Imagine you knew absolutely everything there was to know about the company you buy from. I’m talking about their goals, values … even the challenges they face. It would be pretty radical right?

Or rather, the company in question would be radically transparent.

Radical transparency is a phenomenon that’s gaining traction, and this post is here to tell you why. I’ll be taking a look at what radical transparency means and how the approach is put into practice at Gitlab, a DevOps platform founded upon an open-source ethos.

To jump to a specific section of the post click the appropriate link below:

• What is radical transparency?
• A brief introduction to GitLab
• What does radical transparency look like at Gitlab?
• A look into GitLab’s employee handbook
• What does radical transparency look like in practice?
• Radical Transparency: Concluding thoughts 🧠

Let’s get started 🚀
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We’ve all been there: an hour and a half into a 45-minute meeting. You’re trying to reach a consensus but as one department makes a suggestion, the next disagrees.

Customer success insists the next product should be geared towards students; sales thinks their parents are a better demographic. Content marketing started out by spitballing potential names until someone brought up the latest Process Street post and they all got sidetracked discussing whether it’s better to use odd or even numbers in a post title. Social marketing is scrolling through newsfeeds and graphic design isn’t even sure what they’re doing in this meeting at all.

It should have been simple: get everyone together, brainstorm ideas, then form a game-plan and timeline to use moving forward. Except no one can agree on anything and, at this rate, the only accomplishment the meeting will have made is wasting everyone’s afternoon.

Group decision-making is complicated. Fortunately, there are processes for that.

You may have already read our post on DECIDE, which is a great decision-making process for individuals. However, what works for an individual does not necessarily translate to a group. In this post, I’m going to introduce you to one of the most popular group decision-making frameworks: DACI.

The DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributors, Informed) decision-making framework is a set of processes geared toward doing just that. As a variant of the RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) responsibility matrix, DACI’s emphasis on decision clarity for complex projects often makes it the go-to framework for product managers.

That’s a lot of acronyms all at once, huh?

Don’t worry. We’ll take it slow – or you can jump straight to the point:

• Group decision-making: yay or nay?
• What is DACI?
• DACI and Atlassian’s Team Playbook
• How to create your own DACI framework (with free template)
• Other ways Process Street can streamline your decision-making processes

Let’s get some decisions made!
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Agent *reader*, I call upon you today as we’re at a time of crisis. Humans have annihilated 83% of all wild animals and are disrupting a natural climate balance, throwing us into a projected future that is 4.1 – 4.8°C (39.38 – 40.64 °F) warmer.

It’s our duty, as citizens, business owners, and employees to change the narrative for our children’s lives; to kickstart a transition into a more sustainable future, one that enriches biodiversity and a balanced climate. And for this, we turn our attention to sustainable cities.

According to the World Health Organization, the global world population living in urban areas is expected to increase to 66% by 2050, making cities a perfect place to transform society and support biodiversity and a balanced climate.

In this Process Street article, we’ll become time-travelers, zipping into the future to assess two separate predicted scenarios.

• Scenario 1: The continuation of human activity as normal.
• Scenario 2: Transforming into a more sustainable future, starting with our cities.

Today, we meet at a crossroad, where our future could go two ways. We’ll explore these two separate scenarios, before addressing the role of sustainable cities in creating a more desirable world. We’ll look at how businesses must adapt to survive in a future that is carbon-neutral with rich biodiversity.

After all, who wouldn’t want such a future? 🌻

• What are sustainable cities?
• Our future cities are sustainable
• Sustainable cities: Key takeaways for corporate sustainability

Seat belts on, time-machine ignited, to the future here we come! 🕔🚀🕤
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“Startups that regularly conduct qualitative research (not just quantitative) experience faster results in their quest to achieve product-market-fit.” – Mitchell Posada, I’m a startup, do I need to do Qualitative Research?

Why?

Because by regularly doing qualitative research, you are engaging with (and acting on) the voice of your ideal customer. To the point where the customer actually becomes a part of everything you do.

Whether you’re a founder about to launch a product or someone who is simply keen to understand and put into practice qualitative research methods – 👇🏼 you’re in the right place.

Just keep on scrolling and I assure you that on finishing this Process Street blog you will be well versed in all that is qualitative research.

Alternatively, to skip to a specific section of the post click the links below:

• What is qualitative research?
• A closer look at qualitative research
• Types of qualitative research
• Qualitative research in practice: The chocolate method 🍫
• Is qualitative research for you?

