How to Create the Winning Workflow Process

It is quite crazy to keep on doing same things again and again; still we do it each single day in our work. We do same steps, and go through similar process, and begin from the scratch expecting something totally different to occur when we can save several hours per week implementing the workflows. What’s workflow or work flow? They are the powerful productivity boosters that you have in the project management arsenal. Let us dive in the basics of workflow, where and when to use this, and look at real-world examples on how they will help to streamline as well as optimize the workday.

Workflow creation & documentation checklist

Best thing of workflows is you already use most of them daily without realizing it. So, any time you have gone through the task or optimized every necessary step, you have created the workflow. At every transition point, you will confidently say what is supposed to happen. You do not have to start from the scratch and do same thing expecting various results. Still better, you may transfer such knowledge in the checklist and template so others will follow it. But, when some workflows are straightforward (paying invoice), they will fast get complex. The entire business workflows such as planning & executing Agile sprints will involve various meetings, managing the teams, project management and more.

Here is a simple workflow that you may use to save time:

• Create the meeting agenda & distribute to everybody beforehand
• Send out meeting invites for minimum time (and people may request the longer meeting in case they think this warrants it)
• End your meeting with clear next step
• Follow with the email outlining on what happened & expectations
• Run through the agenda when sticking to its schedule

Sprint planning workflow

Suppose your team makes use of Agile project management, probably you have plenty of workflows in place on how to prioritize, plan, as well as build features. The important ones is the sprint planning workflow. For an unfamiliar, the Agile sprints are collection of the defined development tasks, which take place over the specific time frame. At an end of sprint, you must have the piece of working tool ready for the review and plan out your next steps. With all moving parts, which take place in the software development, to have the defined workflow for the sprint planning is very important.