The other day, my household experienced one of the great tragedies of the home delivery era: our grocery delivery was canceled.

You know what that means. I had to go to the grocery store. Like, physically, in person, go inside the grocery store.

I survived, but phew. Let’s just say there were a few close calls.

All in all, though, it was a successful trip. I picked up a couple of prescriptions, had an eye exam, switched the pet insurance, got some advice about first-time homeownership, and even remembered to get dinner fixins. I would’ve gotten my oil changed and tires rotated, too, but I don’t have a car so… Yeah. I didn’t do that.

This is what economies of scope look like. Economies of scope are when it’s more cost-effective to produce related items together than it is to produce them individually. In the 21st century economy, it’s also an increasingly familiar model as brands continue to expand their offerings to consumers.

As a consumer, this model is great. We don’t have to run around all over the place to take care of all our responsibilities. For companies, it’s not a bad model, either.

Economies of scope – offering all of these services under one roof – companies are actually spending less by offering more.

But wait – how does that work?

Well, I’ll tell you:

• What do we mean by economies of scope?
• Economies of scope: Pros and cons
• Economies of scope vs economies of scale
• Economies of scope in action
• If all your friends jumped off a bridge…

Welcome to Process Street! Right this way, please.
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Who resolved to read more this year? ✋

Who actually has?

Let’s be honest: you’re never actually going to make it through that folder of bookmarked articles you’ve been collecting since last year. Hey – not judging. I’ve been cultivating my own To Be Read monolith for months.

So what’s the deal? How do you catch up with all those industry insights, actionable advice articles, and entrepreneurial retrospectives when there never seems to be any time to, y’know, read?

Simple: let us read them for you.

Introducing Tech Out Loud – the coolest podcast around bringing those must-read articles directly into your waiting ears.
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There are plenty of great quotes from inspirational leaders that perfectly sum up the importance of workforce planning, but in my mind, none of them quite capture it like this one:

“Making a plan without the right tools is like making spaghetti without a pot.” – Kris Hughes, Content Strategy Consultant

You are absolutely not going to be making any spaghetti without a pot, or at least a pot-like vessel that will hold boiling water in a way so as not to burn the crap out of your hands in the process. When it comes to workforce planning, the spaghetti is your business and the pot…

Okay. I took the simile too far. You get the picture: if your business doesn’t have the right people in the right place, you got nothing.

Think beyond that: if the right people don’t stay or aren’t being utilized properly, you still don’t have a pot to… make spaghetti in.

There is a lot out there about workforce planning, and by a lot I mean, a frickin lot. It’s my job to do research and even I got a little dizzy trying to sort through all the different takes on what is or isn’t or could be/might be the best way to manage your workforce.

This post aims to simplify all that. I’ll cover the foundations of workforce planning, specific considerations for remote work, and examine some common methods for finding the right approach for your organization.

This Process Street post is designed so you can jump straight to the info you need to know, so feel free to skip ahead.

• Workforce planning foundations
• Challenges for remote workforce planning
• Future-back planning process
• Recruit, retain, reinforce
• Workforce management tools

Let’s get planning!
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This is a guest post by Brian Skewes, a technologist into deconstruction. Over two decades of self-employment, he has accumulated a wealth of inadvertent real-world lessons related to building, running, and preserving a small company.

There’s a phrase that’s become popular in web analytics, digital marketing, and business consultancy in the last few years: data is everything.

There’s a lot to recommend it. It’s short, snappy, and captures the importance of data to the way in which we do business today. Whether you are building organic links or in the process of drafting an employee development plan, the path to success runs right through a big ‘ol pile of numbers.

Unfortunately, there’s more to numbers than just numbers.

This is due to the nature of data itself. The problem with relying on numbers and nothing else is that no matter how impressive it is, it also remains inscrutable, incomprehensible, or simply boring for the majority of people. Unless your audience is composed entirely of the type of person who can instantly visualize columns of figures, you are going to need to provide some context for the ever-so-impressive stats.

This is where the concept of storytelling comes in.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at how you can go beyond data acquisition, compilation, and presentation. We’ll show you how to make your data come alive through the magic of storytelling.

• Purposeful data, the Enlightenment, and Single Source of Truth
• Building the framework for your data story
• What’s the story behind your data?
• The happily ever after

Once upon a time…
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This is a guest post by Brayn Wills, the current Knowledge Management Specialist at ProProfs knowledge base. He is responsible for creating unique and relevant content on the knowledge base and keeping track of the latest developments in the realm of knowledge management. In his free time, he is either reading a new book or exploring offbeat destinations.

When a crisis strikes, it brings along daunting challenges that require businesses to reevaluate their strategies. One such significant challenge is customer churn. It can impact a business drastically if left unchecked.

Statistics show that, on average, most companies experience a monthly churn rate of 7.5%. If left unchecked, this can be catastrophic for a company’s bottom line.

A rapidly shrinking customer base means reduced profits that can have a severe impact on an organization, especially during a crisis. What’s more, crisis situations tend to exacerbate the root causes of churn, meaning businesses need to be extra responsive and attentive to their customers during these times.

While you cannot prevent all customers from leaving your company, you certainly can take concrete steps to keep customer churn in control.

In this post for Process Street, I will cover:

• What is customer attrition?
• Customer expectations and mindset during a crisis
• 6 Effective ways to reduce customer attrition
• How to provide extra value to customers during a crisis
• Move beyond promotion to meet customer expectations
• Customer retention solutions with Process Street

Read on to uncover the pragmatic ways to reduce customer churn during a crisis by understanding and providing value to your customers.
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This is a guest post by Gabe Nelson. Gabe is a content specialist with over 7 years of experience, currently working with Semaphoreci.com. He has a passion for programming and has written hundreds of content pieces in numerous niches. Currently, he lives in Missouri with his wife and kids.

