Thinking Forward

”What is work management?” is a perennial question. But the answers you will find are routinely shallow and conflicting.

I suspect this question persists because no one is really thinking forward about the answer. We’re going to think forward here.

So, what is work management? It is not a single practice, system, or even systematic approach, as virtually everyone else will tell you. Rather, it is a field of study encompassing multiple disciplines, methodologies, and tools, each designed to help us organize, execute, and optimize some aspect of our work.

That sounds like a non-answer, I know. Stick with me, I’ll pull it together for you. But first, we need to dismantle the outdated and unimaginative answers you are getting today.

Then, beginning fresh, we’ll introduce the concept of the work management meta-discipline and explain how this modern understanding fits the modern work environment. With this fuller understanding, we’ll then explain how to harness the interconnections of work and structure it to drive success with a modern work management ecosystem perspective, a fuller holistic approach to integrated work management.

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”
Peter Drucket | Global Peter Drucker Forum

So, let’s get started with an interrogation of this thing called work management to pave the path to a forward-looking answer.

A figure asks, “What is work management?” while confusing answers swirl around him. — It’s time to move past outdated perspectives to a modern understanding of what work management is in today’s work environment.

Work Evolves but Work Management Lags

We are familiar with the evolution of work from the days of the automated assembly line through the emergence of the knowledge worker to today’s technology-powered workers. However, work management has always lagged behind the continuous and increasingly rapid changes in how we work.

In the early days we got the basics down for organizing people and work to accomplish complex jobs. Then, the knowledge worker emerged, and a greater focus on a participative workforce developed. We began to see project management emerge as a discipline, operations management adjust to accommodate more than just the mechanics of work, and the personnel department evolve into human resource management.

However, simply adapting the earlier basics of managing work to this new environment was insufficient. First, Total Quality Management (TQM) emerged to improve the quality of our work. Then came the development of business process management to improve, well, process.

It seems “work management” was catching up with changes in work, except the way we work kept changing. The emergence of business process improvement revealed increasing complexity. This led to Lean becoming a widespread discipline and to business process optimization.

To be sure, Lean is great! It goes straight to the heart of efficiency and productivity. However, work kept changing, especially with the arrival of personal computing. So, Agile emerged, spread widely, and continues to influence work.

Today, we see a growing drive toward autonomy, automation, and intelligent systems. The way we work today is radically different than what seems like just a few years ago.

Get a full picture of how we got from there to here and where work management is going in our Work Management Guide with a fresh, updated approach to the subject.

The invisible line through history we need to recognize is that the way we manage work has always just been responding to specific issues.

We now have all these disciplines to help us manage and improve the way we work. True, they are all great at what they do. We are even taking these disciplines to the enterprise level so they can improve us across the organization. Again, this is great.

The problem is that they are still individual disciplines, generally operating independently. This makes finding a shared and reliable perspective on this landscape challenging.

Workers switch between 10 apps 25 times per day—fragmenting communication and reducing efficiency. Asana Anatomy of Work Index

Common Perspectives Are Little Help

“What is work management?” is a common search query. In fact, it is a constant search query. According to Google Trends (at the time this article was written), this term performed in the top quartile of all searches for it for 8 of the last 12 months and dipped below 50% only during end-of-year and summer vacation periods.

So, what do we learn from this search query? Let’s look at some of the answers we find.

Work management is a process. And we are given process steps.

Not so bad, a defined process is easy to grasp.
Hmm, reading further, this actually looks a lot like project management. Or maybe simple task management.

Work management is a systematic approach.

This sounds smart.
However, the article doesn’t lay this out in practical terms. At least I can sound smart.

Work management is a system. And we are given some components of the system.

This also sounds smart.
However, as it turns out, we are just given a list of individual functions and are left to figure out for ourselves how they form a system.

Work management is a practice.

This sounds actionable.
Then, we’re told there are many different methodologies and tools. All we have to do is pick the one that works for us. So, it’s not so much a practice as a bunch of individual practices.

There is even one that says work management is software.

Someone is obviously just trying to sell us something.

I am not finding any of this very helpful.

Debunking Current Perspectives of Work Management

In our short review of how the way we work has evolved and the way we manage work has been trying to keep up, I pointed out the emergence of one approach after another, each with a distinct focus area for helping us manage our work.

We might consider each distinct focus area individually as a work management discipline. If so, they would collectively form the work management landscape. That would mean work management is not a specific practice or process, which makes sense because the landscape is pretty complex.

Maybe work management is the collection of practices and processes, then. This would mean it doesn’t actually do anything itself; it’s just a bucket. I’m not sure we can embrace this; a bucket full of practices and processes sounds an awful lot like a bucket of crabs – a lot of conflict and no cooperation.

What about the perspective of work management as a system or a systematic approach?

