ENTERPRISE WORK MANAGEMENT:

How to Slay the Dragon

of Enterprise Work

CONTENTS
The Dragon of Enterprise Work 

The Complete Enterprise Work Lifecycle 

17

The Ugly Face of the Dragon 

The Enterprise Work Management Approach  19

When the Dragon Breathes Fire 

Now Youre Ready for Battle 

21

Dont Just Treat the Burn 

Lifecycles Arent One-Size-Fits-All 

22

The Problem is Bigger than You Think 

11

The Rewards of Slaying the Dragon 

23

Pet Dragons Cost You, Big Time 

13

Your Ultimate Weapon 

24

Slaying the Dragon Requires a Different Weapon  15

THE DRAGON OF
ENTERPRISE WORK

THIS MEANS WAR

If youre reading this eBook, its probably because youve got a
pest control problem. This isnt just an irritating lizard infestation,
though. This is larger and nastier than lizards; its a huge, nasty,
fire-breathing, hard to ignore, dragon. The dragon of work chaos.
And you need to know how to slay it.
Well, theres no need to fear. This eBook will teach you the
rightand necessaryweapons to help you extinguish the fire,
examine your burn wounds, and exterminate the work chaos
dragon for good.

THE UGLY FACE OF THE DRAGON

Work chaos is the fiend that plagues enterprise teams. It emerges as a result of serious work mismanagement and
it can take many forms, including:
Random Input
Processes.
No one knows the
correct way to make a
request, so requests
come in at all times of
the day, in all shapes
and sizeswithout the
key information you
need. Its insane trying
to keep up with them all.

Wasted time.
Your team spends too
much time on phone
calls, in email, making
desk visits, attending
status meetings, and
trying to gather data
instead of actually
executing.

Disconnected
activities.
Your strategy direction
is disconnected from
commitments, which
are disconnected
from work, which is
disconnected from
performance tracking
and management, etc.

No Adoption.
Project managers,
team members, and
executives dont engage
in your tools because
the tools arent relevant
to their work, and
have terrible usability.

Poor visibility Poor resource

into work.
visibility.
Every person and team
is using different siloed
tools for work, like
document sharing,
PPM, spreadsheets,
email, whiteboards,
task management
tools, etc., which
leads to scattered
work data that takes
hours to gather.

Its difficult to know

how effectively or
ineffectively resources
are utilized to deliver
on your business
commitments.

All you really need is to

know whos working on what,
if people are working on the
right work, do they have the
resources they need, and
will work be completed on
time. But every time you try,
you end up getting burned
by the dragon.

WHEN THE DRAGON

BREATHES FIRE...
Unfortunately, the effects of not exterminating the chaos dragon
are that you and your team are:
Burned out.

The chaos and frustration of disconnected work leads to unhealthy stress, long hours,
too many caffeinated drinks, and eventually, extreme dissatisfaction with your job.

Running with your hair on fire.

Work chaos and low visibility mean that you and your team members are always
running around like your hairs on fire trying to get the data that you need to appease
executives and stakeholders.

Constantly facing fire drills.

Without the information you need for process improvement or the right amount of
resource visibility, you have no way to justify priorities or timelines, which results in
constantly putting out fires instead of doing strategic work.

EVERYTHING YOUVE TRIED

ONLY TREATS THE BURN
Managers have tried all kinds of things to help slay the chaos dragon
that plagues them. Unfortunately, these things merely treat their burn
wounds instead of slaying the actual problem: the dragon.

Business Books.
Maybe if everybody reads this
revolutionary new book, it will
change everything.

More People.
If we just had a few more headcount,
that would solve all our problems.

Methodology Merry-Go-Rounds.
Maybe going Lean this month will
help us function better...

New Point Solutions.

Industry Trends.

Well just use another free tool to

patch that hole in our process.

The blogosphere is saying that all we

have to do is empower people more.

Consultants.

If youve ever tried any of those things, then you

get the idea. Heres the thing, every single one
of those helps costs money. And thats an awful
lot of money to spend on temporary fixes. Now,
theres a reason their effect isnt permanent. Its
because we have a bigger problem on our hands
that they fail to address.

