Project Management vs. Workflow Management

Mark on Oct 26, 2013

While the concepts behind project management and workflow management are similar and related concepts, the two are not interchangeable.

Project management is about resources, planning, coordination, and responding to changes in order to get something big done. It is an overall application of knowledge, skills, training, experience, expertise, as well as the best tools and techniques in order to direct a wider-scoped organizational goal toward completion. Projects are usually temporary in nature and often thought of a "one-off" or as specialized endeavors. As such, not usually repeatable, as the techniques and methods applied can differ depending on the specific project expectations and goals.

Business Process Management and Workflow Management Systems, on the other hand, are about managing well defined repetitive business processes or routines. That, once defined, will tend to remain static and occur frequently. The key to managing repetitive processes is to have them well defined and control the steps in the process automatically routing tasks from one user to the next. Monitoring and reporting on the progress as the workflow works through to completion.

Examples include, but are not limited to, hiring and onboarding new employees, policy and procedure changes, budget and expense approval, travel expense requests, contract reviews, invoice processing, and purchase requests.

Yet another difference is the notion of automated workflows allowing business the ability to schedule commonly performed workflows on a regularly scheduled basis.

Workflows allow business owners a means of measuring and predicting the timelines of their production processes.

Flowmingo helps you get the most out of your business processes with an easy to use, drag and drop, visual workflow builder. We understand your processes will change over time and provide a simple revision system to create new versions of your processes.

Check out all of our features.

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