As a system, work management would be methodical, organized, and structured. It would have to provide a clear structure of its elements and defined processes governing interactions among them. While we can arguably make that claim for individual work management disciplines, it would be difficult to make that claim for work management in its fullest conception.

The complexities and ever-changing nature of work challenge the idea of having one sustainable and overarching systematic approach (methodical, organized, and structured) to manage all our work.

Maybe work management today transcends these old and unimaginative perspectives.

Maybe work management is about interconnections and interrelationships. Maybe it is about facilitating and enabling adaptive responses to change within an interactive environment.

Now, this sounds promising!

Imagining Work Management as a Meta-Discipline

What would it look like if we take a work management meta-discipline perspective?

As a meta-discipline, work management would be “a field of study or area of expertise that encompasses and integrates multiple existing disciplines.”

That appears fitting as the many distinct focus areas of work management have various systematic approaches but no apparent natural means of integration or leveraging collective contributions.

As a meta-discipline, work management reveals natural points of integration and offers emerging disciplines support with this integration in the bigger picture. It even provides earlier recognition of gaps needing a more focused approach as work evolves.

Some key characteristics would be:

Integrative Nature: Offering a means to integrate methods and knowledge from multiple disciplines to address complex problems or provide comprehensive insights.

An example of this might involve using project management methodologies to plan and execute tasks while incorporating methods from operations management to optimize processes and leveraging HR management methods to ensure team alignment and performance.

Frameworks and Methodologies: Facilitating frameworks and methodologies that can be adapted to various applications.

An example of this may be how methodologies like Kanban, Agile, and Lean are adapted for use in contexts different from where they originated. This type of integration can also create feedback loops where a methodology evolves at a pace closer to the evolution of work.

Cross-Disciplinary Application: Enabling adaptation to fit the different needs, characteristics, and nature of differing industries, operations, etc.

Examples of this type of adaptation are evident in how various work management disciplines are realized differently in different sectors, such as healthcare, construction, IT, and education, each adapting the core principles and methods to their specific needs.

Some may argue we are already doing these things. I agree, but only to some extent because the effort is laborious, there is little natural realization of the interconnections and interrelationships. And even more to the point, few of us are genuinely achieving the higher-level analysis benefits of it.

Higher-Level Analysis: Providing the means for higher-level analysis and synthesis of insights and data across disciplines.

Because work is managed through multiple disciplines focused on distinct work areas, our work management structure is inherently fractured. This creates seemingly insurmountable obstacles to truly optimizing work structure and execution.
Being holistic enables synthesizing information from the various focus areas. The higher-level perspective provided by a work management meta-discipline offers much better opportunities to improve overall efficiency, effectiveness, and alignment.

The Structure of Work Management

It looks like there is a strong case for stating work management is a meta-discipline encompassing many disciplines that collectively provide robust capabilities to manage individual distinct areas of work.

And we can show how these disciplines are structured in three interacting layers:

Functional Work Management Disciplines

Work management has multiple broad focus areas, each represented by functional work management disciplines, such as operations management, financial management, human relations management, product management, project management, and so forth. These disciplines have:

Bodies of knowledge
Principles and rules that structure the practice of the discipline while allowing accommodations
Defined methods that are generally adaptable to other functional disciplines

Notably, these functional disciplines are also meta-disciplines in their respective domains because they encompass and integrate sub-disciplines and specialized work management disciplines.

Specialized Work Management Disciplines.

Specialized disciplines fill in the common gaps left by the broader focused functional disciplines, and create shared and integrative features in work management. Specialized work management disciplines we see being practiced include change management, risk management, stakeholder management, business process management, and more.

These specialized disciplines are highly focused and are incorporated into and adapted to the respective needs of functional disciplines.

These specialized disciplines may exist at differing levels of the organization and have some of the key characteristics of meta-disciplines, such as integrative features and higher-level analysis for their specialized focus area. But they don’t encompass multiple other disciplines within them.

Universal Components of Work Management

While functional disciplines help us get the heavy work done and specialized disciplines help us do that with real success, there are universal components of work management that help tie it all together for our organization.

These universal components are practiced across disciplines, they include goal setting, planning, time tracking, progress monitoring, continuous improvement, performance measuring, and others. These universal components provide essential capabilities that inform the operation of functional disciplines and the functional use of specialized disciplines.

These components typically have enterprise characteristics that provide some standardization of the activity they represent. They create continuous activity threads vertically and horizontally through the organization, generating key data and insights.

Work Management Definition

Finally, we can reach a definition of work management that will guide us instead of leaving us to chase the latest unicorn methodology or software solution.

Work management is the overarching discipline that encompasses and integrates functional and specialized management disciplines. It focuses on coordinating and optimizing all types of work within an organization to develop comprehensive strategies for maximizing organizational and targeted efficiency, productivity, and effectiveness.