All we have to do is get an expert in here

to teach us how to be more organized.
The average consultant charges $125 per hour. (Thats $1000
per day!) 1

THE PROBLEM IS BIGGER

THAN YOU THINK
The truth is, the dragon youre facing isnt actually the
chaos or the project failure or the inefficiencies. The real
dragon is the creator of the chaos: a nasty thing called
disconnectedness.
Disconnected tools.

How many different tools are you using to manage your work? Several? More
than five? Yeah, thats nuts! And chances are, you use your own favorite tools
to manage your work life while each individual on your team is using their own.
No wonder its next to impossible to get updates on whats really going on.

Disconnected processes.

With everyone using different tools, its chaotic trying to get everyone on the
same page and using the same processes. Because most of the time, different
tools dont play nicely with one another. That means getting project and work
data has to happen manually, which wastes a ton of time.

Disconnected people.

With disconnected tools and processes, not only are team members in the dark
about what the rest of their team is doing and where dependencies are, but
other departments in the organization are having the same problems, so trying
to stay connected interdepartmentally is just(you guessed it!) more chaos.

"PET" DRAGONS COST YOU, BIG TIME

What organizations fail to realize is how much all this disconnectedness is costing
them, in dollars, efficiency, and productivity.

3 wasted worker
hours/day, at an
average salary of
$50k, costs you
$128/day, $638/week,
$2,550/month, and
$7,650/quarter.
Multiply that by 6
people on your team
and youre wasting
$91,800/year! 3

Silos.

Lost data.

Failure.

Individuals working in different,

disconnected tools inevitably
results in team silos and littleto-no work visibility.

Storing data in disconnected

tools with disconnected
processes is like playing
information hot potato. Work
data gets tossed around
from tool to tool and person
to person, making gathering
information and compiling
reports a time-consuming,
error-ridden nightmare.

PMI reports that less than

two-thirds of projects actually
meet their goals and business
intent. In fact, it is estimated
that for every $1 billion spent
on a failed project, $135 million
is lost foreverunrecoverable. 5

As systems fail to interact

and data becomes trapped
and unavailable to decision-makers outside the silo,
people are less likely to interactthey avoid sharing data
and information outside of
their silos. Its a vicious cycle,
one that can cost an organization in agility, productivity,
and responsiveness. 2
Evan Rosen

Lost work.
When you have work requests
flying at you from all directions,
sometimes they fall through
the cracks and time is lost. This
can hold back entire projects,
tangle up your resources, disrupt strategies, and jeopardize
your competitive advantage.

Wasted time.
Disconnectedness means more
employee time is spent in status
meetings and emails while
everyone tries frantically to get
on the same page. It also means
that manual processes eat up a
ton of your average workers day.

Frustration.
Disconnection causes individual
team members massive amounts
of stress because of low visibility
into work and dependencies,
inefficient processes, and
scattered work information. In
fact, three-fourths of American
workers describe their work
as stressful. 6

Distractions.
Businesses lose $650 billion
a year related to the lack of
job performance and creativity
due to distractions. 4

Workplace stress costs U.S. employers an

estimated $200 billion per year in absenteeism, lower productivity, staff turnover,
worker compensation, medical insurance
and other stress-related expenses. 7

SLAYING THE DRAGON REQUIRES

A DIFFERENT WEAPON
The best way to eliminate disconnectedness and chaos is
to unify. Unifying, in the correct way, requires that you start
to look at the way you do work in a different way. There are
two crucial parts to unifying:
1.

unify your tools.

Using five or more tools scatters your work data, lowers visibility, kills productivity, and increases chaos.
Its time to stop disconnectedness once and for all by
implementing one unified, centralized tool for managing all of your work.

2. Unify

your processes.

Disconnected tools inevitably leads to disconnected

processes, especially when youre using separate
tools to manage different stages of the project lifecycle and additional tools to manage the rest of your
work. The secret to unifying processes is to manage
the end-to-end lifecycle of enterprise work, not just
parts of the project lifecycle.

10

MANAGING THE COMPLETE

ENTERPRISE WORK LIFECYCLE
Unfortunately, most of the solutions available to help
manage work, fail to manage it through the end-to-end work
lifecycle. At best, they only focus on one or two stages..