Let’s face it: the longer your software takes to get from ideation to iteration, the more irrelevant it becomes.

With the innovation of new paradigms and working methods to meet the right here/right now demands of consumers in a hyper-connected world, your developers need workflows that will deliver your software into production environments the second they’re able to.

The millisecond micro nanosecond, even.

Managing your software deployment processes and procedures to not just keep up with, but stay ahead of, the competition can seem like a Sisyphean task, but it doesn’t have to be.

Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) together constitute the light at the end of a software developer’s tunnel. No doubt that’s why implementation is commonly described in terms of “pipelines” – CI/CD takes you straight through the problems.

More specifically, CI/CD pipelines make it easy for developers to deploy working code into functional and error-free production environments. That’s because these workflows do a great job of automating entire pipelines of your team’s code releases and updates. This frees up developers to create new features and processes instead of spending hours debugging faulty code.

In this Process Street guest post, I’ll do a quick walkthrough of the basics of CI/CD, then dive into how CI/CD can generate more value for and quicken your software deployment.

• What is CI/CD?
• Commit to the build
• Automate testing throughout deployment cycle
• Initiate software deployment
• Documenting your deployment life cycle
• The value of CI/CD pipelines in software deployment

Read on…
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Everyone knows that unicorns don’t exist.

Or do they?

The latest findings have reported that there are now over 600 unicorns thriving in the wild. Experts in the field often cite unicorns’ unique capacity for managing hyper growth that’s allowed them to experience such a surge of success.

However, unicorns still face a perilous existence: two-thirds of unicorns never reach full maturity. This is partly due to a lack of sustainable resources in their environment, but with valuations of $1 billion or more, they are also highly coveted by collectors.

Say you want to raise a gangly young foal into a noble specimen of unicorn-ness. Where do you start? How do you make sure your prospective unicorn makes it into that elite one-third of successful hopefuls?

Fortunately for you, Process Street knows a thing or two about unicorn rearing and maintenance, and this post will cover the basic strategies of managing hyper growth for the best possible outcome: a fully matured unicorn.

Peruse the following chapters for the best advice we have to give:

• What makes a unicorn a unicorn?
• What is hyper growth?
• The 3 stages of hyper growth
• 4 strategies for managing hyper growth well

Giddy-up! (Last horse reference, I promise.)
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Project management requires a wide spectrum of skills, organizational abilities, and attention to detail to make sure everything moves forward according to plan. A good project manager is able to keep all the plates spinning in sync while making it appear effortless at the same time.

However, the more plates you have spinning at once, the harder this is to accomplish. Critical path method (CPM) is one of the tools project managers can use to create a comprehensive plan and organize complex projects with many moving parts.

In this Process Street post, I’ll take you through the CPM process step-by-step, and then show you how our templates and checklists can take some of the stress out of your project management.

Read on, or feel free to skip ahead:

• Project management 101
• What is critical path method?
• Steps to effectively (and easily) use the critical path method
• Project management with Process Street

Let’s jump in!
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You’re waiting for the train on your way to work. You’ve got a long day ahead, and don’t feel like swinging by the grocery store afterward. Fortunately, there’s a supermarket kiosk on the platform. You scan the barcodes with your phone and arrange for your food to be delivered when you get home.

As you cross the street to your office building, the strap of your computer bag finally breaks. You don’t have time to run out and get a new one, but that’s okay. Once you’re in your office, you log on to the company’s website, put on the augmented reality headset, and virtually try on different bags.

At lunch, you head down to your usual restaurant. The AI in the touch-screen kiosk suggests sandwiches you might like based on your order history, then uses facial recognition to complete the order and charge your account.

This is phygital marketing – all made possible by advances in augmented reality (AR).

The global AR and virtual reality (VR) markets are expected to reach 18.8 billion USD by the end of 2020 – over 78% growth from spending in 2019. By 2025, that growth is only expected to increase exponentially.

With the sophistication of AR/VR tech, more companies are incorporating it into their campaigns – and more consumers are expecting it.

In this Process Street post, we’ll take an in-depth look at the what and why of phygital marketing, but you can also skip ahead to one of the following sections:

• Phygital isn’t a real word… Is it?
• Living in a phygital world: Nintendo, Porsche, and Sephora
• Phygitalizing your brand

Let’s get phygital!

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When I first heard the phrase “entrepreneurial spirit,” I laughed. Scoffed, actually.

I pictured zen-like self-help gurus in yoga pants up on a mountain retreat à la Topher Grace’s Black Mirror tech genius encouraging his followers to embrace their culturally-appropriated spirit animals and open their chakras for more fulfilling hostile takeovers.

Or Jared Leto.

“Does anyone even say that?” I asked Adam, my editor, during our 1:1.

“It’s an interesting concept,” he said. “I think you should explore it.”

Dubiously, I set off to find out what this entrepreneurial spirit thing was all about.

Naturally, Adam was right.

Not only did I discover it’s definitely not as mystical as it sounds, but it draws heavily on some very ancient philosophy, and makes sense for both the personal and the professional.

I’ll walk you through what I learned and how you can use it, or you can skip ahead to the juicy bits:

• What is an entrepreneurial spirit?
• What does ancient philosophy have to do with modern entrepreneurs?
• Ryan Holiday: writing, entrepreneurship, and Stoic principles
• Arianna Huffington: Stoic inspiration for a better work/life balance
• Tim Ferriss: the philosophy of one of the most innovative entrepreneurs
• How to cultivate your own entrepreneurial spirit

Now, get comfortable and still your mind…

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