User:Workapedia/sandbox

Work Maps are simple plans that can be networked to create larger plans for each person to navigate through their work. Shared work maps can be updated to show progress and what each person needs to do for all their tasks.

Why Work Maps are needed
To avoid people getting overwhelmed, lost and stressed through wasting a lot of time and effort trying to identify the tasks they are involved in; what they need to do, when and with whom; changes that affect them; and progress.

Work maps are designed to integrate, sort out, present and navigate through task and team information in a consistent, understandable and actionable way for each person. Online software creates and updates work maps from team member’s inputs.

Work maps provide the minimum information required to choose a path that keeps work flowing freely. They provide the task goal, the task work-flow and what needs to be done, when and with whom.

History
After Dr Neil G Miller completed his Doctorate on Introducing Technology in 1991, he focused on how to get the right task and team information to the right people at the right time. In 1997, he filed a task management patent to sort out who needed to see what and when.

After using a vehicle navigator in 1999, he decided that a work navigator would revolutionize how people navigate through work. Work navigators required work maps; so, he invented work maps and distributed management. Then he spent the next 20 years making it easy for anyone to use work maps to navigate through work with anyone else from anywhere at any time.

Key Parts
Tasks are the things that need to be completed, ToDo’s provide the workflow to complete a task, relevant people (often called stakeholders) are whoever is involved, and the connections between ToDo’s and people show what each person needs to do.

The connections in work maps are rarely static, because they change as work gets done, more information becomes available, and different mixes of people are involved.

Core Module
The core module is the task work map. Each task work map includes the task goal and all the critical mapping required to complete the task.

Larger Activities
Work maps for strategies, projects, process and other activities are just a lot of task work maps joined together, shown in a tree (or work breakdown structure). This modular approach allows unlimited flexibility, and relevant parts of many complex activities to be presented at the same time from each person’s perspective.

Personalized Network of Connections
In practice, a person is likely to be involved in many strategies, projects, tasks and other activities at the same time. So, each person would have connections to tasks and ToDo’s in many work maps. This creates the complex personalized network of connections needed to manage all their tasks together to keep work flowing.

Work Navigator
A work navigator sorts through all task work maps to identify and present critical task and team connections from each person’s perspective and to keep track of changes and progress.

A work navigator displays three core personalized work maps. These are: task connections map (tasks I am involved in), task workflow map/live plan (ToDo’s I need to do or know about), and personal ToDo map (ToDo’s I need to navigate and do). These work maps are integrated and synchronized with other relevant peoples’ personalized work maps.