PPM Tools.
PPM
Tools

Most PPM tools fail to

accommodate work other than
projects (i.e. unstructured work,
everydaylights on work, ad hoc
requests, etc.). And PPM tools
may work fine for project
planning and coordinating,
but they leave you with gaps
to fill for the rest.

Task Management
Tools.
Task
management
tools

ENTERPRISE
WORK
LIFECYCLE

Social Tools.

Social
tools

Your ultimate unification weapon is useless if it doesnt unify the complete

enterprise work lifecycle.

There are thousands of task

management tools out there
for you to choose from, but
they are usually as simplistic
as apps and they only help
manage work execution; youll
have to find other tools to help
you plan, prioritize, collaborate, and measure.

Most social tools are apps

or add-ons that dont even
allow you to collaborate in
the context of your work,
meaning that collaboration is
unconnected from the actual
work its related to. With these
social tools, collaboration
doesnt flow through the entire
work lifecycle.

11

THE ENTERPRISE WORK

MANAGEMENT APPROACH

12

NOW YOURE READY FOR BATTLE

The remainder of this eBook will walk you through each
stage of the enterprise work lifecycle and highlight what
needs to change, in conjunction with enterprise work
management best practices, so you can slay your work
chaos dragon for good.

13

IDENTIFY
Typical Situation:
Requests for work happen in more places and more
ways than ever before because of the structure
of enterprise/matrix organizations. They come as
emails, sticky notes, phone calls, conversations in
the hallway, instant messages, desk drive-bys, etc.,
and sometimes they come so frequently that its chaotic
trying to stay on top of them, let alone prioritize them.

Best practice: standardize.

Designate one place for inputs and requests, so
regardless of whether requests come from within
your team, clients, or other departments, theyll
arrive in the same way, to the same place, where
theyll never be overlooked or improperly prioritized.

77+23+R
23%

Only 23% of companies use standardized project management practices

throughout their organizations. 8

14

2 PRIORITIZE
Typical Situation:
There are two ways people typically prioritize their work:

The 1-2-3 Approach.

People work on requests from their boss first, requests
from other people second, and everything else last.

The pants on fire approach.

People work on whatever is going to bite them in the
butt nextusually whatever is due tomorrow.

Best practice:
There are three important best practices for prioritizing work:

request this quarter because we are already maxed to

capacity on projects more aligned with our business
goals, and be able to show within your tool that what
youre saying is true.

3. Stay aligned.
Work is pointless if it doesnt benefit the business. Thats
why prioritizing work based on what will bring the most
ROI or benefit to your organization is vital.

Without direct links to the strategic plan,

selecting the right projects at the right times
is more political than strategic. 10
Margo Visitacion, Forrester

1. Know when to say No.

Its important to be able to say no to requests when:
You dont have time
You dont have resources
They arent aligned with your organizations

strategic objectives
They wont turn out acceptable ROI

2. Explain yourself.
Whenever you say no or not right now to a work
request, its imperative that you be able to explain and/
or show the requester why youre saying no. For this,
contextual visibility is needed. You need to be able
to say, Im sorry, we won't be able to fulfill your work

Saying no in businessto customers,

employees, vendors, colleagues, etc.
is not only acceptable, it can even be
an action that saves your business. 9
George Roberts

15

3 PLAN
Typical Situation:
Without the visibility that comes from unified tools
and processes, work planning often includes overly
optimistic deadlines and a failure to account for all the
necessary requirements. With unstructured and
ad-hoc work, sufficient planning may not even happen.

Best practice: include the team early.

Getting input from those on the front lines will help
you forecast a more realistic timeline and scope, as
well as catch requirements you may have missed
otherwise. Additionally, this practice helps keep everyone
on the same page about process, expectations, and
dependencies, helping eliminate disconnectedness.

If members are assigned tasks without their

input or agreement, it can cause dissension or
poor work performance within the group. 11
Rhonda Carlson

16

4 COORDINATE
Typical Situation:
Trying to coordinate work usually means disconnected
communication due to inefficient collaboration methods such
as time-sucking meetings, long email chains, and social tool
add-ons.

