When your workflow involves multiple tools and processes, or it’s simply too complex to handle without a framework, it’s time to consider your options for workflow orchestration.
The term “orchestration” is often used interchangeably with “automation” and “optimization,” but this area of business process management is a separate skill and strategy.
Workflow orchestration focuses on integrating your tools and building a system that connects multiple teams and processes at your company. Done well, orchestration creates a more efficient workflow, where it’s easier for your team to communicate, correct errors, and produce consistent results.
By the end of this post, you’ll have a better understanding of what workflow orchestration could mean for your team. Step by step, we’ll show you how to find:
- Situations where workflow orchestration could improve an existing process
- Tasks and projects where workflow orchestration can be most beneficial, and how to approach it in your planning
- Tools to help you effectively orchestrate your workflow
- Strategies to implement your new systems and create a seamless business process
A lot of workflow orchestration posts focus on open-source coding tools and data pipelines. But here, we’ll show you how our intuitive, user-friendly work management platform, Wrike, can help you achieve the streamlined, integrated processes you’re looking for.
Wrike helps every kind of team – from software developers to professional services to creative and design – build and define workflows tailored to the tasks they complete every day.
Who can benefit from workflow orchestration?
To kick things off, let’s look at the scenarios where workflow orchestration could bring the biggest benefits. Whatever industry you’re in, it’s time to start considering ways to refine and standardize your workflows when:
- You have repeatable tasks with multiple steps that could be templated. For intricate or dependent tasks that can’t be done ad hoc, an orchestrated workflow can act as a safety net. It defines complex workflows, sets them within a clear framework, and makes sure the work is completed to the same standard every time.
- You want to increase efficiency by eliminating manual tasks and separate tools. If you’re still using a legacy system, or your process has sprawled to include a mix of tools, orchestrations focuses on opportunities to automate and optimize. When you reduce the number of steps or the length of the processes, you can save both time and money.
- You want to reduce your error rate. By centralizing your tools, an orchestrated workflow eliminates places where a task or approval stage can slip through the cracks. The elements of automation can also ensure each output passes through the necessary stages of setup and validation, which reduces chance of an overlooked step.
- You want to communicate more effectively. Because workflow orchestration usually lowers the number of tools you use and creates more transparency in your process, it gives your team a better overview and more centralized communication system.
- You want to scale up. Once your workflow is orchestrated and you’re working more efficiently, you’ll be able to handle a greater volume of tasks and more complex processes.
If you’re ready to see the benefits of efficiency, scalability, and improved collaboration in your team, we’ll take you through the process of orchestrating your existing workflows step by step.
3 steps to orchestrate a complex workflow
1. Map your workflow
When you want to improve your existing workflow, you need to start with a complete understanding of where you are now. Effective process mapping creates a series of lists — or even a diagram — to show:
- The steps in the tasks or projects you’re undertaking, including any subtasks involved.
- The key phases you move through during your workflow, with the milestones you need to hit and the key decision points where certain information needs to be available to your team.
- The stakeholders involved with each process, with a note of their roles, responsibilities, skills, and the resources they need.
- The mix of tools you’re currently using and the features you rely on. This is vital for the next stage of the process, where you’ll look at orchestration tools. A list of the features you really need can help you find a platform that combines them.
- The issues you’re experiencing with the current system. For example, your team might encounter friction because a delay in data provisioning leads to a bottleneck in the intake process. In that case, you can prioritize a fix in the new workflow. The mapping stage is also a good opportunity to look for manual tasks like data entry that could be automated in the new workflow.
While teams can map their more basic workflows in a flowchart or Gantt chart, visualizing your pre-orchestration workflow will likely be more challenging because of the number of stages and tools. Thankfully, even a basic outline and list of requirements will help inform your choices in the next step.
2. Choose a workflow orchestration tool
Traditionally, workflow orchestration involved a company’s IT team coding solutions to help the rest of the departments use a series of software tools within their workflows.
