{"id":261,"date":"2012-12-11T09:32:07","date_gmt":"2012-12-11T09:32:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cmwlab.com\/blog\/?p=261"},"modified":"2025-04-15T09:26:22","modified_gmt":"2025-04-15T09:26:22","slug":"success-sooner-with-automated-workflows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cmwlab.com\/blog\/success-sooner-with-automated-workflows\/","title":{"rendered":"Focus your team using Automated Workflows"},"content":{"rendered":"

Establish credibility with your new markets by providing laser-focus to your team\u2019s efforts.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

\r\n\"CMW<\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n

As we enter the 20-teens, elegant design in products, packaging, and communications is arguably one of the most important indicators of business success. Beyond these tangible examples of good design, you should also consider how to make your organization\/team function well by providing careful design.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

You\u2019re striving for a deceptive simplicity when you design your team\u2019s work. Your design should appear simple, even \u201cobvious,\u201d because it will be the end product of rigorous forethought, detailed planning, and persistent discipline on your part, a rather maddening process to be honest.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

\u201c…workflows aren\u2019t meant to replace workers, but rather to let your team members focus on their own work while giving them visibility into the process as a whole…\u201d<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n

But, the good news is that once you\u2019ve undertaken this planning<\/a> and forethought in a disciplined way, you can easily make automated workflows that coordinate everyone\u2019s efforts<\/a> so that the right things happen at the right time. Workflows aren\u2019t meant to replace workers, but rather to let your team members focus on their own work while giving them (and you) visibility into the process as a whole. Automated workflows also let you apply \u201cbest practices<\/em>\u201d to informal projects that inevitably come up.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

As you design your team\u2019s work, you will likely start to recognize that one project is similar to another, and that they actually have little processes embedded within them, for things like approvals and reviews — processes where things have to happen in a certain order, with dependencies. Making a simple automated workflow to reflect those processes can save a lot of time and confusion so you avoid the following unanticipated frustrations:<\/p>\r\n\r\n

    \r\n
  1. missed deadlines and budget targets,<\/li>\r\n
  2. team confusion about priorities,<\/li>\r\n
  3. no way to deal with informal projects that pop up,<\/li>\r\n
  4. lack of integration between tasks and overall goals,<\/li>\r\n
  5. and, perhaps worst of all, not knowing what\u2019s even going on with the team.<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n\r\n

    Automated workflows help team leaders, entrepreneurs, and \u201caccidental\u201d project managers to harness control of their team\u2019s work to automate how individual tasks are assigned, tracked, prioritized, and updated. While a workflow automation<\/a> scheme looks like a picture created as a diagram or a slide, it should actually be a computed process so that the order of things you\u2019ve set has to be followed. You can make workflows for things like:<\/p>\r\n\"everything\r\n