Keep reading to find out exactly what chocolate has to do with qualitative research!
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Once upon a time, the island nation of Sri Lanka was called “Serendip,” a word derived from Sanskrit which means Dwelling-Place-of-Lions. (Lovely, right?).

Serendip provides the setting for the Persian fairy tale “The Three Princes of Serendip”, who throughout their travels, stumbled upon an uncanny amount of luck. 🤴🏾🤴🏾🤴🏾

The story of the princes and their relationship with luck is where the wonderful word Serendipity comes from. Serendipity, meaning accidental, unexpected, random, wonderful, happy, luck.

It is luck, or rather, how to make your own luck, that is the focus of this Process Street blog.

This post embraces and explains tech entrepreneur Jason Robert’s concept of “Luck Surface Area”, in the hope of helping you, the reader, increase your luck both in life and in business.

To jump to a specific section of the post click the appropriate link below. Alternatively, just keep scrolling to learn about the three lucky princes, Luck Surface Area, and how you can make your own luck.

• Serendipity and making your own luck
• How to make your own luck
• Make your own luck: The Luck Surface Area equation
• 5 actionable ways you can increase your luck surface area and make your own luck

Feelin’ lucky? ✨

Let’s get started.

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“Global stock markets post biggest falls since the 2008 financial crisis.” – The Guardian, 9th of March 2020

It was a Tuesday morning and my phone buzzed me out of my groggy, lethargic state, flashing open the above notification. The Coronavirus had hit businesses and our economy hard, potentially costing 2.7 trillion globally.

A viral risk, that went viral. Was something like this not foreseeable?

In this Process Street article, we turn our attention to the concept of business risk. As we write this article, the corona crisis is unfolding. We were warned about the risk of a virus outbreak but it appears we weren’t as prepared for it as we could have been.

But viruses are not the only risk we face. The 2020 Global Risk Report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) highlights a host of other risks, which we’ll turn our attention to in this article.

To get started, click on the relevant subheaders below to spring to that section. Alternatively, scroll down to read all we have to say regarding the concept of business risk.

• Confront business risk with a risk management process
• Business risk: What is it and why risk items need to be identified
• Business risks: Global business risks from the World Economic Forum
• What is a risk management process and how do we use it?
• Incorporating the Global 2020 Risk Report results within your risk management process
• Risk item 1: Extreme weather, cause, and economic effect
• Risk item 2: Climate action failures, cause, and economic effect
• Risk item 3: Biodiversity loss, cause, and economic effect
• Risk assessment: Why sustainability is part of a good risk assessment
• Sustainability risk management: How you can document your processes with Process Street

Belts and braces on, let’s jump to it!
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“Everyone who works here is a jerk. It smells terribly bad and the manager is an a**hole.” – Vanessa, TrustPilot

As a business owner, how would you respond to this review? Fight back and tell the customer they’re wrong? Ignore it and hope it goes away? Or apologize profusely and kill them with kindness?

In a world where 70% of consumers look at multiple review sites and read a whopping 10 reviews before choosing a local business, review management needs to be a crucial part of your business success plan.

But with 63% of businesses not checking or responding to their online reviews, we at Process Street, have written this post to help you understand the impact and importance of managing your online reviews.

This post will tell you everything you need to know about review management, including the following topics:

• What is review management?
• Where did review management begin?
• How important is review management?
• How to respond to reviews
• How to get more reviews
• When to ask for reviews
• How to monitor reviews
• How to use Process Street to manage online reviews

We will also give you access to 14 super-charged templates that will actively help you manage your online reviews. If you’re in a hurry, feel free to jump straight into them:

1. Asking Valuable Customers for Feedback Checklist
2. Customer Service Representative Performance Review Checklist
3. Individual Review Feedback Analysis Process Checklist
4. How to Ask for a Review from a High Touch Client Checklist
5. How to Get Google Reviews from Top Customers Checklist
6. How to Get Reviews on Amazon With a Personal Touch Checklist
7. How to Respond to Google Reviews Process Checklist
8. How to Respond to Yelp Reviews Process Checklist
9. Monitor Reviews Set-up Checklist
10. Positive Review Response Process Checklist
11. Product Review Process Checklist
12. Reply to eBay Feedback Process Checklist
13. Responding to Negative Reviews Process
14. Social Listening Strategy Process Checklist

If you’re curious about what these templates look like, check out this embedded Social Listening Strategy Process Checklist here, or scroll down to find them all embedded.

