Understanding quality and seeking to improve it is arguably the core purpose behind undertaking process improvements.

But where did this philosophy of process improvement come from?

One key person is William Edwards Deming – sometimes referred to as Edward W. Deming. He’s principally a statistician, but one could even call him a philosopher of science.

Deming’s goal was to reapply the scientific method to business processes, and has left us with two main variants of his thinking: PDSA and PDCA.

In this article we’ll outline:

• What the Deming cycle is, with its history
• How to apply the Deming cycle to improve your business processes
• The important distinction between PDSA and PDCA
• How PDSA is employed in the medical field

Deming’s approach is not just about improving processes, but about improving a whole business.

In a recent meta-study from the British Medical Journal, researchers found only 2 out of 73 studies had applied PDSA in a way which fully met criteria. Commenting:

To progress the development of the science of improvement, a greater understanding of the use of improvement methods, including PDSA, is essential to draw reliable conclusions about their effectiveness.

And that’s why we’re writing this article!

Continue Reading

Whether you’re starting a business or trying to improve an existing one, you have to understand how things are going to get done.

What tasks do you need to do? Who needs to do them? What are the best ways to approach these tasks?

Working out how these questions can be answered is the first step toward systemizing your business. The creation of processes and workflows will define the way in which your day to day activities function.

One popular approach to this is the creation of standard operating procedures. The simple definition provided by IBM for standard operating procedures is:

…a set of instructions that describes all the relevant steps and activities of a process or procedure.

Simple.

But how do we create these SOPs? What we need are standard operating procedures for creating standard operating procedures. And that’s what we’re going to give you.

We’ll look at:

• How to create a set of standard operating procedures
• Some advanced techniques for improving your SOPs
• Why Process Street is a useful tool for both mapping and following your standard operating procedures

Read through these sections to get clued up:

• Use Process Street to manage your standard operating procedures
• Writing standard operating procedures: a quick how-to guide
• Step 1: Understand how you are going to present your SOPs
• Step 2: Gather the relevant stakeholders
• Step 3: Work out your purpose
• Step 4: Determine the structure of your SOP
• Step 5: Prepare the scope of the procedure
• Step 6: Use a consistent style
• Step 7: Use correct notation, if applicable
• Step 8: Work out all the necessary steps of the process
• Step 9: Try to assess potential problems in the process
• Step 10: Determine metrics against which the SOPs can be judged
• Step 11: Test the process
• Step 12: Send the process to superiors
• Step 13: Clarify the method of optimizing the process
• Step 14: Run a risk assessment on your process
• Step 15: Consider creating a flow diagram
• Step 16: Finalize and implement the SOPs
• Examples of Process Street’s fully-written and usable SOPs
• Ensure your SOPs adhere to ISO standards

Continue Reading

Bonus Material: The Ultimate Guide to Business Process Automation

Writing standard operating procedures is a cumbersome task but a serious requirement for businesses the world over.

In many industries it is important to have documentation which shows you have been adhering to ISO guidelines. This can help you clinch major clients and demonstrate your professionalism.

However, when you’re starting out with your first SOPs it can be difficult to know where to begin.

That’s why we’ve pulled together a range of the best free SOP templates for you to work from.

Simply go through the available SOPs below and pick out the one best suited to your needs. We’ve included Microsoft Word templates and Process Street ones too. You’ll also find a guide for writing SOPs to help you get started.

Given that it can be intimidating writing standard operating procedures, we have provided a number of industry-specific examples plus suggestions for how you can pull together basic SOPs even if they’re not documented according to ISO standards.

Read through the following sections to get completely clued up:

• Use Process Street to manage your standard operating procedures
• Our Process Street SOP template for creating procedures
• Writing standard operating procedures in 16 steps
• Using Process Street for your SOPs
• Process Street SOP templates for every industry and sector
• Use one of these Word templates to build your SOPs from
• More NHS standard operating procedure templates
• Risk assessment templates to review your procedures
• Pick the right template and get started

Let’s dive in.

Continue Reading

This is a guest article by Alexa Lemzy – customer support manager and blog author at TextMagic, a bulk SMS solution for business. She helps businesses take advantage of mobile and spends hours reading tons of content about customer retention and business workflows.

Modern consumers are used to having the option to contact businesses on social media and other public forums as well as traditional contact methods. What’s more, customers are sharing their opinions and interactions across the internet and social media more than ever. Today, customer service is a major part of your brand image.

