dreaded “too many
cooks in the kitchen” syndrome. Collaborate in such
a way that information is collected in the context of
specific work items, including only those relevant to
the work, and no more.
“A sense of autonomy
has a powerful effect on
individual performance
and attitude.” 13
—Daniel Pink

18
5 EXECUTE
Typical Situation:
Disconnected processes often lead to wasteful
redundancies; your team may have done a certain
type of work several times before, but they always
have to start from scratch because little
standardization exists.
Instead of focusing on making work better and
more efficient, team members waste time trying to
remember the best ways to execute. This type of
frustration, without improvement, inevitably leads to
disengaged employees
Best practice:
1. Embrace process improvement.
Work templates (and a single place to keep
and use them) will save your life. Assignments,
processes, and dependencies are built in, so
your team always knows the correct steps for
execution. In addition, templates help streamline
repeatable, improvable workflows and allow
you and your team to constantly learn from
mistakes or inefficiencies and apply those
learnings for next time.
2. Employee recognition.
Recognizing employees in the context of their
work, helps keep people engaged in their
work by making them feel valued, important,
“Employee recognition has a huge communication
component! Recognizing people for their good work
sends an extremely powerful message to the recipient,
their work team and other employees through the
grapevine and formal communication channels.” 14
—Kim Harrison
and like they’re contributing to a higher cause.
It’s an innate need of each individual to feel
that they’ve done things right and like their
contribution matters.

19
6 DELIVER
Typical Situation:
For structured work, the typical “constraints” for final delivery are:
∞∞ On time
∞∞ On budget
∞∞ Within scope
A common adage heard regarding this approach is,“Pick
any two,” implying that the odds of achieving all three
constraints are slim-to-none. With disconnectedness
plaguing your department, that mentality is probably an
unfortunate truth.
Best practice:
Think outside the triangle.
It’s time to think about work delivery in a different way.
Instead of confining work to the constraint triangle,
define what “done” and “winning” should look like
during the planning phase of work. Delivery, then, is
successful when you’ve met the standards set at the
beginning of the work lifecycle, which may be more,
less, or different than scope, budget, and time. The key
is to deliver what you committed to deliver.
Make Outcomes Accessible.
When you’ve delivered your finished work, don’t let
your hard work go to waste. So often, it’s easy to send
off your data, insights, and documents and that’s the
end of it. When that happens, work gets lost or forgotten
about and nobody else has any visibility into what
you’ve accomplished. Make sure that the work you deliver
is seen and acknowledged by the right people, and then
saved, with context, in a central location where you can
frequently refer back to it.

20
7 MEASURE
Typical Situation:
Measurement is a commonly overlooked stage of
the work lifecycle. When you’re using separate/
disparate tools to manage your work, “measuring”
looks more like hours of manual data entry that you
don’t entirely trust. Disconnectedness means that
when it’s time to measure success, it’s hard to say
what worked or who deserves a promotion because
you couldn’t track team member activities and your
data lives in too many different places.
Best practice:
1. Keep everything in one place.
Keep your work, your collaboration, and your
documents in one place, or at least in as few
tools as possible (strategic integrations are a
huge plus). This helps keep all of your important
data in one place, which will save you time in
the long run.
2. Lessons learned.
Keeping all your performance data in a central
location is an improvement goldmine. Equally
as important is team analysis of the data in a
formalized Lessons Learned activity. Teams
should discuss together what worked, what
didn’t, and how they can be more efficient and
successful next time. When you’re done, you
can incorporate feedback into your templates
to make sure next time runs more smoothly.
“When systems interact, people are likely to interact.
Establish common platforms and systems across
the organization and give people access to the
same data and information.” 15
—Evan Rosen

21
LIFECYCLES ARE NEVER
ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL
It’s important to remember that work processes and lifecycles
vary depending on the different types of work being done
and what is best for the organization.
The Key?
All work is different. Never try to force work into a lifecycle that wasn’t
made for it. Unstructured work will be unsuccessful in a lifecycle for
structured projects and vice versa. The key is to take the work lifecycle
laid out for you here and customize it based on the specific types of
work you do and what will work best for your organization,
department, and team.

