Business workflow management is key to driving user adoption as part of business process improvement in the enterprise
Creating an onboarding process for new software users to complete is vital to driving user adoption. However, to ensure that product users are effective in the long term requires a dedicated procedure that accounts for business workflow management.
Defining Business Workflow Management
Business workflow management involves identifying, documenting, and directing a series of steps or tasks to complete a task, or achieve a desired result. Once you streamline a workflow and routine, then you can automate it and further improve efficiency.
Enterprise operations should carefully consider whether automation is necessary to speed up workflows. Automation may cause problems if you are using too many applications because it can hinder productivity.
Simplifying processes and reducing redundancies in day-to-day tasks is key to effective business workflow management. Before introducing automation, business analysts should identify and eliminate these complexities whenever possible.
How to approach business workflow management practices
It’s important to consider these three things before creating a workflow methodology.
- Identify where data comes from: data serves as the input necessary to kick start a process. Make sure you identify all the people, places, and systems that data is gathered from to inform your business process.
- Plot out an ideal process chart: – document and find a solution to any redundancies or bottlenecks in the current process. Solutions could include removing or combining steps, or closing knowledge gaps with additional training. The process can run smoothly after removing barriers to streamline a workflow.
- Decide whether to augment staff capabilities: using a software application for automation can scale the yield of a workflow that has been streamlined. However, it is important to note that sometimes this still requires employee oversight.
Starting with these steps will help you to put a business workflow policy in place.
Workflow management as a Catalyst for Software User Adoption
After implementing a workflow system, your organization can use it to guide an ideal process and improve user adoption. A documented policy for business workflows provides users with a map to complete tasks more efficiently, and produce better results.
To further improve productivity, give software users a guide after implementing or improving business workflows.
When you identify the data sources, the process is mapped, and the decision to automate parts of the workflow is made, it’s important to collect these steps in a place that can be accessed and systemized by software users.
Training Employees to Understand Business Workflows can Boost User Adoption
Business system analysts can help reduce friction in processes by identifying and removing impediments. However, to ensure high user adoption rates, it’s important to provide advocacy and training to all employees involved in implementing the workflow.
Efforts to educate stakeholders on a business workflow can improve their knowledge. Additionally, it can inspire higher user adoption rates of software programs. Especially if participating in those workflows makes them effective and productive.
Companies are increasing user adoption rates by translating business workflows into on-screen guidance within a digital adoption platform (DAP). DAPs are software tools layered on top of other tools to improve proficiency in that tool.
Using a DAP to create an app walkthrough can reduce the strain on IT support resources, by automating the workflow process and providing users with how-to steps, and troubleshooting guidance as they complete the workflow.
Maximizing the Effect of Business Workflow Sequences Training
There are two reasons that investing in workflow training can have a bigger effect on the efficiency of the rest of the organization.
- Better business process management (BPM) – Employee business workflow training is essential to on-going BPM. BPM is focused on reducing error rates and knowledge or process gaps across processes throughout the company.
- Reliable business workflows improve organizational trust – Workflow management deals with individual tasks and processes. Therefore, if you standardize workflows and train employees on every step, this can improve overall confidence in BPM. Dependable procedures can consistently improve efficiency across the organization.
How to validate workflow improvements
To improve business workflow management, it’s important to check how employees are reacting to or engaging with the workflow. Here are three ideas to consider:
- Use surveys – line of business leaders can decide to create and deploy customer satisfaction or employee satisfaction surveys to get critical feedback on how intuitive the workflow is.
- Analyze usage – Business systems analysts can examine the level of software usage against the workflow to identify areas for improvement and remove bottlenecks to adoption.
- Track engagement – Project managers can track the time it takes to complete tasks within a process workflow across employees, departments, or other stakeholders to ensure accountability for productivity.
By accessing data through these three methods, you can gain insights into what’s working and what’s not, and take steps to improve workflows accordingly.
How a DAP can Accelerate Business Workflow Engagement
A digital adoption tool can also make it easier to implement business process improvement strategies that take advantage of continuous improvement methods. A DAP comes equipped with a dashboard that provides a comprehensive view of workflow usage and employee engagement, while also offering an employee feedback loop that overlays any software tool in use.
Any inefficiencies you identify within the DAP can be addressed instantly. You can make the changes directly within the in-application guide, and rolled out to users. With on-demand access to workflow tasks, your business workflow management will be constantly updated with the latest insights. Hence, this will result in improved efficiency.
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