This has blurred the lines between marketing and customer service. Consumers want your business to be consistent from marketing and sales to customer support.

Great customer service is also an effective form of marketing, keeping existing users loyal and attracting new leads.

Strengthening the relationship between marketing and customer service can have a big impact on customer satisfaction. By creating processes for collaboration and feedback, you can increase retention while attracting new clients.

In this article for Process Street, we’re going to look at a series of factors which you have to get right to provide a unified marketing and customer service strategy:

• Customer service reps act as brand ambassadors
• Bring customer support into your social media strategy
• Gain product marketing insights from customer service integration
• Excellent customer service is an underrated marketing channel
• Holistic approaches to customer interactions means consistent communication
• Keep customer service in the loop with marketing promotions
• Better inform your audience personas
• Get content ideas and inspiration direct from customer needs
• Understand whether you’re setting the right expectations
• Improve your customer service strategy with Process Street

Continue Reading

This is a guest post from Diane H. Wong; a web developer who specialises in marketing and enjoys sharing her knowledge with others. She has her own column at Do My Writing.

The primary goal of every business is revenue. It’s therefore reasonable to say that the goal of every website is more conversions, leads, sales, or whatever action you want your visitors to take.

To get more action from your visitors, you need to make frequent changes aimed at increasing the effectiveness of your website and all its elements.

It’s normal to be wary of making changes so you don’t switch the wrong button and hurt your website more instead.

Good news is, there are proven ways to play safe and still grow. Conversion optimization has its safe playing too that is, those practices that have been tested and proven to work generally.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• Our free conversion rate and website optimization process template
• Actionable ways to optimize your website for increased conversion rate
• Basic conversion rate optimization mistakes to avoid
• 2 bonus marketing strategies to increase your conversion rate
• Increase your conversion rate with Process Street

Continue Reading

This is a guest post from Mile Živković, a content writer and work-life balance expert at Chanty – a simple and AI-powered Slack alternative. When Mile isn’t busy writing epic posts on productivity, work-life balance and time management for Chanty blog, he’s probably driving somewhere. His hobbies include cars (huge fan of Alfa Romeo), photography and collecting pocket knives. You can catch him on LinkedIn.

What do you do when there’s work to be done, email communication simply doesn’t cut it anymore and tapping your colleagues on the shoulder is not the ideal solution for communicating in the office?

You use a chat app to collaborate with your team.

With email becoming clunky and outdated and the need for rapid, instant communication at work, the market for team chat apps is ever-growing.

However, with so many options out there, making the right choice can seem impossible. Pricing, the number of users, integrations, searchable history, these are all elements to consider when making a choice for your team.

To make the process a bit easier, we’ve singled out some of the best team chat apps out there with our honest feedback. These are some of the best workplace chat apps out there and we hope we’ll make it easier on you to make a good choice. Let’s dig in!

Team chat apps: The quicklinks!

• Slack
• Chanty
• Typetalk
• Flock
• Fleep
• Microsoft Teams
• Ryver
• Glip
• Process Street

Continue Reading

Process Street is a 100% remote company. We have been from day one.

But our CEO Vinay Patankar has been remote longer than that. Process Street is Vinay’s third remote company, meaning 10 years of running companies remotely.

At the time of writing, we have around 50 employees across multiple continents and it’s working so well for us that we’ve just sealed our Series A funding round from Accel, Atlassian, and Salesforce Ventures.

We thought now would be a good time to do a deep dive into Vinay’s thoughts on remote work and why his experience of it has kept him remote.

For this Process Street article, we sat down with Vinay to ask him 4 key questions, which we’ve provided links to below:

• Were you distributed from day one?
• How many employees do you have and in how many countries?
• What are the biggest challenges of having a distributed team?
• What are the biggest advantages?

Vinay has also produced a short video series of key things to learn when working in or running a remote team. You can check these videos out in the section below: Continue Reading

🚨If you’re on the front lines fighting COVID-19 and want to use these processes to help your facility, please contact us and we will set you up with a free account*🚨
In the wake of challenges at the scale of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 it is vital that we share as much knowledge as possible to help each other prepare for the problems we face and fight them effectively when they arrive.

This article will compile the procedures outlined in the Handbook of COVID-19 Prevention and Treatment (2020) produced by The First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine (FAHZU).

