Document workflow management: Tips, examples, and software

Document workflows are processes designed to help teams record and store a high volume of information in a compliant way. When your role involves overseeing these workflows, it’s vital to understand how they should be managed to ensure efficiency, safety, and compliance across your document processes. 

In this guide, we’ll cover: 

• Key elements of document workflow management, including how to structure, secure, monitor, and optimize the entire document lifecycle 
• Examples of successful document workflow management in a range of industries. Many of these examples are powered by Wrike — our platform used by teams like Marketing Architects, RPBA, and APS to manage internal documentation and boost compliance, efficiency, and security across the document lifecycle 
• Best practices to keep in mind as you start designing, implementing, and managing new workflows. 

Besides ensuring safety and compliance, the tips in this guide should help you avoid wasting time looking for files, fixing duplicate work, and navigating back-and-forth between team members.

Structuring document workflows 

At a minimum, an effective document workflow: 

• Clearly defines each step in the process. 
• Has a clear start point and specifies which processes can initiate the workflow. 
• Has a clear endpoint, when the document is typically archived or destroyed, depending on whether it will be needed again.  
• Defines who is responsible for completing each task and who is ultimately accountable at each stage. 
• Nominates a substitute person if the original team member is unavailable. 

When you first get started, it’s a good idea to map out every step of the document lifecycle — not just the workflow that creates the document, but what will happen as it is used and eventually retired. So, your document lifecycle might include: 

• Document creation, sometimes based on company guidelines, which can be a multi-stage process in itself 
• Review by subject matter experts, developers, editors, or a legal team 
• Approval or validation by management or a client  
• Distribution to the end user 
• Archival or destruction 

You’ll then consider which individual or job role will be responsible for these tasks. For example, if you’re writing and verifying an employment contract, HR and legal teams will be involved in creating the document for the new team member. That person will sign and return it, then the line manager becomes responsible for reviewing the contract after a certain amount of time has passed. 

How the physical or digital document is saved is also an important part of workflow management. 

Document storage concerns both compliance and day-to-day workability, because team members often have to retrieve documents for reference or to support their decision-making. This means it’s also important to consider how to index documents and metadata at the workflow stage, when they’re archived. 

Consider indexing by factors like: 

• Department title
• Document type (e.g., contract, report, policy)
• Tags (e.g., confidential, financial, urgent)
• Who wrote it 
• When it was written 
• When it was last edited or reviewed 

Securing document workflows 

Within teams, document workflows can become complex because each stage is handled by a different person or role. That’s why the most important part of keeping your document workflows secure involves defining permissions and access controls for each stage of the document lifecycle. 

To properly manage a document workflow, each job should have defined access roles specific to its function within the company. 

For example, a junior lawyer might have the ability to create a contract, but it can only be reviewed and sent to the client by a senior legal officer. Likewise, within a creative agency, team members assigned to a particular client might have the ability to edit the documents they’re creating, while other teams with access to that space, like finance, might be able to view the documents, but not make changes. 

How you manage these access roles is also likely dictated by the regulatory requirements of your industry. Specific regulations that affect documentation include: 

• GDPR 
• HIPAA
• SOX 
• SOC 1 and SOC 2

If these regulations require a further layer of security, such as for documents containing a client’s personal data, you can use encryption or enable audit trails to track who accessed the document and what actions they took. 

It’s important to remember that even the best-organized document management system (sometimes referred to as a DMS) isn’t intuitive to every team member, and people require training to understand why the policies and controls are in place and how these should structure their work.  It makes sense to train employees on how to use workflows, particularly: 

• As part of the onboarding process, to help new hires understand the DMS from day one 
• On an ongoing basis, especially when there are changes to the system, like new software or workflow automation to replace manual processes and data entry  

Monitoring document workflows 

Experienced project managers know that nobody gets their document workflow right the first time. There’s always fine-tuning to be done. 

That’s why it’s essential to constantly keep an eye on performance metrics like: 

• Document processing time 
• Speed of approval 
• Document retrieval time 
• Percentage of documents processed electronically 
• Number of documents processed by each employee 

Combining this data with qualitative feedback from employees can give you a sense of which parts of the system need to be optimized. 

For example, your feedback might show where an additional check or workflow stage would reduce revisions when documents are being created, where a tweak to the archival tags would make it easier to track down documents in the future, or where additional team members need permission to work on the documents to reduce a bottleneck. 