Best practice:
1. Get out of the way of work.
Give people the ability to accept work assignments,
make visible commitments, and make important decisions. You will find that doing so increases their commitment to the work, which will help unify your people
to your processes. Gartner Analyst, Robert Handler,
advises, Experiment with self-selection, essentially
allowing resources to have some autonomy deciding
which projects they work on. 12

2. Real collaboration.
First and foremost, status meetings and emails are
not collaboration. Second, unification comes largely
from learning how to collaborate on the right things at
the right times. However, dont collaborate just for the
sake of collaborating. Too much collaboration can bog
down processes and create the dreaded too many
cooks in the kitchen syndrome. Collaborate in such
a way that information is collected in the context of
specific work items, including only those relevant to
the work, and no more.

A sense of autonomy
has a powerful effect on
individual performance
and attitude. 13
Daniel Pink

17

5 EXECUTE
Typical Situation:
Disconnected processes often lead to wasteful
redundancies; your team may have done a certain
type of work several times before, but they always
have to start from scratch because little
standardization exists.
Instead of focusing on making work better and
more efficient, team members waste time trying to
remember the best ways to execute. This type of
frustration, without improvement, inevitably leads to
disengaged employees

and like theyre contributing to a higher cause.

Its an innate need of each individual to feel
that theyve done things right and like their
contribution matters.

Employee recognition has a huge communication

component! Recognizing people for their good work
sends an extremely powerful message to the recipient,
their work team and other employees through the
grapevine and formal communication channels. 14
Kim Harrison

Best practice:
1. Embrace process improvement.
Work templates (and a single place to keep
and use them) will save your life. Assignments,
processes, and dependencies are built in, so
your team always knows the correct steps for
execution. In addition, templates help streamline
repeatable, improvable workflows and allow
you and your team to constantly learn from
mistakes or inefficiencies and apply those
learnings for next time.

2. Employee recognition.
Recognizing employees in the context of their
work, helps keep people engaged in their
work by making them feel valued, important,

18

6 DELIVER
Typical Situation:
For structured work, the typical constraints for final delivery are:

On time
On budget
Within scope

youve accomplished. Make sure that the work you deliver

is seen and acknowledged by the right people, and then
saved, with context, in a central location where you can
frequently refer back to it.

A common adage heard regarding this approach is,Pick

any two, implying that the odds of achieving all three
constraints are slim-to-none. With disconnectedness
plaguing your department, that mentality is probably an
unfortunate truth.

Best practice:
Think outside the triangle.
Its time to think about work delivery in a different way.
Instead of confining work to the constraint triangle,
define what done and winning should look like
during the planning phase of work. Delivery, then, is
successful when youve met the standards set at the
beginning of the work lifecycle, which may be more,
less, or different than scope, budget, and time. The key
is to deliver what you committed to deliver.

Make Outcomes Accessible.

When youve delivered your finished work, dont let
your hard work go to waste. So often, its easy to send
off your data, insights, and documents and thats the
end of it. When that happens, work gets lost or forgotten
about and nobody else has any visibility into what

19

7 MEASURE
Typical Situation:
Measurement is a commonly overlooked stage of
the work lifecycle. When youre using separate/
disparate tools to manage your work, measuring
looks more like hours of manual data entry that you
dont entirely trust. Disconnectedness means that
when its time to measure success, its hard to say
what worked or who deserves a promotion because
you couldnt track team member activities and your
data lives in too many different places.

When systems interact, people are likely to interact.

Establish common platforms and systems across
the organization and give people access to the
same data and information. 15
Evan Rosen

Best practice:
1. Keep everything in one place.
Keep your work, your collaboration, and your
documents in one place, or at least in as few
tools as possible (strategic integrations are a
huge plus). This helps keep all of your important
data in one place, which will save you time in
the long run.

2. Lessons learned.
Keeping all your performance data in a central
location is an improvement goldmine. Equally
as important is team analysis of the data in a
formalized Lessons Learned activity. Teams
should discuss together what worked, what
didnt, and how they can be more efficient and
successful next time. When youre done, you
can incorporate feedback into your templates
to make sure next time runs more smoothly.