FAHZU had significant success in tackling the spread of coronavirus within its hospital while seeing successful outcomes and has – in association with the Jack Ma Foundation, AliHealth, Alibaba Cloud, and other partners – released the above handbook to guide hospitals and medical centers around the world, and inform them of effective best practices to fight the coming challenge.

The handbook contains many materials including policies, charts, and imaging examples. In this Process Street article, however, we’ll focus on the process-aligned elements of the guide.

Some of the items we have extracted from the handbook function as linear procedures to guide action, others as processes to guide the setup or auditing of systems.

Each process template will be embedded below with a description. The article will be structured as follows:

• How to use these COVID-19 templates
• Handbook of COVID-19 Prevention and Treatment from FAHZU (2020)
• 16 COVID-19 procedure templates to help hospitals and medical centers fight coronavirus
• How to use Process Street for healthcare providers

Process Street COVID-19 procedure templates quicklinks

The quicklinks to each template are here:

• COVID-19 Procedure: Isolation Area Management
• COVID-19 Procedure: Disinfection Procedures for COVID-19 Isolation Ward Area
• COVID-19 Procedure: Lung Transplantation Pre-Transplantation Assessment
• COVID-19 Procedure: Nursing Care During Treatment (ALSS)
• COVID-19 Procedure: Protocol for Donning and Removing PPE
• COVID-19 Procedure: Staff Management (Workflow and Health)
• COVID-19 Procedure: Daily Management and Monitoring of ECMO Audit
• COVID-19 Procedure: Digital Support for Epidemic Prevention and Control
• COVID-19 Procedure: Discharge Standards and Follow-up Plan for COVID-19 Patients
• COVID-19 Procedure: Disinfection of COVID-19 Related Reusable Medical Devices
• COVID-19 Procedure: Disinfection Procedures for Infectious Fabrics of Suspected or Confirmed Patients
• COVID-19 Procedure: Disposal Procedures for COVID-19 Related Medical Waste
• COVID-19 Procedure: Disposal Procedures for Spills of COVID-19 Patient Blood/Fluids
• COVID-19 Procedure: Procedures for Handling Bodies of Deceased Suspected or Confirmed Patients
• COVID-19 Procedure: Procedures for Taking Remedial Actions against Occupational Exposure to COVID-19
• COVID-19 Procedure: Surgical Operations for Suspected or Confirmed Patients

Continue Reading

The humble safety inspector is one of the forgotten heroes of our modern age.

I know, I know, you get it all the time. People must be buying you drinks non-stop.

In the UK, for instance, there has been an 84% decrease in the number of fatal injuries by employees at work.

In 1974, Britain saw almost 700 people die at work. Now only around 100 die each year at work. That’s about 600 fewer deaths.

Map that back to 1974 and account for a fairly consistent downward trend and we can determine that about 13,500 people didn’t die thanks to improved workplace safety. And that’s just the UK!

Those lives are on you, safety inspectors.

To show our appreciation, we’re providing a whole bunch of safety inspection checklists – from the ones you expect to the ones you don’t.

In this Process Street article, we’re gonna cover:

• What is a safety inspection?
• Why use a safety inspection checklist?
• Over 40 safety inspection checklists to use today
• How to use Process Street for safety inspections

Continue Reading

How do you know whether you’re going to be successful or not with a new business or product?

Well, you’ll probably look to pour your heart and soul into it. You’ll work hard to make it the best product or service you can. You’ll endeavor to make each and every customer happy.

And well done to you for that.

But you’re not the only one who impacts on whether your efforts are successful.

It’s no secret that one of the hardest parts of business is the competitive nature of the market.

What your competition looks like, how it’s constructed, and what opportunities their weaknesses provide you, are crucial factors which can determine your success.

This is where you’ll need to do some kind of competitive position analysis.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at a framework which is designed to help you understand your competition called Porter’s Five Forces. We’ll cover:

• What is Porter’s Five Forces Model?
• Porter’s Five Forces – Force 1: Threat of new entrants
• Porter’s Five Forces – Force 2: Threat of substitutes
• Porter’s Five Forces – Force 3: Bargaining power of customers
• Porter’s Five Forces – Force 4: Bargaining power of suppliers
• Porter’s Five Forces – Force 5: Competitive rivalry
• Resolving the 5 Forces: An Economic Moat

Continue Reading