Division of work

Division of work refers to the practice of dividing a job, task, assignment, or contract into smaller tasks. A division of work may also include a schedule or set of deadlines for the subtasks. Within large organizations, subtasks are often distributed to functional areas such as operations, finance, production, or marketing. They may also be assigned to individuals.

If we consider the work of building a bridge, we can divide the work into different tasks (such as designing the bridge, arranging money for building it, procuring raw materials etc.) with deadlines to finish each task so that subsequent dependent tasks can proceed to meet the overall deadline for the project. These tasks are then given to their functional areas of the organization responsible for building the bridge, such as finance department which will arrange money flow and the architects and engineers which will produce drawings.

In contrast to division of work, division of labour is the specialization of an individual workers' or organizations' skills, through education, training, and practice. This specialization may last throughout one's career or the life of an organization, and certainly spans many projects, tasks, or contracts that an organization or individual may engage in. In fact, a significant shift in a worker's skills (his specialization within a division of labour) is often referred to as a "career change". In contrast, a new division of work is generally initiated for each new project or contract in an organization and seldomly encompasses a worker's entire career or an organization's lifespan. Division of labour is often associated with industrial assembly lines. It may also include the organization of labour and skills within a town, city, business organization, country, or an economic region (like the European Union, or the NAFTA member states).