20

LIFECYCLES ARE NEVER

ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL
Its important to remember that work processes and lifecycles
vary depending on the different types of work being done
and what is best for the organization.
The Key?
All work is different. Never try to force work into a lifecycle that wasnt
made for it. Unstructured work will be unsuccessful in a lifecycle for
structured projects and vice versa. The key is to take the work lifecycle
laid out for you here and customize it based on the specific types of
work you do and what will work best for your organization,
department, and team.

21

ONCE YOUVE CONQUERED THE DRAGON,

YOU WILL BE REWARDED
The benefits that come from unifying (eliminating disconnectedness) are more
specific than just killing chaos.

Simplification.

Saved Time.

Unifying your tools and processes means no more

switching back and forth between disparate tools or
badgering team members for status updates.

Time-sucking status meetings and navigating long

email chains for data become a thing of the past.
When tools and processes are unified, you get
contextual collaboration that saves everyone time.

Connection.
Team members are connected to their work and to
each other because everyone is on the same page,
able to collaborate within the context of their work, and
using the same processes.

Visibility.
Everyone has the visibility they need in order to do their
job more efficiently. Team members can see dependencies
and timelines, managers can see statuses, progress,
and proper resource allocation, and executives have
what they need in order to justify costs.

Saved Money.
Buying books, paying for several different tools or
consultants, and bad processes that waste team
members time cost you in the long run. Unification
eliminates all of those extra costs.

Happiness.
When youre unified, everyone is happy. People are
engaged in their work, feel like their contribution
matters, and no longer feel frustration from being
over allocated or left in the dark.

22

YOUR ULTIMATE WEAPON:

ENTERPRISE WORK MANAGEMENT
Enterprise Work Management is your ultimate weapon
for unifying your tools and your processes and slaying
work disconnectedness once and for all.

Manage the end-toend work lifecycle.

Its one system that manages
the entire lifecycle of all types
of workboth structured and
unstructuredfrom initial request
to delivery and measurement.

Increase adoption.
Its one system that people will
actually use because its easy,
relevant, and works the way
people naturally work so it isnt
just another step in an already
complicated process.

Unify collaboration. Gain work visibility.

Its one system that reduces the
information overload you feel
by cutting out excess tools and
connecting collaboration with
work. This means more context,
less meetings.

Its one system that provides all

levels of an organization with
visibility and insights into the
truth about workloads, dependencies, and when things will
really be done.

Improve your work.

Gain people visibility.

Its one system that streamlines

your repeatable work processes
using custom built templates
and process improvement to
improve your teams productivity
and efficiency.

Its one system that gives

managers and senior managers
visibility into who is working on
what, who has bandwidth, and
how to justify the resources you
have, and the ones you still need.

Unify your tools.

Its one system that combines
everyones individual work
management needs and processes
into a single tool, eliminating
silos and frustration.

23

ATTASK ENTERPRISE WORK CLOUD:

TRUSTED DRAGON SLAYER, WORLDWIDE
AtTask is the only provider of cloud-based Enterprise Work Management
solutions for enterprise teams.
AtTask can help you slay the dragon of work chaos in your organization.
Contact us today to learn more.
www.attask.com

+ 1.866.441.0001

+ 44 (0)845 5083771

WORKS CITED
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Conflict_Example.pdf
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5.PMIs Pulse of the Profession: The High Cost of Low Performance. March 2013

11.http://rhondacarlson.hubpages.com/hub/Effecive-Team-Project-Planning
12.Handler, Robert A., et al. Predicts 2013: PPM Leaders Must
Embrace Constant Innovation and Change. Gartner. 2013
13.Pink, Daniel H. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Riverhead Books. New York: 2009. 88.
14.http://www.cuttingedgepr.com/articles/emprecog_so_important.asp
15.http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/feb2010/
ca2010025_358633.htm

6.http://www.fdu.edu/newspubs/magazine/99su/stress.html
7.http://www.fdu.edu/newspubs/magazine/99su/stress.html
8.PMIs Pulse of the Profession: The High Cost of Low
Performance. March 2013
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10.Margo Visitacion. Forrester. Its 3PM; Do You Know Where
Your Portfolio Is?

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