22
ONCE YOU’VE CONQUERED THE DRAGON,
YOU WILL BE REWARDED
The benefits that come from unifying (eliminating disconnectedness) are more
specific than just “killing chaos.”
Simplification.
Unifying your tools and processes means no more
switching back and forth between disparate tools or
badgering team members for status updates.
Connection.
Team members are connected to their work and to
each other because everyone is on the same page,
able to collaborate within the context of their work, and
using the same processes.
Visibility.
Everyone has the visibility they need in order to do their
jobmoreefficiently.Teammemberscanseedependencies
and timelines, managers can see statuses, progress,
and proper resource allocation, and executives have
what they need in order to justify costs.
Saved Time.
Time-sucking status meetings and navigating long
email chains for data become a thing of the past.
When tools and processes are unified, you get
contextual collaboration that saves everyone time.
Saved Money.
Buying books, paying for several different tools or
consultants, and bad processes that waste team
member’s time cost you in thelongrun.Unification
eliminates all of those extra costs.
Happiness.
When you’re unified, everyone is happy. People are
engaged in their work, feel like their contribution
matters, and no longer feel frustration from being
over allocated or left in the dark.

23
Enterprise Work Management is your ultimate weapon
for unifying your tools and your processes and slaying
work disconnectedness once and for all.
Manage the end-to-
end work lifecycle.
It’s one system that manages
the entire lifecycle of all types
of work—both structured and
unstructured—from initial request
to delivery and measurement.
Unify collaboration.
It’s one system that reduces the
information overload you feel
by cutting out excess tools and
connecting collaboration with
work. This means more context,
less meetings.
Improve your work.
It’s one system that streamlines
your repeatable work processes
using custom built templates
and process improvement to
improve your team’s productivity
and efficiency.
Unify your tools.
It’s one system that combines
everyone’s individual work
management needs and processes
into a single tool, eliminating
silos and frustration.
Increase adoption.
It’s one system that people will
actually use because it’s easy,
relevant, and works the way
people naturally work so it isn’t
just another step in an already
complicated process.
Gain work visibility.
It’s one system that provides all
levels of an organization with
visibility and insights into the
truth about workloads, depen-
dencies, and when things will
really be done.
Gain people visibility.
It’s one system that gives
managers and senior managers
visibility into who is working on
what, who has bandwidth, and
how to justify the resources you
have, and the ones you still need.
YOUR ULTIMATE WEAPON:
ENTERPRISE WORK MANAGEMENT

ATTASK ENTERPRISE WORK CLOUD:
TRUSTED DRAGON SLAYER, WORLDWIDE
AtTask is the only provider of cloud-based Enterprise Work Management
solutions for enterprise teams.
AtTask can help you slay the dragon of work chaos in your organization.
Contact us today to learn more.
+ 1.866.441.0001 + 44 (0)845 5083771www.attask.com

25
WORKS CITED
1. http://www.exality.com/files/ConsultantFeeSurvey2011.pd
2. http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/feb2010/
ca2010025_358633.htm
3. http://www.workdaysolutions.com/resources/Workplace_
Conflict_Example.pdf
4. http://smallbusiness.chron.com/bad-effects-multitask-
ing-32419.html
5. PMI’s Pulse of the Profession: The High Cost of Low Perfor-
mance. March 2013
6. http://www.fdu.edu/newspubs/magazine/99su/stress.html
7. http://www.fdu.edu/newspubs/magazine/99su/stress.html
8. PMI’s Pulse of the Profession: The High Cost of Low
Performance. March 2013
9. http://blog.openviewpartners.com/10entrepreneur-leader-
ship-lessons-from-my-25-year-software-career/#the-impor-
tance-of-saying-no-in-business-and-explaining-why-not
10. Margo Visitacion. Forrester. It’s 3PM; Do You Know Where
Your Portfolio Is?
11. http://rhondacarlson.hubpages.com/hub/Effe-
cive-Team-Project-Planning
12. Handler, Robert A., et al. Predicts 2013: PPM Leaders Must
Embrace Constant Innovation and Change. Gartner. 2013
13. Pink, Daniel H. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Mo-
tivates Us. Riverhead Books. New York: 2009. 88.
14. http://www.cuttingedgepr.com/articles/emprecog_so_im-
portant.asp
15. http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/feb2010/
ca2010025_358633.htm

How to Slay the Dragon of Enterprise Work

How to Slay the Dragon of Enterprise Work

Recomendados

Recomendados

Más contenido relacionado

Destacado

Destacado (14)

Más de Workfront

Más de Workfront (20)

Último

Último (20)

How to Slay the Dragon of Enterprise Work