Like any employee who works at a young startup, last month I was given a task which threw me far out of my depth.

Even though I’m an audio tech graduate whose final project was video-based, I can’t say that my skills destroying VHS tapes and creating feedback loops translated too well.

Either way, the task was clear:

Create a 5-minute demo video for Process Street showing off most of the features, with screen recordings and slides.

It took me much longer than it should have. But, in the end, I polished it off nicely and got back to doing what I’m better at — writing articles (phew).

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Tracking your work and what you do may sound a little simple (however, we’ve proven before that it’s not necessarily the case). But just imagine having lots of people working on the same project at the same time. That’s when it actually becomes not so easy to track what’s going on.

Online collaboration tools are on the rise with businesses who want to track their employee’s workflow – especially remotely. You might have already seen our previous article comparing Asana and Trello, but instead of comparing the user experience we will look at the features and usability of each app.

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The following is a guest post by Darren Chait, Co-Founder at Hugo. Hugo is the meeting note platform that keeps your team connected with what your customers are thinking and saying. It enables fast-moving teams to make meeting insights shareable and actionable in their existing tools.

As a startup guy, my world is full of buzzwords. We’re disrupting a space, have pivoted, got our minimum valuable product (MVP) out to our total addressable market (TAM) and even had a ‘.ai’ domain name. Undoubtedly, one of my ‘favorites’ is ‘team alignment’.

While team alignment is not a new concept and certainly not unique to fast-growing technology businesses, I’m fascinated with my peers’ obsession with this utopian concept. It’s understandable. Why wouldn’t you want your team moving forward in unison with precise coordination and execution? Why wouldn’t you listen when experts warn that misalignment kills startups?

In this guest post, I’ll share our story and perspective on team alignment and some easy-to-implement solutions to achieve this ideal state with your team.

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I’ve been obsessed with science fiction since I was a young teen, so coding has always appealed to me. I was fascinated by the idea that it is possible to write a program that behaves randomly — to me, that was already deep in the realms of sci-fi!

That obsession fueled my first forays into code, and resulted in a ton of fun bots. For example, this one that describes scary-sounding places by combining words at random, and this one that paints PNGs in block colors.

It’s nothing fancy. I’m hardly a master programmer, and you don’t have to be either. With a basic grasp of coding and APIs, you can create genuinely useful software for fun and profit. In this tutorial, we’ll look at creating a Telegram bot from scratch.

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Do you recognize this mission statement?

To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

That’s Google‘s. What about this one?

To accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible.

Of course, it’s Tesla.

And finally, how about this?

It’s our responsibility to simplify cutting-edge products and continue to progressively promote and future-proof manufactured solutions, all while striving for technical leadership.

I made that one up! Awful, isn’t it? But the thing is, it almost sounds feasible.

Company mission statements can act as strong guidelines that help promote an attitude and culture that works towards your company’s goals. Or, they can mean so little that you might as well have generated them using a joke tool like this.

So, what goes into a great mission statement?

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Born in 1970, sales operations was originally described as “all the nasty number things that you don’t want to do, but need to do to make a great sales force”.

Sales is moving from paper rolodexes into the world of AI, automation and cloud computing. With it comes more nasty number things than ever before, making operations staff a vital part of the sales team.

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According to the American Management Association, one-quarter of workers seem to avoid responsibility on the job on average, and 21% of companies believe that the figure is as high as 30-50%. From these stats, it’s clear that low employee accountability is wasting company money on a massive scale.

At the same time, almost two thirds of employees believe their company does not have a strong culture. The link between these two factors is strong, argues management consultant and author Roger Connors. Connors blends The Wizard of Oz with now-influential writings on employee accountability in a series of best-selling leadership books including The Oz Principle and Change the Culture, Change the Game. In the latter, he says:

“Our experience proves that accountability, done the right way, produces greater transparency and openness, enhanced teamwork and trust, effective communication and dialogue, thorough execution and follow-through, sharper clarity, and a tighter focus on results. Accountability should be the strongest thread that runs through the complex fabric of any organization” — Roger Connors, Change the Culture, Change the Game

To paraphrase Connor, a business’ employee accountability depends on leaders creating a transparent culture where responsibility is clear, transparent, and owned. One way to bring clarity to the way your business operates is to use standardized processes and leverage technology that helps track activity, assign tasks, and facilitate hand-offs.

In this article, we’ll go through the links between processes, accountability and company culture, and give you tips on how to improve your business in those areas. But first, let’s look closely at the ties between accountability and culture.

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As an analyst, you spend your day designing your organization’s processes, measuring their performance and ironing out the fine details. You focus on the “how”. You’re very good at it, but maybe you’re more interested in the “what”? If you want to move past the nitty-gritty of processes and devise end-to-end models and strategies instead, then you’re looking make the leap to business architect.

The necessity of architects is a byproduct of digital transformation.

“There’s a growing need for talented pros who can reduce complexity, establish solid technology processes and ensure tech’s used consistently across business units and functional areas.” — Sharon Florentine, CIO

What is a business architect?

As a business architect, you will design the structure of the business as a whole by looking broadly at systems design and requirements. Your aim is to improve the business’ operations in line with goals and strategy. Architects do this by theorizing and testing the components of a system (the technology, the flow of work, the deliverables) and overseeing the implementation of the systems by someone in a business analyst role.

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Only 9% of information security professional believe their organization has effective incident response processes. The biggest issue? Well, you’re reading Process Street so you probably guessed it: the lack of standardization. Almost half of the respondents to the SANS Incident Response Survey said that their lack of a formal incident response procedure was holding them back and causing security issues.

It’s not even like preparing for serious security incidents is wasted time or that you’d be going overboard with precautions; 61% of companies have experienced critical incidents in the last two years — that includes data breaches, unauthorized access, and denial of service attacks.

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Staring at the tiny LCD progress bar of the vending machine in a lobby, I realize nothing pisses us off more than indefinite waiting times. Especially people waiting for their coffee, their cheap flight comparisons, or their computer to finish doing whatever it’s doing.

Since the creation of software, there has always been loading times. An early example comes from Bob Stahl’s way-ahead-of-its time article in February 1986’s Computerworld.

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