Quick! You have an exam in a week. What’s your study plan?
Will you spend hours reading the material? Take notes? Use flashcards? Cram it all in the night before?
Most people in this situation wouldn’t think very far ahead when deliberating on how to study. They’d just wing it, most likely pull an all-nighter the night before, and hope for the best when the time comes for them to take the exam.
The problem with this is that it’s lazy. And lazy studying only gets you mediocre results (at best).
But this doesn’t mean spending long, grueling hours studying every day is the way to go. In fact, research shows that students that are consistently successful actually spend less time studying than their peers; they just do it more effectively.
So, what should you do then?
In this Process Street article, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about how to study effectively and efficiently.
It’s all too common to find yourself wading through your organization’s shared folders in search of the file you’ve been asked to review:
PROJECT-PROPOSAL-NEW-v5.doc
Project_proposal_2020_final+edits.doc
THIS_is_the_final_proposal_(old-version).PDF
Why does this happen? Why can’t everyone just use proper file naming conventions? The reasons can be lack of proper internal policy or procedure for naming and organizing files, lack of any consideration for folder or information architecture, and just plain carelessness.
With a small amount of effort, you can establish proper file naming conventions and avoid this kind of document spaghetti. The more organized you can be with your internal information, the more efficient and effective you can be in your business goals.
Just imagine – seeing neat, intuitively named folders, knowing which folders contain the documents you’re looking for, and – take a seat – having confidence that the file you’re about to click on will be what you expect it to be.
This is a guest post from Julia Samoilenko, a marketing specialist who writes about digital marketing trends and strategies for the Chanty blog. This powerful and free Slack alternative is aimed to increase team productivity and improve communication at work. Feel free to connect with Julia on LinkedIn.
Many of us like the idea of working remotely (especially if we have never experienced it). Out of bed and —Voila!— you are ready for work. No commuting, no noisy colleagues. Top level of independence and flexibility.
But what is remote work really like in practice? One day here at Chanty we had to answer this question and discovered what new benefits and challenges teams face when transitioning to remote-only mode.
Spoiler: there were many productivity pitfalls on the road to beneficial collaboration. It turns out that being an efficient remote worker is quite challenging. And that it’s twice as tough to manage a high-performing virtual team.
If you want to adapt to remote working best practices and maximize the benefits, then you’ve come to the right place. We’re going to reveal the ugly truth and teach you everything we’ve learned about a successful transition to remote work. After reading our ‘confession’, you’ll understand the challenges and methods on how to overcome them.
There’s nothing more frustrating to a project manager than witnessing the slow, painful death of a healthy project to the beast known as scope creep. When last minute changes transform their straightforward, A-to-B project plan into a sprawling mess of up-ended sprint plans and gold-plated feature requests, branching out in all directions with no concern for time or resources.
In one extreme example, the head contractor for the extension of a city library ended up actually suing their client in a scope-creep induced rage, claiming that their almost 55-week delay was a direct result of the large number of last minute changes.
In order for a project to be successfully completed on time, the project manager and their team need to agree on a clearly defined project scope before getting started.
However, life isn’t so straight forward and changes to the project will inevitably need to happen.
But additional problems can arise if the changes aren’t dealt with properly.
Scope creep can quietly sneak its way into your project and set your team down an unproductive and self-destructive path, wasting your company’s resources, missing deadlines, weakening team communication and, ultimately, ruining any chance of your project’s success.
So what can you do to avoid this fate, and overcome scope creep once and for all?
In this Process Street article, we’ll be covering everything you need to know scope creep–from what (and who) causes it, to how to manage it, even in an agile environment where change is embraced.
Product roadmaps are an essential part of understanding how to align your product to a long-term vision for product-market fit. They are also one of the key deliverables for product managers and are useful to almost all teams and stakeholders.
What the product roadmap should provide:
Clear overview of key launch dates and milestones
Clearly communicate which teams are responsible for what
Clearly communicate important deadlines and time allocation
A beacon to align different teams to core company goals and objectives
What the roadmap shouldn’t include:
Goals and objectives unrelated to the product
Overload of information about specific product features and specifications for development
Big Surprises
Too much data without clear association with company goals or objectives
Travis Taborek is an SEO and content marketing specialist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s a graduate of General Assembly’s digital marketing course, and has since written content and optimized websites for Wescover and TiVo. He also has a side-business doing PR and social media work for indie games and reviews indie games in his spare time. His most recent accomplishment was finishing Homestuck and thereby winning shelter-in-place.
