Process Mapping Project Management For Process Improvement: Fill & Download for Free

I might be a little biased, but as an Asana employee, I believe Asana is the best project management tool. With Asana, my entire team has a central source of truth so they know exactly who’s doing what by when. We can track all of our tasks and stay aligned on our team goals. This has been especially important recently, since it’s enabled our team to manage shifting priorities and take any new challenges in stride.Every team is different, so your team might not use Asana exactly like my team does. But every team can benefit from more clarity, coordination, and collaboration at work. Here are five reasons why Asana is the best project management tool for your team:1. Quickly get started and get organizedSpend your time doing skilled work—not getting set up. With Asana’s CSV importer, you can import your current project data from whatever spreadsheet or system you have into Asana in minutes. Here’s a 1-minute video on how.Or, if you don’t have a process you currently use, you can also use one of Asana’s 50+ pre-built templates to jumpstart your work.2. Manage all of your work with flexible viewsIn order for your project management tool to be your team’s central source of truth, it has to work for everyone. Individual contributors need to be able to dive into details, managers need to easily gauge team bandwidth and spot bottlenecks, and senior leaders need a high-level view of how projects are progressing.Every project in Asana has four views, so every member of your team can find what they need:List View: A linear grid view that provides at-a-glance insight into who’s doing what by when.Board View: A kanban board view so you can visualize each stage of work and manage agile teams.Calendar View: A customizable calendar where you can see all tasks in a project and set and adjust due dates.Timeline View: A Gantt-chart style view so you can see how work maps out over time, avoid overlap, and easily identify dependencies.3. Track and report on progressThe average employee uses 10 different tools per day. The app switching is not only exhausting, but it also means information is scattered and difficult to find. Your team shouldn’t have to dig through 10 tools in order to find the information or context they need in order to be successful.With Asana, you have easy access to all the tracking and reporting features you need:Status updates: Keep everyone informed on the progress of your work—without scheduling recurring follow-up meetings or digging through multiple tools for updates and information.Advanced Search: Asana Advanced Search takes the parameters you remember and narrows the scope of your search results, so you can easily find exactly what you’re looking for.Reporting: Save an Advanced Search as a report. The report will automatically refresh to provide the most up-to-date information every time you click into it.4. Communicate where you workMost teams have two totally different types of tools: content tools—like documents, spreadsheets, and team-specific software—and collaboration tools—like email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom. But there’s a third must-have type of tool: coordination tools. Coordination tools like project management software connect all of your work. With a coordination tool like Asana, you have all of the context, feedback, and information you need—right where you’re working.When everyone is using Asana, all of your work is centralized in one place. That means you can get easy access to all tasks and projects for a full understanding of what’s going on. Instead of digging through an email chain, you can easily search, sort, and find the task you need. Share files, leave a comment, or send an update, all where work is being done.5. Automate the work you hateToday, 82% of workers report feeling burned out, largely because of the busywork associated with checking in on progress, adjusting due dates, and assigning tasks. There’s no reason those tasks should be done manually.Asana Rules help you automate the manual processes that get between you and your daily, high-impact work. Instead of worrying about the details, Rules can automatically assign work to the correct teammate, send stakeholders important notifications, shift due dates, and hand off work at the right time. That way, you have more time for strategic work.Try Asana for freeThere’s a sixth must-have feature to look for in a project management tool: your team should be able to try it for yourselves. Start your free 30-day trial to see how Asana helps teams organize and manage their projects, improve collaboration, work more efficiently, and hit their goals.

Project managers play the lead role in planning, executing, monitoring, controlling and closing projects. They are accountable for the entire project scope, project team, resources, and the success or failure of the project.The knowledge areas include integration, scope, time, cost, quality, human resources, communication, risk procurement and stakeholder management.A sales manager is someone who is responsible for leading and guiding a team of sales people in an organization. They set sales goals & quotas, build a sales plan, analyze data, assign sales training and sales territories, mentor the members of his/her sales team and are involved in the hiring and firing process.Sales managers will plan, direct, or coordinate the actual distribution or movement of a product or service to the customer. They coordinate sales distribution by establishing sales territories, quotas, and goals and establish training programs for sales representatives. Also, they analyze sales statistics gathered by staff to determine sales potential and inventory requirements and monitor the preferences of customers.Main differences from Sales managers and Project managers:Sales managers are oriented externally. Their focus is to help clients grow their businesses with the help of the agency’s resources. The agency’s internal operations are less of concern for them; they’re primarily advocates for the client.Project managers are internally oriented. Their focus is to make the best possible use of the agency’s resources. While helping clients achieve their goals is obviously important, the top concern for PMs is to reduce wastage and improve efficiency. That is, they’re advocates for the agency.Sales managers are deeply involved in working with clients. They'll correspond with clients on overall strategy and deliver estimates, SOWs, schedules and status reports. They'll also have ownership over meetings, client communication, and finding new opportunities within the client's business.Project managers offload client engagement duties to AMs. They'll produce SOWs, estimates, schedules, etc. for account managers, but their work will be focused on project delivery. They can communicate with clients, but in a strong account management setup, this will be in a limited capacity.Sales managers have ownership over the client side of the agency-client relationship. Thus, while they will keep tabs on the project’s progress, their primary goal is to keep clients happy and spot new opportunities, not monitor the day-to-day of the project.Project managers have complete ownership of the project, right from planning to final delivery. They’ll map project scope, draw up a WBS, track milestones, and create reports. If it affects the project, it comes under the purview of the project manager.Charting out a strategy for each client is the sales managers' responsibility. They’ll understand the client’s business and formulate an approach that can help them grow with the agency’s resources.Project managers have a limited role in strategizing solutions. Rather, they’re involved in figuring out whether a particular strategy can be implemented successfully or not.Sales managers occupy a role halfway between sales and customer service. They’re not only expected to keep clients happy but to also upsell new services and expand the agency’s business.Project managers do not traditionally have a sales role in agencies. They’re focused on project delivery, not spotting new opportunities to grow the business.Account managers are salespeople, strategists, creatives, and have an excellent grasp of business. They must be strong communicators, highly social, and highly available. Good analytical, sales, and financial skills are a big plus.Project managers have to be excellent planners, delegators, and communicators. They must be detail oriented, well-organized, and proactive. Experience with a project management system is a definite plus.

