How to Use a Project Tracker to Keep Projects Profitable

Amanda Greenwood July 27, 2020

Business, Management, Productivity, Project Management

✅ Bonus material: Project Management Template + Checklist to keep on top of your projects

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:

Let’s get going!
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Visual Management: How to Communicate Effectively with Your Workforce

Amanda Greenwood July 13, 2020

Business, Management, Productivity

visual-management

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. visual-management

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:

Ready?
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HAZOP: The Cornerstone of Effective Risk Management

Amanda Greenwood July 6, 2020

Business Processes, Management, Manufacturing

HAZOP

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:

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!

How to Reach More Customers with Virtual Reality Real Estate

Amanda Greenwood July 2, 2020

Marketing, Real Estate, Software, Technology

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:

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

Let’s go!

The Pareto Chart: How to Solve Problems & Make Informed Decisions

Amanda Greenwood June 26, 2020

Productivity, Quality Control

Pareto-chart

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:

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!

How to Apply 7 Change Management Principles to Your Remote Workforce

Amanda Greenwood June 18, 2020

Management, Processes

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:

Let’s get stuck in.

Total Quality Management (TQM): Improve Processes & Keep Customers Happy

Amanda Greenwood June 15, 2020

Management, Manufacturing, Quality Control

TQM-total-quality-management

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:

Let’s get going!

The Secret to IT Service Management: The ITIL Service Lifecycle

Amanda Greenwood May 8, 2020

IT, Quality Control, Technology

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:

Ready? Let’s make a start…

Grant Writing: How to Win Every Time (8 Free Checklists)

Amanda Greenwood April 15, 2020

Business Processes, Checklists, Writing

What’s the difference between a winning grant proposal and a losing one?

Grant writing.

Grant funding today is more difficult to obtain than ever before. A recent National Institute of Health (NIH) report showed that out of 50,000 grant applications, only 10,000 were given funding. That’s only 19%, which has fallen from 33% in the last 15 years.

Why?

A lack of Government funding, fierce competition, and poor grant writing skills.

We can’t do anything about the Government funds. We can do little about fierce competition. We can, however, do a lot about poor grant writing skills.

From completing complex grant applications to writing tip-top proposals, we’ve created the following eight templates to hone your grant writing skills.

If you’re in a hurry, go ahead! Click on the links below to jump straight in!

Curious about what these templates looks like? Check out the Proposal Template embedded below.

Scroll down for more information on each template of our grant writing template pack.

In addition to introducing our grant writing templates, I’ll be taking you behind the grant writing scenes, covering the following topics:

Ready? Let’s start with the basics…

Review Management: How to Win Business and Influence Customers

Amanda Greenwood March 18, 2020

Checklists, Customer Success, Marketing, Processes

“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:

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:

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!