The workflow is the succession of activities in business operations. Workflow is essential because from its effectiveness comes the success in achieving the stablished goals and the satisfaction of customers, who are the ones receiving the product or service from these activities.
For any organization it is important to have in perspective all the workflow, with all the activities and people in charge, because many times improvement of a process comes from the improvement in workflow and not from changing some specific parts of the process. This means that improvement depends more on the connection between activities and communication between people in charge than from activities themselves, as isolated actions. For instance, more important than getting a better information analyst, is to check why the reports from the current analyst are not reaching properly the managers or to identify why that information is not understood by them.
This is the meaning of these words, also valid in corporate world:
Looking to improve our work—or when things go wrong— we tend to put all our resources in improving our raw skill: we buy books, take expensive professional courses, watch tutorials, and practice. When we keep bumping into the same kind of problems, we do more of the same, not realizing it’s not our raw skills that we need to upgrade. It’s our workflow (Mayer, 2018).