The office is not a production line. How to manage it?

OA + PM integration to truly achieve refined management

The production line includes automation, time efficiency management and quality assurance. Keeping it under control allows workers to concentrate on their work. However, the role of OA in the office is to automate, which is not helpful for time efficiency management and quality control. Compared with the production line, the management of OA is quite weak, and it is only suitable for managing simple and interesting work, such as managing the team that decorates the Christmas tree, because the work is simple and interesting, and it is all about the assigned person to participate.

However, not all office work is as simple and fun as decorating a Christmas tree. As management guru Tom Peters said: "All white-collar work is project work". Therefore, to manage the efficiency and quality of the office. , we need a more refined and powerful project management platform than OA.

OA is about the electronic form and its flow and there is no work breakdown, time management, cost control, dependency management and quality management and so on. Therefore, OA can generally only control who participates in the process and the order of participation, which is the most superficial work assignment. It cannot achieve a good assignment of responsibilities, not to mention the control of time, cost and quality. If the work in the office does not need to control time, cost and quality, but only needs the convenience of automation, the use of OA can meet the needs. But to control efficiency and quality, project management must be required in addition to OA. Moreover, because the OA technology is relatively primitive and has a long distance from the project management platform technology, OA plus the project management platform must be more professional and have refined management capabilities to truly manage the time, cost and quality of office work. If you just change the electronic forms of OA into WBS that looks like project management in the past, it will not help, because it is still a form.

The OA model is electronic paper or blackboard. There is no refined work breakdown and responsibility assignment, no quantification of work and cost and no tracking of dependence, progress and compliance with employee commitments. Due to the lack of norms and too many things being completely manipulated by individuals, the entire working environment will produce a lot of ambiguous and false information, which will implicitly encourage employees to be undisciplined and dishonest, easily leading to the whole team's indiscipline and dishonesty. Since it is impossible to ensure that all employees are disciplined and honest, the electronization of OA only brings convenience in automation, not a truly powerful management method like production line management.

To do a good job in time efficiency management and quality control of the production line, project management tools must be used to manage the following:

• (a) Refine work breakdown and responsibility assignment;
• (b) Quantify work and costs;
• (c) Track dependencies and progress and standardize the fulfillment of commitments.

An advanced project management tool, after the management rules are set, can lead managers and employees through the implementation steps and remind them of the deadlines and unfinished work.

The OA management platform alone cannot accurately track the process and results of intellectual work. OA+PM that integrates enterprise office automation and project portfolio management not only achieves accurate quantitative management, but also tracks the execution details and results of each job in real time. Besides, PM provides an effective deliverable acceptance mechanism to strictly monitor the quality of intellectual work. Employees can enter the completion rate of each job at any time according to the actual completion status, and the system will update it in real time. However, if the deliverables are not submitted, the employees cannot update the completion rate to 100% at will, and must submit the deliverables and pass the review and acceptance. The system will automatically determine whether the work is 100% complete. Moreover, it will automatically track the approval rate and quality level of each deliverable in real time, truly realizing the quantitative and refined management of intellectual work.

PM can be connected with any OA system in real time to realize single sign-on, unified approval flow and document management.

If you do not have any OA system or the original OA system is outdated, OA + PM can provide you with advanced functions including office automation and project management.