Work management vs. project management: The definitive guide

Does your team excel at handling projects, going above and beyond to meticulously plan every detail, from timelines to budgets and resource allocation? Many organizations prioritize project management but also need a systematic work management approach for handling regular tasks and operations.

This guide explains the concepts of work management vs. project management, including how both are critical for business success. We’ll also explore how a robust work management system allows you to track projects, workflows, and any other type of work to hit your organizational goals on time, every time.

What is work management?

Work management involves planning, organizing, executing, and monitoring any business task or workflow that enables you to achieve your objectives.

Whether you’re focused on hitting short-term goals, such as revamping your website landing pages, or long-term goals, like expanding into a new business area, work management enables you to collaborate and reach shared goals quickly.

Effective work management practices are integral to your business operations and functions, increasing efficiency, speed, and productivity by managing work components like:

• Coordinating tasks
• Allocating resources
• Tracking time
• Creating deliverables and dependencies

Work management in action

Human Resources may use work management practices to oversee performance review cycles and collaborate between HR, department managers, L&D teams, and the employees receiving their review. HR teams can create recurring tasks for setting performance metrics, conducting evaluations, booking feedback sessions, monitoring training progress, and generating performance management reviews.

What is project management?

Project management is a single aspect of work management focused on planning, managing, and completing specific projects. Unlike regular, ongoing workflows, projects have clear start and end dates and produce a clear outcome, such as a product, service, or event. Traditional project management involves life cycle stages, such as:

• Initiation: Establishing the project team and setting goals and objectives
• Planning: Developing activities, outlining timelines, and assigning resources
• Implementation: Assigning tasks and monitoring progress
• Closing: Reviewing results and wrapping up loose ends

Project management in action

Software development teams require precise coordination of resources to bring new technology to market, on time and under budget. By setting milestones, appointing project leads, and outlining deliverables, teams can oversee software projects from start to finish.

5 key differences between work management and project management

Work management encompasses the entire scope of workflows and activities involved in your business processes and operations. Within this, project management is a single area of work management focused on completing individual business projects. Some key project management vs. work management differences are:

• Focus: Project management zooms in on specific project lifecycles, addressing their unique objectives and deliverables. Work management adopts a broader perspective, encompassing both day-to-day work and ongoing operations that sustain the organization beyond individual projects.
• Timeframe: Project management works with clear start and end dates. Work management practices may also use fixed dates but can be fluid and open-ended.
• Resource allocation: Project managers will allocate resources to fulfill the project’s specific requirements. Work management allows you to balance out resources such as budget or personnel across various business activities or processes.
• Structure: A specific project manager or team usually handles project management. In work management, the structure may involve multiple stakeholders collaborating across different departments.
• Collaboration: Project management communication focuses on project-specific objectives, which finish at completion. Work management invites more continuous collaboration and ongoing relationship-building.

Benefits of work management software

Work management software streamlines workflows by combining crucial information in a central location. It reduces the need to context switch, where workers suffer a 40% decrease in productivity by flipping between multiple tasks, tools, tabs, and conversations to complete their work. The key benefits of using a work management software include:

• Tracking cross-functional processes: Improve transparency into operations by tracking all your organizational workflows from a single dashboard. Doing so lets you quickly identify bottlenecks and allocate resources accordingly to overcome them.
• Managing requests and approvals: Receive request and approval forms from employees, customers, and external stakeholders. Automate manual tasks and eliminate the need for manual processing.
• Planning out goals and strategy: Map out organizational strategies and adjust tactics as needed. Ensure projects stay on budget by closely monitoring expenses, and ensure your team members have manageable workloads.
• Reducing waste: Decrease operational costs by identifying and eliminating unnecessary processes or tasks that don’t support your objectives.

Benefits of project management software

Standish Group research finds that only 35% of projects are successful. An example of an underprepared project occurred when Hershey Foods implemented a new ERP system to replace its legacy IT system.

Project management software can mitigate these issues by setting businesses up for success with the following benefits:

• Communication: Share notes, documents, updates, and conversations with your team or customers in a central location. This easy collaboration prevents siloes from forming.
• Task tracking: Break projects down into tasks assigned to specific team members. Understand who is accountable for each portion of the project and how each task impacts the next.
• Project visibility: Gain immediate insights into project progress, determine what resources you may be waiting for, and keep your budget under control.
• Deadline management: Set important milestones to ensure you complete the project on time.

Collaborate on projects and regular workflows in monday work management

monday work management is a powerful platform that’s ideal for handling any type of work or project for any type of business. Using our platform, you’ll multiply business efficiency and always know exactly where your work stands. From strategy and execution to collaboration and monitoring, the following features of monday work management will ensure you hit your goals faster and allow you to make informed decisions about your work.

• Dashboards: View essential data from your central dashboard, custom-built with 10+ widgets that give you a high-level overview of budgets, goals, resources, schedules, and more.

• Views: Choose from a range of dynamic Project Views, such as Gantt or Kanban charts and Workload Views which allow you to balance team resources and respond quickly to changing priorities.

• Time tracking: Maximize efficiency by understanding how long tasks and projects take, enabling you to plan resources accordingly. It’s easy to add the Time Tracking Column, and click play to start the timer, or pause it as required. You can also export your data to Excel to create time tracking reports to support future work and project planning.

• Forms: Collect form submissions from employees, vendors, and external stakeholders. Our built-in customizable forms allow you to receive important proposals or requests and review them from one streamlined location. From here, it’s easy to accept or deny approvals in line with your organizational strategy.

• Custom workflows: Use no-code building blocks to design the precise workflows you need. No two businesses are identical, which is why you need a bespoke work management platform built to your requirements. By adding your choice of widgets, dashboard views, and a range of integrations, you can quickly adjust, progress, or entirely rebuild your workflows in response to shifting priorities or new business goals.
• Automation: Eliminate manual processes using automated notifications, templatized project boards, and more. For example, you might set up a notification to alert a team member once you’ve completed a task. Instead of remembering to type and send an email, monday work management will send a template email as soon as the task status changes to “Done.”

• Integrations: Connect monday work management with all the tools you need, such as Jira, Microsoft Teams, Gmail, Slack, Salesforce, and more, so you never have to switch tabs to access critical information. For example, instantly access, attach or preview important files in a single click by connecting Google Drive to your monday work management boards.

FAQs

1. Does monday work management enable me to manage my projects?

monday work management is the perfect platform for managing all types of work, including projects. Track tasks, set milestones, assign resources, and manage workloads from a central location.

2. What features does monday work management offer for managing projects?

monday work management offers everything you need to plan and execute projects of any size or scope successfully. Its features include task tracking, to-do lists, deadline management, workload views, collaborative work docs, and more.

3. Is monday work management secure?

monday work management aligns to enterprise-grade security standards to keep your work and data safe at every level of your organization. The platform also provides multi-level permissions that enable administrators to control user access for employees, vendors, and guests.

Combine efficient project and work management processes in monday work management

Project management is just one aspect of work management. The good news: you can organize projects, tasks, workflows, processes, and anything else from our highly customizable monday work management platform. Get started today and gain visibility into projects and ongoing operations to ensure your business keeps progressing and hitting your goals.