I have a proposal for you.

I can build you a house, complete with walls, windows, doors, and a roof for $350,000.

Do we have a deal?

No. I didn’t think so!

To make a decision like this, you need cold hard facts. You need details, clarity, and proof! You need budgets, breakdowns, and solid guarantees.

That’s exactly how a project stakeholder feels when they receive your project proposal, and to further complicate things, calculating an average proposal win rate is next to impossible.

Project stakeholders will, on average, receive around 50 proposals a week. To choose you out of this huge pile, they need clarity, details, specifics, lateral thinking, and a whole heap of persuasion.

You need to learn the art of how to write a project proposal, to stand any chance of winning their investment, and increasing your proposal success rate.

So, join me in this Process Street post where we will take the following lessons in how to write a project proposal:

• Lesson #1: What a project proposal is
• Lesson #2: What a project proposal reviewer is really looking for
• Lesson #3: The surefire way to succeed with your project proposal
• Lesson #4: The 4 types of project proposal & how to create them (with tips & templates)
• Lesson #5: A little more about Process Street and how it can help your project proposals

If you’re in a hurry, grab this Project Proposal Template Checklist, and catch up with the class later:

Click here to access the Project Proposal Template Checklist!

Now, butts on seats, no talking, and let the class begin!
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This is a guest post by Rimma Sytnik – a Senior Digital Marketer at Reply with 4+ years of experience with email & messenger marketing, on-page SEO, and link building.

Did you know that a nurtured lead can make, on average, a 47% larger purchase than a non-nurtured lead? Did you also know that perceived indifference can cost you 68% of potential customers?

Buyer journeys are becoming more and more complex, not to mention competitive. To stay afloat, you should maximize every interaction you make with each potential customer. You need to focus on building meaningful relationships with your prospects through consistent personal interactions.

That is exactly what sales engagement is and, coincidentally, what this Process Street post is all about.

In this article, we’ll talk about the importance of sales engagement and give you some tips on how to get started. This is a brief overview of what’s to come:

• What sales engagement means (and why you should care)
• Getting started with sales engagement in three easy steps
• Best practices for effective sales engagement
• How to use Process Street to make your sales engagement work

So, let’s dive in!
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I’ve got bad news.

Statistics show that no matter how hard you try, your project is probably going to fail.

To be a little more specific, only 2.5% of companies complete their projects 100% successfully.

“Failure is an unavoidable part of any project process” – ProjectManager, 5 Notorious Failed Projects & What We Can Learn from Them

Yet the cost of project failures is staggering. Failed IT projects alone cost the United States around $150 billion in lost revenue and productivity. And it’s frightening! Failure scares us all.

But, the good news is, failure, and how it affects you and your project’s overall success and profitability is controllable. If you can catch, or even predict, failures early enough, you can execute damage control measures and prevent them from completely derailing your project and its profitability. You can even use them to improve your project.

How can you catch or predict failures early?

By using a project tracker.

A project tracker is a snapshot of your entire project. It gives you and the project team a clear picture of how the project is performing, where the weak spots are, and which areas need the most attention.

Let me explain this concept further by taking you through the following topics in this Process Street article:

• What is a project tracker and what does it do?
• Are project trackers really necessary?
• What happens if you don’t track projects properly (with a real-life example)
• The most effective way to track projects

Let’s get going!
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Click here to visually map and improve your business processes now!

Did you know that visual information is processed 60,000 x faster than text?

This explains why the average person remembers only 20% of what they read but 40% of what they see. This also explains why most companies use a form of visual management to communicate with their employees.

Let’s do a little test to see if people, in general, respond better to visual cues than text.

Look at these two depictions of a traffic light below.

One is a sentence describing a traffic light, and one is an image of a traffic light. Both traffic lights are on different colors:

1. The traffic light is on red.

2.

At the end of this Process Street post, we’ll see which color traffic light you remember! No cheating mind!

In the meantime, I’ll take you through the following topics to explain what visual management is and how you can use it to effectively communicate with your employees:

• What is visual management?
• Why use visual management?
• The 3 golden rules of visual management
• Implementing visual management with Process Street

Ready?
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I’ve just read an article.

The first two lines scared the living crap out of me:

“Dihydrogen Monoxide. It’s everywhere. It’s in our bodies, it’s in our houses, and it’s in the air we breathe.
If we consume too much of it however, we will die.”
– Critical Risk Analysis for Our Daily Lives, Harvard

As a self-confessed worrier, you can imagine what happened when I read that.

Sheer. Blind. Panic.

Until I read the next line;

“Dihydrogen Monoxide is just the chemical name for water”

Yes, I did feel silly. But it did get me thinking.

About ‘risk’ of all things.

Risk is everywhere, in everything we do.

As we’ve just read; there’s a risk of dying from drinking too much water. There’s a risk of catching coronavirus every time we leave the house. Risk of breaking an ankle slipping on spilled coffee at work. Risk of choking on a toast crumb.

So, given that everything in work and life is so risky, how are we able to work and live?!

Through managing the risks we face.

Which brings me to the point of this HAZOP post.

HAZOP (which stands for Hazard and Operability) is a way of managing risks. It’s a technique that identifies potential hazards and functional flaws in new or existing systems and processes.

To get to grips with how to manage risk with HAZOP, we’ll cover the following topics in this Process Street post:

• What is HAZOP?
• How to conduct a HAZOP
• Where did HAZOP come from?
• Who uses HAZOP?
• How to implement HAZOP with Process Street

If you need a little convincing, here’s a sneak peek of the free HAZOP Process that we’ve created. Check it out and get it for free below.

