In this series of blog posts, we will summarize each chapter of the book, Rise of the Project Workforce, and highlight a few key take-aways from that chapter. These posts will make it easy for me to refer back to key ideas in subsequent posts, and provide an online "landing page" for these concepts.
We are at a strategic inflection point in the ways that we work, compete and win–these require a new approach that is no longer suited to large, hierarchical organizations. In what author Thomas Friedman calls the "flat world," the best talent for a task might be anywhere in the world. He writes, “More people than ever…collaborate and compete in real time with more other people, on more different kinds of work, from more different corners of the planet, and on a more equal footing than at any previous time in the history of the world.”
Globalization has given rise to flatter, more agile teams that take on more discrete projects and make decisions locally. The Internet and faster computing technologies have enabled this phenomenon. Hierarchies are flattened, and enterprises are fragmented through outsourcing. Meanwhile, increasing regulatory scrutiny requires these flattened, fragmented teams to carefully assign, track, and manage the accountability for the work being done.
In this flat world, businesses need solutions to rapidly increasing problems, such as: the inability to get actionable business information while there is still time to take action; the inability to measure productivity; the inability to make sense out of massive pools of disconnected and sometimes conflicting business data; and the inability for teams to collaborate and share knowledge with one another.
Enter Project Workforce Management–designed to enable progress in a flat world. Project Workforce Management, by necessity, combines human capital management, project management, business process management, and cost/revenue accounting into a synthesized solution that meets the challenges of a flat world:
- Project Workforce Management helps design and oversee business processes, while it provides real-time visibility into areas including cost accounting, productivity analysis, budget-vs.-actual comparisons, utilization, and profitability.
- Because change is a constant, it enables managers and teams to manage changing and fluid processes while change is occurring.
- It enables work to be broken down to accommodate the many units, teams, cost centers and individuals in today’s flattened organizations.
- It is an interactive environment for real-time tracking and analysis of project workforce data.
Moreover, Project Workforce Management is a workflow platform that allows mangers to model project, workforce, and financial processes, represent those processes graphically, and then automate those processes.
Project Workforce Management encompasses and integrates:
- Time and expense tracking
- Cost and revenue accounting
- Workforce planning
- Project planning
- Project process management
- Analytics
While traditional business management systems perpetuate silos of information and narrow departmental views, Project Workforce Management brings together talent, work, and finances into one system that provides a common vantage point for decision makers, provides real-time views of business operations, and supports more accurate decision making. It enables the cooperation and collaboration that must occur in a flat world.