This means when you research ways to orchestrate a workflow, you’ll still find results that speak about the benefits of Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS Step Functions; explanations about how Apache Airflow orchestrates workflows in Python; or posts about ETL operations to help handle your company’s data lake.
But with the latest workflow management software offering low-code or no-code solutions, more teams can see the benefits of true workflow orchestration without training in DevOps themselves.
Choosing a workflow orchestration tool means researching the features and comparing them to your business needs. You’ll find a variety of tools out there, but we’re confident our award-winning work management platform, Wrike, includes all the automations, integrations, and reporting features teams need to effectively orchestrate even the most complex cross-team workflows.
Powerful integrations
Your workflow orchestration platform needs a powerful and easy-to-use API to help you connect your task tracking to the tools your team relies on. If the tool you’re considering can’t provide this flexibility, you won’t truly be able to orchestrate a workflow at all.
With over 400 integrations and the opportunity to develop your own, Wrike gives you all the tools you need to handle a vast range of use cases at your company. Other integration platforms might limit the number of apps you can connect to, but Wrike makes integrations work your way.
With the Wrike Integrate add-on, you can quickly connect Wrike to your current cloud-based and on-premises tools. This helps you create, sync, and automate workflows across your business. When you can bring in as many different apps and automations as you need to fully orchestrate your workflow, you remove the integration gaps that stand in the way of your team’s process.
Customizable process automation rules
As we said earlier, workflow orchestration often goes hand in hand with automation. It’s one of the easiest ways to speed up a process, remove human error, and ensure all the data your team needs is easily accessible when they need it.
Wrike’s unrivaled automation system is the key to process orchestration that truly supports your team.
For example, Wrike makes it easy to create automation rules tailored to your organization — and even the individual teams within it. This can help you:
- Update your team in real time. Whenever your team updates a task status in Wrike, it shows instantly across your workspaces and dashboards, and sends notifications to keep the right people in the loop.
- Monitor task dependencies. When you define dependent tasks in your Wrike workspace (for example, by clicking and dragging to link them in a Gantt chart), changes to the first task will automatically alter the subsequent tasks.
- Create process guardrails. By automatically ensuring all the steps are completed for each task and recording information like decision makers, discussions, and key dates, Wrike acts as a safety net for your team and creates a paper trail if you need to perform an audit later.
- Save money. Automations help your team do more faster and use resources more efficiently.
- Reduce the number of repetitive tasks your team has to complete. For example, Wrike’s automation rules remove the need to manually assign tasks, send reminders, file documents at the end of a project, update shared Kanban boards, or provide status reports.
Plus, with our groundbreaking machine learning model, Work Intelligence®, you can monitor the entire task or project lifecycle, identify threats to your success, and find new opportunities where an automation rule could support your team.
For full orchestration, Wrike’s workflow automations also create a seamless data flow between your apps, so you can centralize all the work your teams complete.
Total visibility throughout your workflow
The best orchestrated workflows show the progress of your tasks and give you the insights you need to inform your decisions.
When it comes to transparency, Wrike’s customizable dashboards are unbeatable. We give you the overviews that help your teams visualize your project ecosystem and the granular data they can use to power their work.
In seconds, you can set up a predefined dashboard and start seeing the real-time reports on your progress and KPIs, and translate your project data into calendar and chart views with ease.
Dashboards are a game changer when it comes to workflow orchestration because they simplify your entire management process.
- They eliminate the other tools you might have been using to track your workflows, like task management apps, spreadsheets, or even paper lists.
- They provide clarity and a central source of truth that shows your whole team where their tasks feed into the wider goals, facilitating collaboration.
- They help you efficiently drill down to find the details of your tasks in files and discussions attached to the card, with no need to search through separate folders and email chains.
With an at-a-glance view of your workflows and projects, your team has the data they need to prioritize their work, and the tools to apply the newly orchestrated workflow to their daily tasks.