Pour yourself a glass of Dihydrogen Monoxide, and let’s get started!

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This is a guest post by Thornie Longmuir from EssayShark, an on-line academic writing service. Thornie Longmuir is an experienced marketing expert with a deep knowledge of SEO, and over 10 years of experience working within the IT industry. Through his articles, Thornie helps SMEs and entrepreneurs launch their online products or services and teaches them how to promote and sell them. His articles are mainly focused on new and upcoming marketing tools and techniques.

Real estate agents have it tough.

They often work long, anti-social hours, they spend hours driving to and from different locations, they face a lot of rejection, and it can take a long time to become successful.

Virtual Reality (VR) is a new type of technology that can solve these issues.

How?

Let’s find out together by exploring the following topics in this Process Street post:

• What is virtual reality?
• Where did virtual reality come from?
• Virtual reality in real estate
• The benefits of virtual reality real estate

Ready to find out what impact VR is having on the real estate market today?

Let’s go!

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I’ve just finished watching this Netflix docuseries and I can’t stop thinking about it.

The Last Dance.

It’s ten juicy episodes, full of massive egos, incredible basketball, and a banging 90’s hip-hop soundtrack. It’s a fantastically brutal account of how the Chicago Bulls came to dominate the basketball scene throughout the 1990s.

The team was led to countless victories by three key players: Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and Dennis Rodman.

This, coincidentally, demonstrates the concept behind the Pareto chart, and this Process Street post perfectly.

I’ll explain what I mean by this later. First, let me go through what we’ll cover in this post:

• What is a Pareto chart?
• Where did the Pareto chart come from?
• How to read a Pareto chart
• When to use a Pareto chart
• How to create a Pareto chart with Process Street

I’m excited to get started. So, my cagers, let’s take it to the hole!

I admit. I may have googled “basketball terms” for that sentence… what I’m basically saying is; C’mon you lot! Let’s go!

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This is a guest article by Dan Fries – entrepreneur, investor, and writer. Dan shows bootstrapped entrepreneurs and business owners how to prepare for an exit by making better long-term financial decisions.

The only constant thing in business is change.

Whether you are seeking to grow your business or looking to adapt your model to evolving market conditions, implementing strong change management techniques is key to keeping your business agile and sustainable.

Effective change management techniques have many different elements, some of which Process Street has covered before. For instance, checklists for teams can help you to keep a careful track of the development of your team, and these ten templates that optimize creative workflow management can provide your team with the flexibility and creativity they need to stay ahead.

One of the biggest obstacles to applying change management techniques in the contemporary workforce is the rising number of freelance, remote workers.

In this Process Street post, we’ll cover the following seven key principles for managing change within a modern, remote workforce:

• Change management principle #1: Develop your strategic vision
• Change management principle #2: Master the art of communication
• Change management principle #3: Build a business transformation team
• Change management principle #4: Encourage communication with customers
• Change management principle #5: Use a business process management suite
• Change management principle #6: Assess your workforce’s response to change
• Change management principle #7: Get your team together
• Apply change management principles using Process Street

Let’s get stuck in.

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What caused the global financial crash in 2008?

Failures of AIG, Lehman, Merrill, and other major financial firms? Disproportionate risk-taking by banks and lenders? Deregulation within the financial industry? Development of new ways to finance mortgage products? Excessive lending and borrowing in the housing market?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes.

However, these causes only tell half the story behind the financial meltdown that morphed into the biggest global recession since the Great Depression (Covid-19 aside).

What was the root cause? The real reason behind the enormous cost to the economies of many countries and the lost fortunes of millions of families?

A lack of total quality management (TQM).

Paul Moore, former head of group regulatory risk at HBOS (part of the Lloyds Banking Group since 2009), dubbed this crisis as ‘the biggest quality failure of all time.’

Total quality management stems from the belief that mistakes can be avoided if everyone is behind the continual process of detecting, reducing, and eliminating errors.

If organizations from within the financial sector believed in putting quality first, and positioned culture and people above profit margins and structure, the events leading up to the crisis could have been avoided.

Just imagine how different things might have been had the financial sector been managing their quality in a similar way to ISO 9001!

We’ll continue to explore this concept later but, before we do, let’s look at what else we’ll cover in this Process Street post:

• What is total quality management (TQM)?
• Total quality management’s 5 core principles
• TQM’s benefits (& how it might’ve stopped the financial crisis)
• Create and use a TQM framework with Process Street!

Let’s get going!

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What do Sony Ericsson, the UK Passport Agency, MT Gox, and Knights Capital all have in common?

They’ve all suffered massive financial and reputational losses following the mismanagement, or non-existent management, of their new and existing IT services.

• Major mobile phone operator, Sony Ericsson failed to renew one of their certificates and left 32-million people unable to use their mobile phones for a WHOLE DAY.
• The UK Passport Agency failed to test its new computer system and left half a million British people without a passport in the UK.
• Japanese bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, failed to spot several weaknesses in their software systems which enabled hackers to STEAL over 850,000 bitcoins.
• Knight Capital Group, one of America’s largest traders, failed to spot a major bug in their trading software which cost them $440 million.

What could they have done to avoid these embarrassing, not to mention financially crippling, technical disasters?

Implemented an IT service management system, like the ITIL Service Lifecycle.

Which, coincidentally, is what this post is all about.

By the time you’ve finished reading this Process Street article, you will have answers to the following questions:

• What is the ITIL Service Lifecycle?
• What are the 5 stages of the ITIL Service Lifecycle?
• How does Disney use the ITIL Service Lifecycle?
• How do I use the ITIL Service Lifecycle in my business?

Ready? Let’s make a start…

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