Optimizing document workflow management 

As well as identifying areas where the workflow isn’t performing as expected, there are plenty of opportunities to streamline your work by using templates and automated workflows. 

For example, you can optimize workflows by using AI-powered tools to automate repetitive tasks, such as: 

• Archiving documents after a certain amount of time has passed 
• Creating executive summaries of documents, so team members can check an AI draft rather than writing the summary from scratch 
• Routing files to managers or people with the appropriate job role to close a document approval workflow.  
• Backing up business documents at regular intervals to protect the data they contain
• Identifying duplicates of documents to reduce issues with versioning 

You can also optimize by using integrations to pass data between your DMS and the rest of your tech stack. This is much faster than transferring files manually and reduces the risk of human error. 

Process automation integrations that are particularly useful for managing documents include: 

• Your CRM
• Your email platform 
• Collaboration tools like Slack or Teams 
• Approval or editing tools

Best practices for successful document workflow management 

Your document management should make your processes clearer, more efficient, secure, and measurable, while still allowing you to work across teams and scale when you need to. 

As you get started, keep these best practices in mind: 

1. Balance standardization and differentiation 

Companies implement document workflows to ensure the documentation they’re producing has gone through the right checks at the right times and is stored in an appropriate way. That’s why the first stage of building a new document workflow involves identifying repeatable processes to standardize and define the steps they involve. 

However, not all documents are created in the same way, so you can expect to set up different document workflows for different kinds of tasks. A platform like Wrike can help you define intake forms, workflow stages, and approval paths to suit your unique processes. Simply create a custom item type for each type of document your team creates, and set out the steps and accountability required for that process.

2. Automate where possible 

Document workflow automation isn’t feasible in every situation, and you’ll always want to know whether a trusted team member has reviewed what’s been created before giving it a stamp of approval. 

However, many manual workflow stages — inputting data from forms, copying information from one platform to another — are slow, laborious, and increase the risk of errors in your records, which could have a ripple effect. 

Consider automations to populate your documents, record how decisions are being made, notify team members to loop them in quickly at key stages, and update the overview of your workload. 

Automations can be as simple as rule-based triggers, but they can make your processes more scalable and free up a significant amount of time for you to concentrate on your other management tasks.

Additional reading: End-to-end document workflow automation.

3. Establish strong governance and compliance controls from the start

As you’re designing new processes, be sure to consult the legal and regulatory requirements for document workflow systems in your industry as well as your company’s internal policy. 

Understanding these rules and frameworks will help you ensure your workflows are set up with the appropriate roles and access permissions, the correct approval stages, and the most suitable archive or disposal protocols. 

Remember, when you use software to manage these documents step-by-step, you’re also creating a paper trail that will make it easier to audit your work in the future. 

4. Align your workflows with business objectives

Ultimately, your workflows should support your business outcomes. This often means adapting your process to meet key goals for operations, compliance, and specific customers, especially for project-specific workflows.  

As these goals evolve, you should also review your workflows and management systems to ensure they capture data that proves your team is meeting targets and delivering a return on investment. 

5. Use software to monitor your workflows in real time 

As a manager, you need a bird’s-eye view of your workflows and where your tasks sit within them. Previously, teams had to rely on manually updating spreadsheets to record their latest work, emailing to request status updates, and compiling reports that took hours every week. Now, solutions like Wrike continually monitor the work that’s being completed and filter that data to show a custom, real-time overview. 

For example, Wrike can show your workflows as a Kanban Board, Gantt chart, Table view, or in a custom dashboard. Then, if you identify an issue like a forgotten task, you can dive straight from the overview to the task card, view granular data on its status, and decide how to support your team to get the document over the line. 

3 Examples of successful document workflow management 

In this section, we’ll move from theory to practice by covering three real-life examples of document workflow management. These focus on different use cases and industries — marketing, legal, and tech — so you can get a feel for how different document workflows can be in practice.

Marketing Architects: Collaboration and document revision tracking

Marketing Architects is a Minneapolis-based marketing agency focused on TV advertising. The company team uses Wrike to collaborate on documents, manage comments, and implement version control. 