Plus, Wrike’s reporting features translate this data into snapshots for your stakeholders, giving them the up-to-date information they need. For example, project managers can configure a weekly report including updates, risk assessments, data on capacity and workloads, and information on the budget and KPIs to inform their strategic planning.
Tailored solutions for cross-team projects
One of the areas where workflow orchestration can make the biggest difference to the speed and quality of your outputs is in managing cross-team work. When your workflows span different teams, locations, or departments of your company, it’s even more important to replace disjointed systems so you can remove information silos and promote collaboration.
This is where Wrike’s folder structure makes all the difference.
Folders, which are completely customizable, group information together and make it accessible in designated areas of your work management system. You can set the permissions so the relevant parts of your team have access to the files they need, and make the folders instantly accessible from their Wrike workspaces.
Folders are even more effective when you use Wrike’s cross-tagging feature. When items like folders and tasks are tagged, they can exist in multiple locations in your workspace, so teams working on a shared asset will always have access to the latest versions.
For example, a marketing campaign could live in the design team’s space as part of their work for the quarter, and also in the content team’s space, so they have access to the latest assets as they are produced and approved without requesting them by email. This folder structure can streamline the way you manage assets in your workflows and create a culture of connectivity and clarity across your shared projects.
Integrations, automations, centralization, and organization can all be critical to the complex workflows. When you combine these tools in a platform like Wrike, you can truly orchestrate your workflows by building a unique process that covers all your team’ needs in one unified location.
3. Implement your orchestrated workflow
Orchestrating a workflow should make a complex process simpler. Still, if you want to see a true improvement in the results your process gets, it’s vital to acknowledge that a new workflow is still a big change for your team. Once you’ve come up with a plan to orchestrate your workflow and decided which tools you’ll use, it’s important to:
- Train and onboard your team so they can understand the new framework. It’s also worth planning an adjustment period that reflects the scale of the changes and the complexity of the new tools, and consider implementing change management techniques.
- Set up the processes that will report on the new workflow so you can start gathering data to show how well your team is transitioning and how effective your orchestration measures have been.
- Look for further opportunities for workflow optimization in your reports, results, or feedback from your team.
- Create blueprints so you can easily kick off new tasks and repeat your most successful processes time and again.
During the final phase of the orchestration process, Wrike’s ease of use is one of the main advantages over another, more traditionally code-based orchestration tool.
We simplify the setup process so you can migrate smoothly to your new tools. For example, it’s possible to import your existing files from tools like Microsoft Projects and Excel to get started. Plus, our customer care team is there to provide training and support you as you customize your workspace, and help you find integrations to orchestrate a workflow tailored to your team.
Wrike users can access our comprehensive online Help Center, community posts, and monthly live webinars. And — unlike some other work management tools — our team is available via email, web chat, and phone.
Workflow orchestration with Wrike: 3 success stories
Analyzing your workflow and applying the principles of workflow orchestration can help teams in any industry. To prove it, we spoke to three teams who have built and optimized their workflows in Wrike to find out about the issues they wanted to solve, the tools they now rely on, and the benefits they’ve seen.
Siemens Smart Infrastructure standardizes processes and automates delivery
Siemens Smart Infrastructure is a global company building energy systems, software, and smart storage solutions.
Tackling a massive task volume and complex projects, its dispersed international teams previously struggled with information silos and disjointed processes that posed a significant security risk.
According to Hannes Leitner, Process Owner of Project Execution, the company’s goals with Wrike went further than executing the vast projects it was known for. It also aimed to:
- Work within its margins for the smaller ($50-100,000) projects it undertook
- Reduce the time spent on tasks so it could be more competitive
- Replace a variety of tools with different levels of reliability and data security with one “central, state-of-the-art collaboration platform”
Good usability helps, but Wrike’s strong integrations and security bring a lot of value.
