Throughout my career, I have been involved in discussions around making work more effective and efficient. I have observed that working activities can get bogged down in a flurry of meetings, emails and metrics which are time consuming to generate and absorb and don't always support effective coordination and management. Part of the battle is making sure that all the participants are on the same page about what is being done, by whom it will be done and when it may reasonably expected to be complete.

I have advocated workflows and dashboards to 'herd the cats' and help ensure common purpose. This can be particularly important when working with geographically distributed teams.

The following is a summary of lessons learned from desigining and using workflows to manage business processes.