Benefits of Modern Work Management

Can you see how modern work management can’t be a single process, practice, system, or whatever? The meta-discipline concept allows us to see all the elements of work management in a much more complete and fuller way—and it is scaleable!

Importantly, gaining this perspective provides us with some key benefits we need, such as:

integrating disciplines so they don’t exist in silos,
sharing and adapting methods in a purposeful manner that addresses identified needs rather than simply rising haphazardly out of prolonged pain,
being flexible for disparate applications, and
providing an actual means of enterprise-wide analysis and optimization.

So, how exactly do we accomplish this?

Work Management Ecosystem

It takes another paradigm shift. This time, we take the meta-discipline construct and put it in the context of an ecosystem – an environment occupied by interacting elements that organically form and evolve their interactions within a relationship structure.

From this perspective, the work environment is the environment of the work management ecosystem. The work environment is definable, the definition is scalable, relationships are responsive to change, and there is an element of natural selection.

Much like a forest ecosystem has a ground layer, an understory layer, a canopy layer, and an emergent layer, the work management ecosystem has its layers: functional disciplines, specialized disciplines, and universal components.

Let’s take a moment to deconstruct our definition of an ecosystem:

Environment: the work environment represents organizational aspects (e.g., structure, hierarchy, business purpose), physical aspects (e.g., workplace layout, distributed and remote workforce), and psychological aspects (e.g., culture, management style, morale).
Interacting elements: functional disciplines represent the functions of an organization, while specialized disciplines provide enabling capabilities, and universal components that tie it all together in the enterprise.
Organically form and evolve their interactions within a relationship structure: teams and departments collaborate; communication channels develop and shift; and processes are continuously refined in response to feedback and environmental changes.

I think we arrived at a forward-looking answer to what work management really is.

Great! But what does this mean to us practically? It can’t be just an academic exercise.

Benefits of the Work Management Ecosystem

All the current perspectives of work management suggest integration and holistic views, but they each come miserably short. Work management remains a fractured and siloed landscape.

Software promises to remedy this by integrating the fractured pieces and siloed elements. However, these solutions have three distinct shortcomings.

First, they begin with the perspective of independent pieces with linkages. This results in a fundamentally different solution than if we began with a meta-discipline, ecosystem perspective.
Second, the human perspective has not matured, which constrains our ability to truly see the pieces come together in an ecosystem landscape.
Third, without better alignment of our work management components and data, we will not be able to fully leverage the opportunities in emerging technologies.

What can we realize from a forward-looking perspective of work management as a meta-discipline and the landscape of work management an ecosystem? To be sure, the benefits are quite substantial.

First understand, simply integrating separate parts is not being holistic. As a meta-discipline we see the parts are already interrelated. And as an ecosystem we see the parts are already naturally interacting. It is our outdated approach and mindset that is fracturing the ecosystem and siloing the parts into individual disciplines.

Let’s outline some specific benefits organizations can realize from this new perspective.

Data Analytics and Business Intelligence: Turning Information into Insight

In a data-driven world, the ability to derive actionable insights from vast amounts of information is a critical competitive advantage. A work management ecosystem elevates data analytics in several ways:

Unified Data Ecosystem: Breaking down silos and standardizing data across work management areas creates a comprehensive set of rich data for analysis.
Contextual Insights: By integrating work data, analytics can provide deeper, more contextual insights that are truly holistic.
Real-time Decision-Making: The ecosystem’s holistic view enables real-time analytics and dashboards, allowing for more agile decision-making.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA): Streamlining Operations at Scale

RPA is revolutionizing how organizations handle repetitive, rule-based tasks. A work management ecosystem approach amplifies the benefits of RPA in several ways:

Process Standardization: By standardizing and reusing workflows across the organization, it becomes easier to identify processes suitable for automation.
Holistic Implementation: Instead of piecemeal automation, an integrated approach allows for strategic, adaptable organization-wide RPA implementation.
Continuous Improvement: The cross-disciplinary feedback loops in an ecosystem enable organizational and targeted RPA implementation and optimization.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: Powering Predictive Work Management

AI and ML are perhaps the most transformative technologies of our time, and their potential in work management is enormous. A work management ecosystem creates an ideal environment for AI and ML implementation:

Quality Training Data: The standardized, comprehensive data generated within an ecosystem provides high-quality training data for ML models.
Cross-functional AI Applications: With an ecosystem view of all work, AI can be applied more effectively across different functions and processes.
Augmented Decision-Making: AI can augment human decision-making at all levels, from strategic planning to daily task prioritization.

Digital Twinning: Simulating and Optimizing Work Processes

Digital twinning – creating a digital replica of physical assets, processes, or systems is gaining traction in various industries. A work management ecosystem provides an excellent foundation for implementing digital twins of our work processes and systems:

Comprehensive Process Mapping: A holistic view of work processes makes it easier to create accurate digital twins.
Scenario Planning: Digital twins allow organizations to test different work scenarios and strategies in a risk-free virtual environment.
Continuous Optimization: By simulating changes before implementation, organizations can continually optimize their work processes and systems.

