How to build a project management workflow (+ 3 templates)

How to plan and implement a project workflow (step by step)

Building your project management workflow is a step-by-step process. 

It starts with defining the project scope and the outputs, goals, or objectives you’re working toward, and ends when you evaluate the experience after the project goes live.

Companies often approach this in four stages.

1. List all tasks

Most managers start planning the workflows for a new project by listing the jobs to be done, putting them on a project timeline, and structuring the project into phases or milestones. 

They break complex tasks into smaller subtasks and identify task dependencies — the jobs that rely on the first task being approved before work can start on the second. 

It’s pretty easy to start listing the essential tasks that will soon make up your workflow but this foundational step can quickly spiral.  

For example, it can be difficult to define tasks where the endpoint is hard to measure, or plan for task dependencies before you have a clear idea of due dates. And, if your project involves different departments — for example, if you’re doing staff onboarding, you’ll need input from recruitment and HR — the leaders in one team might struggle to identify all the jobs the other teams need to complete before each phase of the project can begin.

2. Gather and record your tools and resources

Your team will need access to all kinds of internal resources (such as software, meeting spaces, and office supplies) as well as external resources (such as hired equipment, client data, and freelance specialists/agencies). Project planners also need to have an overview of the personnel who are available to come on board, sometimes called ‘human capital.’ 

Without an accurate understanding of the resources you have and the gaps you need to fill along the way, it’s impossible to keep a project on track. Delays in the first phase — for example, if your marketing team is waiting for design assets from the graphics department — will have a knock-on effect on timings for the rest of your project. 

3. Assign roles and responsibilities 

Delegating tasks and making sure everyone understands who’s accountable for the different areas of your project makes it easier to collaborate, communicate, and get the deliverables right. To delegate well, project managers and team leaders need an accurate overview of the skills and capacity within their team before they start to assign tasks and milestones.  

But, however well you plan, changes within teams are inevitable during a large or lengthy project. When this happens, a good workflow must be able to adjust the responsibilities — for example, transferring task ownership to another person. Along with automation, design, and reporting (more on how Wrike handles all these things later), this flexibility is an important part of effective workflow management. 

4. Visualize your project progress

You can’t manage a project effectively without an overview of the sequence of tasks, the progress you’re making, and the overall project status. 

Some teams like to visualize their process maps as a Waterfall diagram or flowchart where completed tasks trigger new ones. Others prefer Kanban board methodology, where each task is represented by a card that moves through the process. And there’s always the option of a Gantt chart, a popular way to track deadlines, dependencies, and simultaneous tasks.

However you prefer to visualize your workflow, you need a way to understand the progress that every team member, every separate team, and the project as a whole is making. Because people have diverse working styles, having customizable ways to view the same project data will help everyone to do their best work. 

Companies across different industries use these four steps to create a beautiful plan for their project workflow but then run into problems as soon as the project begins:

• Some have checklists for managing individual tasks, but no real way of visualizing how each task flows into the rest of the jobs to be done. This makes it harder to anticipate and respond to potential problems. 
• Others have an intricate workflow that visualizes their task sequences and dependencies but their team spends hours manually writing messages, CCing different people, and waiting for approvals whenever they complete a task. 
• Sometimes, a company has a process for every aspect of their work, especially when they’re using multiple platforms. For example, it might send files to Google Drive while moving a Trello card and writing an email to explain the document to the person who needs to review it. 

This way of working can keep projects ticking along but it’s not the most effective way — and it doesn’t help your team do their best work together. It’s far too easy to miss notifications, lose track of the most recent version of resources, and let things fall through the cracks. 

If you truly want to take control of project management — and every part of the project itself — an all-in-one, flexible, automated project management platform is a far better solution. 

Build an intuitive, collaborative workflow with Wrike

With Wrike, you can manage every aspect of your project, from ideation to delivery and beyond, thanks to intuitive, customizable workflows tailored to the way your teams work best. 

When Fitbit used Wrike during its launch process, it spent 50% less time on project management specific to timeline building and saved 200 hours that would previously have been spent tracking marketing materials. 

And when Kalexius, a legal services company, switched to Wrike, it gained 360° visibility on all the work performed in the firm and cut the time spent in meetings in half.

Our award-winning platform is the only software you need to plan, implement, evaluate, and improve your team workflows, whether that’s the process for a single item on your checklist or the way you run an entire project. 

When you need to plan a new workflow for your project, Wrike makes it simple to list jobs, delegate them, and bring new team members on board. But it does far more than this. In a custom Wrike workspace, you can:

• Build an interconnected workflow that reflects how every task feeds into the others, then monitor your progress as the task statuses change
• Eliminate information silos and duplicate file versions thanks to shared resource folders within Wrike
• Put your project in motion and maintain a fresh, comprehensive overview of the steps every team is taking
• Save countless hours on communications, approvals, and file sharing through cross-tagging, workflow automation, and over 400 integrations

Plan and assign every detail of your project 

Project managers love the way Wrike builds workflows tailored to their team and their goals. 

Within your Wrike workspace, you can create projects with connected resource folders and invite all your collaborators to join in, even if they work in a different department or global division of your company. 

Let’s start by looking at some different strategies for breaking projects into smaller tasks within a Wrike workspace. 

Imagine your team is focused on writing a proposal for a potential new client. Chances are, you’ll have to:

• Research the needs of the company you’re pitching and clarify what you can offer
• Plan, outline, and organize your proposal with input from other people in your company, such as consulting your finance department to set the budget
• Write and edit the proposal and approve it internally 
• Send the proposal to the client or present it to them in person 

All these can become tasks within Wrike. Simply click the + button at the top of the workspace, select Task, name it, and assign it to the folder, project, or space of your choice. 

However, the list of tasks above still represents hours of work and potentially dozens of people across your company. With Wrike, you can also convert larger tasks (like ‘Complete proposal research’) into milestones that structure the timeline and break smaller tasks (like ‘Approve project budget’) into a workflow of subtasks.

You can even use Wrike’s generative AI functionality to auto-suggest subtasks, adjust them, and add them to your workflow. 

As well as standard tasks, you can use Wrike to define custom items that fit the unique business processes your team follows every day. The difference between these different types of tasks lies in the different statuses they move through and the workflows they automatically trigger when you add something new to your list.

For example, a creative agency might move a new design task from ‘New’ to ‘In progress’ to ‘Approved.’ Or a real estate agency might set up a custom item for each listing on their books, which then moves from ‘Off-market’ to ‘On-market’ to ‘Under offer’ to ‘In escrow’ to ‘Sold.’ This way, you can construct your workflows from the ground up in a way that makes sense to each team, using language that reflects the work that they do.

The difference between a task checklist and a workflow is the ability to visualize the way these tasks affect each other. Once you have your list of tasks, Wrike makes it easy to define the associated task dependencies and build a full project workflow plan. 

Just bring up your task list in the Gantt chart view, click on the task you want to connect, and drag your mouse across to the task it relates to. Once someone completes the first task, alters the deadline, or stretches the timeline, the schedule for dependent tasks automatically adjusts.

This eliminates human error and you won’t have to write any emails, either. Everyone who’s tagged in the relevant tasks will be notified automatically when the timeline changes.

Once you’ve mapped out your project, defined how tasks relate to each other, and understand the workflow behind each task, you have more than just a progress tracking checklist: you have the accountability and flexibility to execute a whole project.