Process Management tools. Save money & avoid layoffs

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When your business goes down, and you think about how to stay in black and where to cut business costs, it often leads to staff layoffs. Firing employees isn’t always the best option. How about finding some other and even more effective solution with process management tools?

 

Think about how many recurring Jira tasks your employees have daily or weekly. And what about the time they spent creating these tasks and assigning them to the right person? Have you ever wondered how much time=money you lose on that routine work? It shouldn't be like that in the era of automation and AI. It actually can be the opposite: reduced time on repetitive tasks = increased productivity & creativity for prioritized work = growing business and its profitability. Let’s try to save time, money and employees.

How much time do we spend on repetitive tasks?

Onboarding new hires, waiting for approvals and feedback, organizing documents, generating reports, creating Jira tasks every week, etc. – there are thousands of repetitive tasks each employee has in each department. In The Anatomy of Work Index research from Asana, it is stated that people spend roughly 60% of their time on activities that are “work about work”.

How much money your business loses on duplicated tasks?

Let’s take a marketing manager, for example. The average hourly pay for a marketing manager in the US is $33. Due to double work, this employee wastes 4 hours, 55 minutes each 50 weeks (not including the two weeks off) or 227,5 hours annually. The sum is 7,507.5$ per year. And count how many employees you have. 

You can take this example and calculate the losses based on your employees' salaries. Routine tasks and financial loss are related in ways that go beyond the pure time you waste performing the same set of duties repeatedly. 

It’s time to review your workflow and process organization. Our marketing manager, from the example above, has different options two work: 

🕛 An hour of work can be spent to create Jira tasks for an employee or colleagues, for example: create a content plan, check the site, send an email, make a post on social networks, etc.

🕛 An hour of work can be spent to perform some of these tasks: write a post, send an email, create an article or generate ideas for a content plan, etc.

What will you choose? 

You will pay the same money for this hour for both types of activities, but at the same time have a different result.

If you want to optimize your team time for recurring tasks, you can try some solutions below.

Optimize your Business Process Management in Jira

When it comes to recurring processes or tasks in your workflow, the best way to avoid losing time for unnecessary actions is to automate task creation or the whole work process. The Business Process Manager (BPM) is created as your assistant in optimizing regular work processes. Set the process once, and BPM will do the recurring tasks for you as often as needed.

For instance, you can include all recurring weekly tasks for the whole department in one process. In our case, marketing managers have such weekly assignments as competitor analysis, KPI reports, posts on social media, etc. 

Key actions to take:

• List all recurring weekly tasks and set them in BPM
• Choose single or multiple assignees for each task
• Set priorities and order for task creation
• Add approvers if you need someone to check the task

BPM will automatically create tasks for the chosen assignees at a specific time.

 

That way, your employees will spend no time every week on task creation and free up their minds for more interesting and valuable work. 0️⃣time to create tasks = free time for what is really important. 

Additionally, Business Process Manager helps standardize typical processes and reduce costs because everyone knows where, what is stored, which steps to follow, and which people participate in the process. 

You can compare this process with the new habit acquisition. When someone decides to acquire a new habit, it takes a lot of time and effort for the actions to become automatic. If you translate this into business language, you will lose money every time your employees make mistakes. They need time to remember exactly how the process is built and all steps. With BPM, you can give them freedom in their actions but control them through the approval step and process tracking.

Organize cost tracking in Jira

Before cutting the expenses, it is necessary first to track where the funds are spent. Informed decisions about resource allocation, scope adjustments, and other aspects of project management are possible when managers have a clear picture of the project costs. 

If you are looking for your budgeting assistant, check out Cost Tracker for Jira Cloud. Here you can set hourly rates for employees, track their past changes, and monitor direct spending (one-time and recurring). In general, the following formula is used to calculate project and company costs:

Jira project costs = Personnel worklogs * Salary rates + Direct expenses

With this Jira plugin, you can estimate costs for projects, sprints, versions, a single issue or bug, etc.

• 💡Use Case: How to estimate project costs with Cost Tracker
• 💡Use Case: How to estimate the sprint cost in Jira 
• 💡Use Case: How to calculate version costs in Jira
• 💡Use Case: How to estimate the issue cost
• 💡Use Case: How can you calculate meeting costs

If we take our marketing team, for example, we use custom Jira fields to mark different types of activities and channels. Then using dashboards, we examine which tasks take the most of our time and which are the most productive.

Each marketer in Jira has a pool of tasks for each activity. We can calculate the price of these tasks using Cost Tracker for Jira. The relationship between the most productive traffic channels, their share of the overall picture, and, consequently, how much it costs show us whether it is wise to spend money on particular activities. Here, you can read more about Cost tracking for marketing teams.

Wrapping up

May your single cost-cutting decision will be wise, data-driven and well-considered. If you are looking for options to save money, avoid layoffs and stay productive, check out the tips and solutions from the article.

• Business Process Manager – to reduce time and costs for recurring processes and tasks. Grow your talents to grow your business.
• Cost Tracker for Jira Cloud – find out processes and activities that take the most costs and re-evaluate your priorities.

Wishing your business all the prosperity and growth!