If the United Nations Environment Programme is to be taken seriously, the current generation is the last generation with a realistic chance of kick-starting the processes necessary to halt or reverse the looming global crisis of climate change.
“We are clearly the last generation that can change the course of climate change, but we are also the first generation with its consequences,” Kristalina Georgieva, the CEO of the World Bank.
SWOT: Whether or not the acronym conjures images of riot gear and armored vehicles for you, we are of course talking about a business methodology for evaluating the internal and external factors governing the performance of your business.
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. A SWOT analysis is a way of evaluating a part of (or even a whole) business, based on the criteria of each of the words in the acronym.
If you just want to dive right in and skip the details, here’s the template, as promised:
When you actually run it, conditional logic will show only the tasks relevant to you, to save you a whole lot of manual work and messing around in the long run.
If you’re interested in learning how to use the template, plus some best practice SWOT principles, real-world use cases and some post-SWOT advice, read on.
ISO 9001 is an international standard for defining a quality management system (QMS). It outlines various criteria (or standards) to define quality management principles such as focusing on the customer, optimizing leadership and management within the organization, improving and fine-tuning internal processes, and general methods of continuous improvement.
Let’s break down each of the components of and ISO 9001 certification.
I have a riddle for you:
What has four sides, often goes missing, comes from trees, and can be expensive to reproduce?
I’ll give you a hint.
It wastes up to 40% of on-the-job time, and about $120 billion per year in the US alone.
Need another?
Around 7.5% of them will be lost or misplaced each year (about one lost every 12 seconds), and for each that gets lost you’re looking at a loss of between $350 to $700 in employee time.
Did you get it yet?
Condescending sarcasm aside, I am of course talking about paper forms. But this article isn’t about paper forms, per se; it’s about how you can get rid of paper forms in your business with form automation software.
Before we dive into the world of ISO audits, if you’re savvy on ISO audits and are just here for a complete, actionable, and totally free ISO 9004:2018 self-audit checklist, you can grab that here:
Otherwise, read on.
An audit in the context of ISO standards is the process of making sure a certain business system or feature, whether a process itself, a quality management or business process management system, or a product, is compliant to certain requirements.
The requirements by which the compliance of an organization are assessed could be defined by certain ISO family standards, or they could reflect the need to analyze certain performance indicators or business needs.
If you have a problem, it’s in your best interest to ensure that trying to solve that problem doesn’t end up causing more problems. This is a good way to think about low-code development platforms.
Each business has its own set of tools for solving problems and getting things done, and for the most part, these problems can be solved by existing commercial apps.
But of course, there are certain needs that off-the-shelf solutions cannot meet, and for these needs a business could approach the problem a few different ways.
If a proprietary tool doesn’t exist, then the best option may be for the business to try and build a solution themselves. This is often done from scratch, and it’s called software development.
That’s fine, except it costs a lot of money, takes a long time, and is difficult to make changes once things are in motion. It also means everything gets more complex, because it’s not just the development team you’re bringing onboard, but designers, testers, data analysts and many others as well.
The simple truth is that it takes a small village to develop good software with conventional methods.
However, there are tools that are designed to give businesses the freedom to build their own solutions, without all of the excess baggage.
These tools are known as low-code development platforms.
This is a big blog post about Business Process Management (BPM) software.
If I’ve succeeded in doing what I set out to do, this article should provide pretty much everything you could ever need to know about BPM software.
At its core, the article is built around the following pillars of BPM software:
I have tried to distil the information in this article to only the most crucial elements, and many sections have been abbreviated where they deserve entire articles to themselves!
Thankfully, where necessary I have provided links to supporting material where these concepts are expanded upon, should you be interested in delving deeper.
I got bitten by a dog recently, and, funnily enough, it gave me the idea for this article.
The dog wasn’t at fault; it was the process that led to me having to get 5 vaccines over the course of a month, wherein my only major complaint was the way patient records were kept and processed at the hospital I went to.
You know how frustrating it is to deal with a business with inefficient, ineffective processes?
Every single time, I had to fill out my name and address again in some tattered paper version of a spreadsheet that got shoved in a filing cabinet. After I’d gone to do that, they were able to confirm that I needed injection 3 because of the paper ‘injection passport’ I got given, and I was sent to pay for this particular session before coming back to queue up again.
Let’s get straight to the point – you’re probably searching for a policy and procedure template you can actually use (bonus points if it’s ISO compliant).
So, if you just want an actionable policy and procedure template, you can find two hand-crafted examples below. One of them is basically a blueprint you can use to build out your own, and the other is a fully filled out example of the first, using a fictional company called Brightstar Marketing.
Both can be easily edited and updated by you inside Process Street.
PocketSuite is a smartphone-based booking, payment, and client management toolset for solopreneurs, which seeks to empower business owners while streamlining the customer experience via SMS communication.
We spoke to Ilya Ornatov, head of growth marketing at PocketSuite to find out how they use Process Street every day to drive down costs, save time, and grow business.