The Synergy of a Work Management Ecosystem and Emerging Technologies

While each benefit is powerful on its own, the real power comes from combining them within a work management ecosystem. Imagine the combined power of:

RPA handles routine tasks, freeing up human workers for more strategic work
AI-powered analytics providing real-time insights across all work activities.
Machine learning algorithms continuously optimizing work allocation and processes.
Digital twins enabling risk-free testing of new strategies and workflows.

This isn’t science fiction; it’s real. But you can’t fully get there without true integration, which begins with a genuine meta-discipline understanding and ecosystem perspective.

Constructing a Work Management Ecosystem

Transforming our current state to an integrated work management ecosystem, to be fair, will be a significant task. These are some of the things we’ll have to do:

Establish a Design Team

Form a cross-functional team with representatives from various functional disciplines (e.g., operations, HR, finance, project management, product management).

Define the Meta-Discipline

Develop a high-level framework for how different functional disciplines fit within the overarching work management meta-discipline.
Develop similar frameworks for each functional discipline, considering their unique sub-disciplines and those organizational specialized disciplines they employ.

Identify and Define Universal Components

Identify those components that are enablers for functional disciplines and form common threads throughout the organization.
Define their purpose, utilization, and interfaces.

Map Out the Landscape

Identify where and how functional disciplines intersect and interact.
Identify methodologies used; both shared and unique.
Identify processes for cross-disciplinary collaboration and information sharing.

Design a Data Architecture

Develop a data model that reflects the data generated across the ecosystem and allows for discipline-specific extensions.
Design how data will flow between disciplines, between disciplines and components, and between components.
Ensure the data architecture supports both standardization and flexibility.

Conduct a Gap Analysis and Design Plan

Identify gaps in cross-disciplinary collaboration and information sharing.
Design a plan to resolve these gaps.

Develop a Governance Structure

Design a governance structure for maintaining and evolving the work management ecosystem.

Plan for Flexibility and Scalability.

Build in mechanisms to evolve and adapt over time.

Design Performance Metrics and Measurements

Develop a framework for measuring the effectiveness of the work management ecosystem.
Design KPIs that span disciplines and align with organizational goals.
Create mechanisms for continuous feedback and improvements.

Explore the work management ecosystem further in our linked article.

Balance and Future-Proofing

Designing a work management ecosystem is a significant undertaking that requires careful thought and planning. The key is balancing standardization with flexibility, ensuring that the ecosystem can provide a common relationship framework while allowing for the unique needs of different disciplines and parts of the organization.

Regular review and refinement of the design will be important as you uncover new insights and requirements throughout the process.

In the interim of undertaking this transformation, you can position yourself by adopting or strengthening the core work management principles, fundamentals, and best practices, as explained in our linked articles.

Embracing the Future of Work Management

By interrogating the outdated answers to “What is work management?” we are able to see it in full context and gain a forward-looking perspective.

Our discussion shows why and how we need to move from a fractured work management landscape to an integrated work management ecosystem. Can you see how the way we manage work needs revolutionary change?

“The key is to embrace disruption and change early. Don’t react to it decades later. You can’t fight innovation.”
Ryan Kavanaugh | Film Financier

Key Insights

Let’s recap what we covered:

Current work management approaches are not keeping up with work. Siloed operations, tool proliferation, and fragmented data keep organizations from reaching their full potential.
An integrated work management ecosystem offers a truly holistic solution, unifying diverse work management practices under a single, coherent relationship framework.
This approach brings substantial benefits, including enhanced collaboration, improved strategic alignment, more efficient resource allocation, reduced IT complexity, and increased organizational agility.
Perhaps most excitingly, the ecosystem approach creates the perfect foundation for leveraging emerging technologies like AI, RPA, and digital twinning, positioning organizations for future success.

What Next?

Here are four concrete steps you can take toward a work management ecosystem:

Assess Your Current State: Take a hard look at your existing work management practices. Identify the silos, the redundancies, and the gaps. This honest assessment is the first step towards improvement.

Educate and Align: Share the work management meta-discipline concept and ecosystem perspective with your leadership team. Align on the vision and the potential benefits for your organization.

Start Small, Think Big: Begin with a pilot project in one department or team. Use the insights from this pilot to refine your approach before rolling out organization-wide.

Remember, this shift is not just about changing processes or implementing new tools. It’s about fostering a new mindset that views work management as a naturally interconnected and interacting ecosystem, rather than a collection of disparate parts.

Be bold. Be visionary. Be the catalyst.

What is Work Management? A Modern Answer for Success in 2025