Processes are all the rage right now, and we’re very pleased to be leading the charge in making processes agile and actionable for organizations of all shapes and sizes.

We’ve written countless pieces about creating a process, writing standard operating procedures, or building business systems.

But sometimes we’re guilty of assuming that having a process automatically makes something organized. It doesn’t.

If you’re a solopreneur or working in a startup, managing processes is fairly easy. You have a limited number and you can easily scroll through to find the one you need when you need it.

But what about large organizations? Companies where people on different teams are in different countries? Businesses where different departments speak and operate in different languages?

How can we manage processes on such a large scale, and what does that tell us about managing processes for small businesses looking to scale?

This is where a process library comes in.

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

• What is a process library?
• Why you should build a process library for your business
• Determine your information architecture before building your library
• How you can build a process library in Process Street
• Harnessing the power of Process Street’s templates!

Or, if you’ve just come for the templates, grab them below:

• Process Library Checklist
• The Process for Optimizing a Process

Let’s get started!

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Modern business is a fast paced game and there are always new ways you can discover to improve your operations and output.

One of the easiest and simplest ways to improve the day to day running of your business is to supply your team with better tools.

With the array of modern SaaS products available on the market there are specialized tools for a host of use cases.

We use Close.io for our sales team, Intercom for customer support, and Process Street for our business process management throughout the company.

But if you’re a department within a larger company, or a team within a department, how do you convince top management and finance to sign off on a new software product to boost your team’s performance?

In this article, we’re going to give you a step by step guide of how to make that happen. Including:

• What is a purchase requisition?
• The difficulty of bureaucracy
• 3 important factors to convince finance
• How to write a proposal for a new software purchase requisition
• Create or improve a purchase requisition process

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Writing perfect processes is a dream all Process Street users share.

But a perfect process isn’t necessarily a process where all the steps work perfectly all the way through.

In real life, processes come up against external forces and unforeseen circumstances. A perfect process doesn’t have to predict all these external influences in advance; it needs to be able to adapt to them in real time as they arise.

Fortunately, there’s a concept for this: Process Flexibility.

Process flexibility helps keep our processes working even when everything else is going wrong.

In this article, we’re going to outline what process flexibility is and the main approaches to managing it:

• What is process flexibility?
• What are the main approaches to process flexibility?
• Flexibility by design
• Flexibility by deviation
• Flexibility by underspecification
• Flexibility by change
• How Process Street is designed for agility

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We now have the world in our pockets. Our TVs are smart. Our cars soon to be driverless.

We live in the tech futures of 1970s futurists, or at least partly.

Along with predictions of technological development came ideas of utopias and dystopias. The technology we craft creates new use cases, opportunities, and dangers. The tech and its application cannot be separated.

This brings us to larger questions of how we should employ technology, what risks new tech may bring, and what the arrival of these new futures means to us as humans on our little ball of dirt.

This is the sphere of digital ethics.

Process Street was invited to the inaugural World Ethical Data Forum, and it has set our minds rolling over some of these questions and the discussions of what may lie ahead.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• What is digital ethics?
• 3 current hot topics in digital ethics
• 3 challenges discussed at the World Ethical Data Forum
• What to look out for in the future of digital ethics

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Here at Process Street, we’re always talking about the importance of workflows.

Workflows help you define what work you do and the order in which you do it.

According to the Powering Productivity report from Planview, poor processes and workflows are the number 1 cause of inefficiencies in organizations. Plus, the Chaos Theory report from Projectplace revealed project managers lost 2 hours 45 minutes each week due to poor workflows.

When you document your workflows and improve them, you optimize your work. This results in better work done more quickly.

It’s one of the simplest ways to improve the performance of your own work, or that of an organization. From basic workflows with only a couple of steps to company wide workflows with multiple stakeholders and variables.

This principle remains true in countless use cases and industries but is most powerful in areas where work benefits from standardized practices.

This brings us to an area of business where standardization is a true sign of quality: accounting.

Effective accounting practices require a strong understanding of how information flows throughout your business.

In this article, we’re going to look at:

• What is the accounting cycle?
• What is a workflow?
• How to construct processes for your accounting activities
• 11 accounting processes you can try today

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We always seem to be caught up in a never-ending mission to make our businesses better.

You have to ride out crises, fight through external problems, and still improve your performance week on week, quarter on quarter, year on year.

