Keeping work organized is a major challenge. There is a strong relationship between the effectiveness of work organization and productivity; so better organization usually improves ROI.
People do work, so work organization is largely about how people are organized and most importantly, how people organize themselves. Gone are the days, when managers were able to organize every action that each person is doing.
People are more dispersed, changes are more frequent, and there are less managers and supervisors. So the only way forward, seems to be to make it easier for people doing the work to more easily contribute to organizing work. This means that the traditional management approaches that centralize organizing activities around managers need to be more distributed amongst the people doing the work.
Distributed management is a management method for people to work together over the web to accomplish desired goals. Management activities are distributed through the people doing the work. The key concepts of Distributed Management are discussed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_management.
I have been developing distributed management methods and web software to apply those methods for over 10 years. The great thing about software is that it forces you to confront the real world issues that make distributed management hard to implement.
For example, organizations usually want to control the task and process information that organization members create. This information is the organizations intellectual property and usually is core to the organizations competitive advantage. But in these days of outsourcing, people outside an organization need to be involved in organization tasks and processes.
For distributed management to function, there needs to be a relatively free flow of relevant information between the people involved from anywhere at any time, but security and privacy also need to be an integral part of the process.
For a distributed management method to become mainstream, it needs to be able to easily manage tens of thousands of people globally, doing tens of thousands of tasks, in close to real-time. Smart software is required to keep work organized with minimum effort from managers and others. Web and mobile browsers provide access from anywhere at any time.
TASKey has spent years working through the complexity that rapidly occurs when people want to work together. There are many software products that focus on managing projects, or on individual time management. These products are useful, but they are limited to relatively simple situations.
In contrast, a true distributed management solution can simultaneously handle: the implementation of a corporate plan; projects and change initiatives; operations; business processes, and tasks and actions involving many people within and outside an organization in many locations.
Task and team information needs to be synchronized and presented from each persons perspective. This is the key for distributed management to work every person involved needs to see the up-to-date task and team information they need to do their job.
Using distributed management software with web and mobile browser access, work can be better organized, leading to higher productivity and a credible return on investment (ROI).
For more information, visit www.taskey.com or www.me2team.com
By,
Dr Neil Miller