Yes, I work on Blue Prism as well. First, a company has to purchase a license, set up the BP database, VMs and other intricacies I’m probably not going to talk about here. I am going to give you my developer’s perspective as I’m a Blue Prism developer. Just like what others have said to successfully deploy a process, an SME is required to map out the manual process using process maps created from applications like Visio. This includes all scenarios that can be encountered during a manual operation flow e.g when a customer is applying for a service or when an error occurs in a mainframe application and the enter key doesn’t work?A developer is required to build the automated process from the process map and the development is normally done in an agile manner (3 -4 weeks). The process goes through development -> Testing -> Pre Production -> Production stages just like any Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). It normally takes between 1 - 3 months to have a fully functional process depending on the complexity of the process.A functional Blue Prism team should contain a set of developers, 1-more SMEs, an IT support team, a Scrum Master, a Product Owner, a Project Manager and a Solution Architect. The Product Owner determines the business value of the automated process. This business value can be measured in terms of Full-Time Equivalent(FTE) and sometimes in terms of speed (e.g 3 hours of manual work vs 1.5 hours of an automated solution).Several challenges can be encountered during the automation process which may be beyond a developer’s controlBrowser changes due to an upgrade. Some mapped buttons in IE8 may fail to be identified in IE11When a manual process has too many intricacies. For instance, getting inputs from different sources or having too many outputs may be difficult to model on a process mapDue to the intricacies posed by the manual process, a project overrun can be encountered. The project manager will be responsible for managing such overrunsSome web applications may behave differently when automated. For instance, some web applications depend on keypress - letter k input from the user keyboard. Blue Prism does not work based on keyboard input since it is automated technology. This requires a lot of experience to get around thisSome network lags can be encountered whilst in production that wasn’t encountered in development and your built process might be stuck on some applicationsIf you are coming from other programming backgrounds like Java, C#, C etc you may find that Blue Prism has some deficienciesBlue Prism doesn’t use any advanced source/version control systems like GitHub. The versions are encapsulated as history in Blue Prism and only one developer can be allowed to edit a process at any single time and other developers can only view the process or waitRestriction to .Net (C#/J#/VB) while building a code in the code stageYou can’t view any command line whilst running a code stageYou have to constantly save your process/object else you lose it. You don’t always get the benefit of restoring your object/process stage like Microsoft WordWhen building a massive process, expect slow performance e.g retrieving data to a database, service calls, opening the process. You can’t manually scale your processes by using a distributed cacheFrom my experience, there are a couple of best practices you can adopt to improve an existing process or bear in mind while building a new processUse error logging tool like Splunk to log in relevant information about the process. This is very useful when a process is in production, you can get a high-level view of how your process is workingThere should be a clear distinction between the usability of a process and an object. A process should be unique while an object should be used for re-usabilityWhen you have a massive process build smaller processes first rather than having it all together, that can scale up the performanceWhen building in the code stage as a developer with a programming knowledge think of the time and space complexity and refactor code accordinglyWhen dealing with applications, always develop alternatives routes for cases where a network lag may occur, a system doesn’t open or close and when Blue Prism fails to identify elements in the applications. Always use time - out for applications( 5- 30 seconds) or raise exceptionsThink of a process thoroughly before building it. A manual process that takes a few minutes should not be automated. There isn’t much gain in itIn general, most manual processes should go through systems thinking or process improvements to ensure some wastes are not being automated. This is generally done before the automation of the manual processA developer should not be responsible for deployment into higher regions/environments. Depending on how your team works, you might decide to allocate some designated individuals with access to higher regions and having deployments go through this people. This is to ensure the higher regions are highly sanitised with fewer bugsI hope this helps.