So how do we approach this improvement to get the most from it?

The key is about making improvement part of the daily process.

This approach falls under the umbrella of continuous improvement; what Toyota call Kaizen.

This is the art of taking a million steps forward. Compounding every success and safeguarding against every failure.

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

• Why Kaizen is important
• What are the other Toyota Production System concepts?
• Things to consider when implementing Kaizen.
• How Samsung use Kaizen selectively to optimize production

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There are so many layers to a modern support team.

Some companies will have countless reps working hard each day to champion the customer and empower them to do what they need to do.

On top of that, you might have members of the support team who double up as part of the product design team; looking for niche use cases or areas where customers don’t find the product intuitive.

Support teams may even have specialized roles which look to help customers achieve certain business goals, rather than just guidance with the software.

In this Process Street article, we’re going to look at one of the unsung specialists of the modern age: the customer support engineer.

With the rise of SaaS products particularly, the customer support engineer has become a meeting point for customers, sales, design, and development.

A Jack or Jill of all trades!

We’re going to explore exactly what a customer support engineer is, what they do, and when or why you might need one!

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Marketing is such a vital part of how we do business. So many of us do marketing-related roles, yet how many of us have really read up on the fundamentals? Not enough.

That’s why we’re going to look at some texts from across the marketing field which can help sure up our knowledge.

From advertising to PR, SEO to content, it’s all related.

As a follow up to our wonderfully received article cataloguing the 45 best sales books, we’ve decided to break down the world of marketing literature for you too!

We have some old classics like Scientific Advertising, some newer classics like Blue Ocean Strategy, and a number of this year’s must reads!

Some of these books will put you inside the mind of the customer. Others will transport you into the realm of strategy. Many of the books listed will go super specific into technical approaches.

There’s something for everyone!

Check out our Process Street list of the 31 best marketing books below!

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Finding ways to improve processes within your organization can be tough.

There always seems to be so many things to measure and so many variables to consider.

Where do you start? How do you determine what’s good? Who takes responsibility for improvement?

Fortunately, you don’t have to go in blind.

There are loads of approaches you can take to process improvement, but one of the key techniques used by some of the world’s top companies is Six Sigma.

The Six Sigma school of thought is all about finding the right focus and tightening up processes around that goal. The end result should be the reduction of defects from a process. This saves resources, time, effort, and most of all money!

In this Process Street article, we’re going to give you an intro into Six Sigma while linking off to resources for you to explore deeper.

We’ll investigate the key Six Sigma principles which can shape and direct process improvement in your business.

The core Six Sigma principles

The 7 key Six Sigma principles we’ll cover are:

• Always focus on the customer
• Understand how work really happens
• Make your processes flow smoothly
• Reduce waste and concentrate on value
• Stop defects through removing variation
• Get buy-in from the team through collaboration
• Make your efforts systematic and scientific

You could categorize these as lean Six Sigma if you want to as well.

Given the evolving nature of the different schools of business process improvement, there will always likely be some disagreement over what the specific principles are.

For this reason, I feel it’s important to include the various competing principles even if some other lists might look at only 5 or 6 principles.

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As you’ll have noticed when you phone call centers, visit the bank, or deal with the government in any capacity, bureaucracy can make organizations slow and frustrating to deal with.

Endless forms and complex layers of approval impact a company’s services along with the morale of its employees. It can leave organizations unable to adapt to new market pressures or external threats.

The UK Home Office, during the Windrush Scandal, ended up wrongly deporting many people who came to Britain after the Second World War from the Caribbean. It was exposed that these people were being wrongly deported yet deportations and other negative effects continued, as illustrated by The Guardian. The organization failed to respond adequately, and a scandal was born.

Despite all this, large organizations in our society – whether they’re governments or big business – aren’t just going to go away. Instead they need to find ways to adapt and improve while retaining the benefits which pushed them to develop complex bureaucratic structures in the first place.

The big question is: how do you manage operations within a bureaucratic organization so that it can run with the agility of a startup?

In this Process Street article, we’ll explore:

• When, how, and why bureaucratic organizations experience slow movement
• The failures of large organizations to achieve efficiency
• 4 key examples of big bodies trying to break free from the problem
• Our important takeaways for how you can maintain agility and efficiency in a large organization

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