But if you’ve got time, grab yourself a cuppa and let’s get started!

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This is a guest post by Rahul Varshneya, the co-founder and President of Arkenea. Rahul has been featured as a technology thought leader in numerous media channels such as Bloomberg TV, Forbes, HuffPost, Inc, among others.

Several organizations use a wide range of tools to execute and monitor their internal processes. These systems are interfaced by human agents who pass on the data output from one system as input to the next system in the pipeline.

Because of the non-automatic nature of manual execution, manual data entry work makes these processes slow and error-prone.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had these interfaces taken care of automatically?

That’s right, we are talking about Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – a transformational paradigm that optimizes such processes by automating repetitive, rule-driven tasks.

According to Forrester Research, RPA market revenue is expected to gross $1 Billion USD in 2019.

With RPA and by using RPA tools, your internal processes can be finished faster and more efficiently. It would free your agents from trivial data entry and data exchange tasks so you could deploy them to do more strategic process initiatives.

In this article, we at Process Street will present 5 best practices for RPA. We will then introduce our favorite RPA tools, so you can walk away with actionable robotically automated processes.

This article has been structured as the following:

• How does Robotic Process Automation eliminate tasks from structured environments?
• Software silos and how they affect your teams
• How to break silos with the implementation of Robotic Process Automation
• How to achieve exceptional results with Robotic Process Automation implementation
• RPA tools: Process Street’s top four RPA tools
• How you can use Process Street’s RPA tool capabilities

Let’s get started!

Note that RPA does not aim to eliminate jobs. It aims to reduce the burden of mundane and repetitive tasks of the existing staff so they can work on more strategic initiatives.
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You may remember from Latin 101 at college that conversiō is the process of turning around, altering, changing, or converting.

And whether you’re now a WeWork-dwelling solopreneur or a newly-hired marketer at an SMB, it’s crucial for your leads to undergo conversiō.

After all, without conversions site visitors aren’t as likely to sign up to newsletters, put an item in a cart, or proceed to the checkout page and order that product or service. Conversions, therefore, are a major contributor to your business’ longevity.

This could be the point where you’re frantically thinking: “I want to secure my business’ longevity! How can I help facilitate conversions? And how can I optimize conversion rates for the better?!”

Slow down.

We’ve got you covered.

During this post we’ll be explaining all things CRO – conversion rate optimization.

First we’ll tackle what CRO is, then we’ll delve into an actionable framework for increasing your conversion rates, and then we’ll provide you with a Process Street-made template which has everything you need to hike those conversion rates up!

All you have to do is read the different sections below:

• What is CRO (conversion rate optimization)?
• A 10-step framework for optimizing conversion rates
• Use Process Street’s template for CRO and website optimization
• The secret 11th step for improved website conversion

Let’s jump straight in.

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Agile is a buzzword. These days, everyone is “doing agile”. Or so they say.

Despite over 90% of senior executives stating agile adoption as a top priority, less than 10% actually consider their firm to be performing with a high level of agility.

As much as people love to wear the badge of agile on their sleeve, there is a great deal of confusion swelling in the dark chasm between the aspiration of agile implementation and reality.

So what is agile?

It’s basically a philosophy of software development that prioritizes iterative development of working software and solutions through cross-collaboration and self-organizing teams.

It’s also an umbrella term for a bunch of development frameworks, but agile doesn’t simply mean kanban or scrum.

Some of the confusion arises when teams equate the agile approach to using an “Agile framework” (usually capitalized).

Frameworks like these are attractive because they’re sold as simplified solutions to difficult project and process management problems.

Sure, these frameworks can be an important part of an agile implementation, but they need more. They need a firm foundation to stand upon.

It’s not enough to simply go through the motions and expect an agile approach to “just work”, especially when transitioning from a more rigid and traditional framework like waterfall.

In order to drive agile success, teams need to adopt agile philosophy. They need to change the way they think about work ownership, management, and their relationship and duty to customers.

Without this vital force, frameworks like scrum and kanban fall flat.

In this article I’ll investigate what it is that separates true agile from the “fake” agile that is often the differentiator between success and failure of a development team. Here’s a quick overview:

• What is fake agile?
• Why fake agile is bad for your teams
• Fake agile vs true agile: How to spot the difference
• Misguided agile leadership
• Understanding true agile
• Questions to ask to help you spot a fake agile team
• The need for agile training
• Tools for agile teams

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