What Benefits Should You Expect from a Workflow Solution? Part 5: Empowering Stakeholder-Led Change

Investing money and time in a workflow solution holds the promise of significant value. However, if you have not utilized a workflow software solution in the past, you may be asking yourself: What benefits should I expect to gain from a workflow solution, and how can I make the right investment and deliver ROI? To help you think about this, in this series of blogs we’ll discuss five things you should consider. Previously, we discussed increasing employee morale, enhancing customer experience, driving competitive advantage and reducing operational risk. In this final piece, we’ll look at how workflow can help you empower stakeholder-led change – or as I like to think of it, creating your own Knights of the Round Table.

Doing what? Ok, maybe I am stretching it a bit with knights. However, your solution should create workflow champions! The challenge in today’s fast-paced business environment is that the business needs solutions … fast! The IT department has its hands full maintaining networks, ensuring security, integrating solutions, and working on critical automation needs. The line at IT’s door is often long, and it’s a corporate reality that critical needs will jump to the front of that line. What can a department manager do to implement solutions faster? How can a business analyst provide a solution faster than waiting in that line will allow for? That is where no-code workflow solutions come in. Imagine your business analysts being able to configure workflow solutions for themselves without writing any code. Imagine an application-savvy staff member within your department configuring forms, fields, and a workflow within a drag-and-drop environment. Suddenly, the line at the door of the IT department just got shorter while the business users enjoy faster access to the solutions they need when they need them. A good workflow solution will empower business users to configure solutions in days, while coding often takes months.

I recall a story where a director of finance, an accounting clerk, and a receptionist collaborated around a conference room table and configured processes together to manage new client fulfillment, billing, and renewal processes. Becoming a workflow solution “knight of the round conference table” is no longer an impossible dream nor a small and exclusive club. A good workflow solution will empower process champions to emerge from within the ranks of your subject matter experts, while also reducing the burden on your IT department.

Your workflow solution should create workflow champions by:

• Providing a no-code, easy-to-use workflow configuration environment.
• Enabling onscreen, drag-and-drop mapping of processes, in real-time.
• Enabling intuitive configuration of gauges, charts, and reports for real-time analytics.
• Providing the ability to document and organize workflows within the same system.
• Making it easy and quick to update or change processes without requiring support from IT resources.
• Supporting your teams to achieve new levels of success by continuously improving their own complex processes through frequent incremental changes

This series could have been much longer. There are many more ways a workflow solution can enhance the success of your organization. We are truly in the age of digital transformation and the pace is getting faster and more democratized. As you consider investing time and money into a workflow solution, set your expectations high and ask yourself these questions:

• How much is an exceptional employee experience worth to your company?
• How could delighting your customers help grow your business?
• Who will gain the competitive edge with workflow? You, or your competitors?
• How could eliminating risks improve your business outlook?
• If your employees could be empowered to make your business operations empirically better, would you want the results they would achieve?

At your next staff meeting, look around the table. What do you see? Do you have workflow champions looking back at you ready to share the success? Do not just interview them to find out what could be better about your organization’s workflows, set the bar high and empower them to improve them for you, and consider the five things we’ve shared in this series.

Catch up on Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.