What is a Collaborative Work Management Solution?

When we used the term Collaborative Work Management Solution to describe our platform, Conductor, we were often met with some variation of “what does that mean?”

So I thought we should take a moment to unpack that term a bit.

Collaborative: working with other people to produce or create something.

Work Management: the processes and organization of work-related tasks.

Solution: in this context, solution means a software application.

Ask The Experts

Gartner, a leading global research and advisory company defines work management as:

“Work management is a set of software products and services that apply workflow structure to the movement of information as well as to the interaction of business processes and human worker processes that generate the information. Work management streamlines and transforms crucial business processes and thus can improve results and performance.”

So basically, a Collaborative Work Management Solution is software (and services) that:

• Helps people communicate and work together better
• Gives a common structure to how people work together
• Collects and coordinates the work-related data; and
• Leads to better performance and better results.

What makes Collaborative Work Management Solutions different?

Traditional Portfolio and Project Management (PPM) tools were designed based on the old command-and-control approach to project management. Typically, this plays out with one or several project managers who create a project plan and then spend the duration of the project assigning work, chasing after team members for status updates, and then updating the project plan (that no one else is looking at) to reflect the current status of the project.

Instead, Collaborative Work Management Solutions like Conductor were designed around a more people-centric approach to project orchestration that connects and engages the entire team.

Some early attempts at work management software don’t offer a robust project management feature set, Conductor shatters that thinking — with a work management structure and process that encompasses everything from managing large portfolios to individual task management. Outside of project management — this new generation of Collaborative Work Management Solutions also includes a toolset to support efficient project management, including learning management, peer recognition, and social integrations to boost collaboration and connection.

Collaborative Work Management Solutions create greater transparency and accountability, and give team members instant access to all the documents and information they need. This gives teams the support and structure to complete projects faster, avoid issues, and course-correct before the project derails.

How the category has evolved

Since this post was first written, the category has split. Collaborative work management now generally refers to team-level tools such as Monday and Asana, while the enterprise-scale problem this post describes, governing portfolios of initiatives against strategic and financial outcomes, has become what Gartner calls strategy execution management and strategic portfolio management. Conductor is positioned there today as a strategy execution platform, but the underlying argument hasn’t changed: the plan has to live where the work happens.

Final Thoughts

No matter how you define Collaborative Work Management — it’s clear that traditional workplaces are becoming more and more digitized and that digital workplace solutions are going to play an increasingly important role in how teams work, communicate, and collaborate with each other.

To learn more about how Conductor is changing how teams orchestrate their complex programs, book a personalized demo.