Specifically, Marketing Architects has used Wrike to differentiate between two types of documents:

• Creative assets, which are client-facing and sent to multiple project stakeholders
• Internal documents, which keep the team running

The team uses Wrike to manage both types in a single shared workspace, eliminating the time spent switching between platforms. Wrike’s folder structure allows them to store everything from creative briefs to storyboards — without anything getting lost.

Wrike gives us a documented approach to client feedback and to legal feedback. We could go back a year from now and see what was approved by whom, what those changes were. We have that paper trail, so to speak.

Eric Pilhofer, Senior Vice President of Creative

Sometimes, the team at Marketing Architects runs into situations where multiple clients need to review a single document. By using project folders, integrated document editing tools, and custom permissions, Wrike can handle this as well. In our platform, clients can see each other’s comments on the document they’re sharing, in real time. 

The team also uses Wrike to track revisions, with automatic version control ensuring that the latest version is always on top. If needed, they can compare previous versions to confirm that all the feedback has been applied correctly.

RPBA: Optimizing legal document workflows

RPBA is a law firm in Portugal that specializes in taxes on income and real estate. Similar to Marketing Architects, RPBA uses Wrike to manage all its legal documents — and all related tasks — in one central location.

Whenever a team member adds a note or comment on a document or task, they simply @mention the person they want to notify. This ensures the right person is alerted about the comment, cutting down on time spent chasing colleagues for feedback.

Wrike changed our daily work by providing us with tools for effective project control and risk reduction. This boosts confidence in our performance and diminishes concerns of failure.

Ricardo da Palma Borges, Managing Partner

Wrike has also helped RPBA simplify its document creation process. The company has come up with a series of custom task templates that have two occurrences:

• The first one creates the project and the necessary documentation, with a strict deadline.
• The second one gets used internally to adjust the project schedule.

APS: Workload management and asset approvals

APS is a tech company based in Cape Town, South Africa. 

The team uses Wrike’s workload tools to track who’s working on which documents, monitor their progress, and assess whether team members have the capacity to take on new tasks. This helps them allocate resources efficiently.

Since approval processes are built into Wrike, APS can review documents quickly and easily. APS also uses Wrike to compare contract versions by displaying them side by side in the preview window, which helps track changes and understand which revisions have been made.

The designers mostly work in InDesign or Photoshop, but Wrike helps everyone stay connected in their main document workflow. Thanks to an easy integration between Adobe Creative Cloud and Wrike, designers receive instant notifications whenever they need to make changes to images or text.

The value of document workflow management software 

The considerations we outlined above show how much planning and oversight are required to manage a team’s document workflow. 

The work can be complex, and once the workflow has been implemented, you can find yourself responsible for hundreds of documents at varying stages of their lifecycle. While many teams start out by using spreadsheets to manage this, the process quickly becomes a mess as documents grow, different teams get involved, and changes are happening all the time.

On the other hand, using a dedicated document workflow management software can do a lot to:

• Reduce the friction in document creation: Any high-quality DMS should include tools like request forms and templates to set up the typical documents your team works with.  
• Help your team collaborate: Software can bring full visibility to your workflows, showing you at a glance who’s responsible for a task, what its status is, and bringing your discussions alongside the documents you’re creating. 
• Simplify complex workflow stages like reviews and approvals: Whenever a document reaches a new stage, management software can notify the person responsible and record the work they do. It can also route documents directly, so unauthorized employees can’t view or edit the documents until they’re ready.  
• Make it easier to retrieve your documents: Because all your documents pass through your management system, it acts as a centralized repository, and you can implement a clear folder structure to reflect the way your team shares and stores your documents.
• Automate your document workflows: The most powerful document workflow management tools now include AI to speed up essential workflow monitoring tasks, like report creation and risk management.  

Wrike also integrates with over 400 different platforms to help you create, edit, share, and store your documents more efficiently.  This includes integration with Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, and other cloud storage solutions. 

For a full rundown, check out our complete guide to the best document workflow solutions on the market.

For effective document workflow management, choose Wrike

For teams that want to manage document workflows efficiently, the detail of the work and the quantity of tasks can seem overwhelming. But it doesn’t need to be that way. 

When it comes to managing document workflows, Wrike stands out due to the ease of document creation, the seamless, centralized collaboration options, and the informative workflow overviews our tools generate automatically. And if a repetitive task is eating up hours of your week, simply use Wrike to automate it.