Back in 2011, you might have been able to get away with uploading your indie game to Steam’s marketplace and expect a revenue of $30-50K in the first year, without any effort or marketing knowledge.
Hell, you might have even been able to get away with that as late as 2014. But these golden days for indie game developers are long gone.
Steam has made many changes to the way it promotes indie games and the current market is far more saturated. There are more game developers than ever and tools like Unity and Unreal have made game development more accessible than ever.
Just getting that final build finished and uploaded to your storefront of choice is no longer enough. To have a successful launch, whether you’re a solo dev or a small team, you have to understand how to market your game.
In principle, marketing your game is relatively straightforward; you just need to know where to start. If you understand who you’re making the game for (your audience) and how to talk about your game as a product (meaning: you’re able to communicate what your game offers and how that aligns to the expectations of your target audience), then you’ve already done most of the hard work. The rest is as simple as following a process.
Once you have this base knowledge, it’s just about taking your product to market and doing the legwork that’s involved with getting the word out and making sure you get eyes on the finished product.
It’s basically exactly what it sounds like: using social media to get your game in front of your target audience. The term ‘social media marketing’ is a bit vague and encompasses a bunch of different approaches; we’ll be looking at some of the different ways you can use social media to market your game in this article.
Social media marketing is great for connecting on an intimate level with your fans and building lasting communities around your game, from early development until launch, and beyond. When done properly, it can allow you to develop trusting relationships with your audience that will drive them to not just purchase one of your games, but every game you put out.
Here’s a high-level overview of what we’ll be looking at:
Musk indicated that the failure was due to bad welding at the base of the rocket, around the area of the puck that is designed to bear the engine thrust load.
Starship SN3 suffered a similar fate during a round of pressure testing, where the lower of the two tanks collapsed due to test configuration mistakes.
Of course, this is the whole point of testing; failures such as these are half expected, and should be planned for accordingly. Failures like SN1 and SN3 pave the way for future successes like the Crew Dragon launch to the ISS. Failure is an essential ingredient that is necessary to push the limits of understanding.
But it does raise an interesting and important question – when failure is a statistical inevitability, what role does process standardization and quality management play in the prevention and meaningful gain of failure?
In this Process Street article we’ll be looking at AS9100D, the foremost aerospace quality management standard. How can you implement, maintain, and utilize AS9100D to proactively mitigate failure, as well as a tool to learn from errors and failure to drive improvement and optimization?
Want to skip straight to the templates? No worries! Here’s a preview of the free templates to come and a list that you can use to cut straight to the chase.
People are the most important asset in a company; processes need people to execute them, and the outcome of these processes is often a function of how well the instructions have been put together.
If the outcome is less than ideal, then don’t just blame your employees: check your processes.
Standard operating procedures (SOPs) are there for your employees to follow so that the job gets done properly. SOP software is all about figuring out how to innovate and improve efficiency in your internal processes.
This Process Street article will help you understand the benefits of SOP management software and give you some actionable SOP templates to get started. We’ll be looking at:
If you’re on the front lines fighting COVID-19 and want to use these processes to help your facility, please contact us and we will set you up with a free account*
COVID-19 hit hard, and many communities, organizations, and small businesses are struggling to shoulder the increased pressure put on by circumstances of economic downturn and uncertainty.
This article is an attempt to offer some aid in the form of 8 free coronavirus workplace templates, to help you improve efficiency in your organization by streamlining and automating manual tasks in recurring COVID-19 processes.
Some of these templates are straightforward, linear processes, while others are more complicated processes with various different outcomes. They will all be embedded below with relevant descriptions and links to sources.
The Process Street checklists in this post were all informed by procedures established by the following leading health authorities:
World Health Organization (WHO)
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
Government of Alberta’s Emergency Coordination Centre (ECC)
New York Department of Health (DoH)
Each process template will be embedded below with a description. The article will be structured as follows:
If you’re chronically ill, pain medication will help but not solve the issue. Just like if you’re experiencing abnormally high customer churn, the last thing you want is to spend all your time firefighting.
You need to find the cause.
That’s exactly why root cause analysis is a vital process. It helps you to understand the causal focus and underlying issues behind your biggest business problems.
For example, Eastman Chemical‘s customer complaint numbers were cut in half after conducting a logic tree root cause analysis to pinpoint their deeper issues. Clipper Windpower saved $1 million in lost revenue by identifying the underlying causes of their turbine malfunction.
In this Process Street article, we have a root cause analysis template for you to follow. Our aim is to give you a comprehensive overview of the root cause analysis process, from a simple introduction and break down of the key principles to when and why you’d want to perform a root cause analysis.
