In today’s workplaces, characterized by more work, less people, faster changes, greater complexity, greater connectivity, and separated people; the alignment of work through people is essential for high productivity. In most cases, complexity and change make it almost impossible for managers to maintain high quality alignment to keep work flowing. So there is an urgent need for a better solution to managing alignment.

Work alignment is ensuring that the work being done is contributing to business goals. Most people want to add value, but they need to know what they need to do, when, and with who. So aligning work and keeping it aligned is a major task for managers that can take a considerable amount of time and effort.

When there are not enough people to do all the work required, managers need to use priorities so the most important work is done. In most cases, manager’s priorities relate to relatively high level tasks. So the people doing the work need to further prioritize their time and effort. If peoples’ priorities and the work they are doing are not aligned to business goals, a lot of potential productivity will be lost.

The key to improved alignment through people is not more managers, but developing a method to make it easy for the people doing the work to see both context, and where they can add the most value. In other words, alignment is not only done by managers, it must also be done by everyone who is actually doing the work.

Over the last 12 years, TASKey has developed and validated a distributed management method that allows everyone to keep their work aligned. The diagram below shows how work can be aligned through people.

The key is that managers provide a goal and a framework for people to work in. Managers do not say how the goal is to be achieved – that is up to the people doing the work to decide. By using a series of interlocking goals and giving people involved the freedom to achieve each goal in a way that suits them; significant flexibility and freedom is achieved without losing accountability.

When people decide how they will achieve their sub goal, they generate a list of the actions/ToDo’s for each task they need to complete. These actions can be aggregated into a personal ToDo list, so each person can see how what they need to do to contribute to business goals.

It was found that managers with available tools were unable to achieve the flexibility and levels of alignment needed in the modern workplace. Consequently TASKey developed and validated software (called TASKey TEAM and Me2Team) to keep individual and team work aligned to business goals.

Using TASKey web software, it has been shown that all tasks (strategic, operational, governance, compliance and projects) can be managed together. This integration has been necessary to generate comprehensive ToDo lists that keep individuals and teams aligned to business goals, and the organization’s work flowing very productively.

More information can be found at: www.taskey.com for enterprise users and www.Me2Team.com for smaller users.

By

Neil Miller