People are
lazy bastards.
In workplace, they need to work in concert to achieve
results too far-ranging for one person to manage.
What we call "the workplace" is simply a single, although
complicated, case of the well-known phenomenon of "a person
must earn his/her living by the sweat of his/her back."
Because there are as many opinions and viewpoints as people, working in concert is not naturally easy or
effective. The current view of work at the workplace is
that it needs to be managed in ordered to be effective.
This so-called management is an single-purpose activity
which aims to make sure that whatever the task at hand is,
it will be completed in time and in budget.
Management sounds simple only on paper. However it is a
very complicated activity riddled with many problems.
These problems often spring from the common case of a work
task, project or mission not having been defined
properly. This results in interpersonal conflicts between
people who seem to have conflicting goals or
objectives.
The tricky part to understand here is that while these
situations seem very real to the participants, the
conflicting tasks have all to be completed for progress
to be made in the project or process.
There are certain classes of businesses and business
processes which lend theirselves to analysis, compared to
the majority of business processes of which it would be
a folly to analyse or try to control.
Some of these easily analysable processes are suitable
workflow analysis material. The workflow analysis is simply
a description of the process (deus_x used newspaper
publication as an example of a process, which needs to be
completed in a fairly consistent manner daily) which
details things such as tasks, actors, artifacts and many
more, depending on how complete an analysis you wish to
perform.
There is a class of software which seeks to automate some
of the tedious repetitive management work related to
the class of processes described earlier. Workflow
Management software lets you model your process and
takes care of the usual work management issues such as
task completion, timing, artifact storage and so on. Or
at least tries to do this.
I would very much like to implement a workflow management
software package, but unfortunately it's 1am on a Sunday
morning and I should be working on a client project at this
very moment. Which sucks.