Hannes Leitner, Process Owner, Project Execution
In answer to these intricate needs, Wrike helped Siemens to build mobile-ready workspaces with intuitive KPI dashboards, custom workflows, SAP integration, and enterprise-grade security. With all the challenges of a massive, multinational company, the premium 24/7 support was also a huge selling point.
Christina Fischer, Global Product Manager, told us how the team uses Wrike’s flexible project templates and integrations: “We use an integration with our SAP system. Once a project is booked, the project is automatically created in Wrike with the right project template and filled with data. Then, in Wrike, we have an automatic assignment of the project manager, who is also set in SAP.”
All in all, Wrike’s streamlined systems and secure processes have meant:
- Adoption by 14,000 users in 20 countries
- 10% increased productivity
- Over 250 custom workflows to standardize Siemens’ business processes across the organization
BigCommerce: Scaling services with unified processes
BigCommerce is a SaaS eCommerce platform based in Austin. Its software helps businesses to scale, but when its own company pivoted to target larger brands, its system of emails, spreadsheets, and Google Drive couldn’t grow to give it the data processing power it needed.
Patrick O’Connor, Manager of Professional Services, told us: “It was really hard to keep track of dates or the current status of our projects. When you’re doing everything disjointly, managers have no way to align their processes or report on what’s going on. You just can’t have an Excel sheet, a Google Doc, and a Trello board talk to each other.”
With Wrike, BigCommerce built a collaborative, flexible workspace. The team orchestrated workflows to unify their processes, create powerful reports, and give them full portfolio visibility. They’ve integrated their communications with Slack and built connectors to automatically kick off projects and push Wrike updates to Salesforce and Jira. “We’re able to learn and adapt a lot faster, which has been really beneficial,” added O’Connor.
Getting data-driven insights from Wrike has been crucial. Being able to truly make informed decisions has made a real impact.
Patrick O’Connor, Manager of Professional Services
So far, BigCommerce has seen:
- 50% less reporting time
- 102% increase in adoption rate in one year
- Improvement in both main KPIs: time to value and customer satisfaction
Ogilvy Australia
Ogilvy is one of the largest marketing agencies in the world. Its Australian team alone spans three offices in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. With Wrike, it set out on the road to digital transformation, replacing its paper-based workflow with a system that facilitates collaboration, alignment, and accountability across a remote team.
For Ogilvy, workflow orchestration means collaboratively tracking the steps in its creative workflow and monitoring the changes, agreements, and approvals in one place.
A particular bonus is the creation of creative briefs. Before Wrike, an account manager would go through meetings, emails, and a long back-and-forth process to clarify requests before campaigns could go to production. In contrast, Wrike gives them a creative brief request form to gather all the essential information and kick off the project automatically.
Everything I see now in Wrike is live and in its current status, which is a big plus to me. We can jump on the job, look at the last couple of comments on it, and pick up the ball up and run with it from there.
Ashley Risstrom, Senior Production Manager
According to Pedro Da Palma Rosa, Digital Operations Director, this process has saved “a lot of time and effort.” Wrike’s method of data processing and capture aligns the digital, print, and TV teams in their production departments. There’s a consistent process to follow every time, which means they can deliver top-quality results even across a high volume of active projects.
So far, Ogilvy Australia has achieved:
- A streamlined process for creative briefs with request forms
- Consistency with reviews, approvals, and feedback (@mention) tools
- A transparent process across teams, locations, and devices
Wrike: An intuitive workflow orchestration tool for any team
Workflow orchestration is a transformative process that selects the best tools, integrates your business processes, and helps your team work far more efficiently.
By focusing on collaboration, optimization, and removing manual tasks, an orchestrated workflow puts you in a far stronger position when you want to scale your organization or tackle more complex tasks. This is something every business can benefit from.
When you use Wrike to centralize your workflows and integrate your tools, you’ll have all the tools and support you need to guide you through the changes and implement a new approach to work management.
Get in touch today to find out what Wrike can do for your team.
