As humans, we tend to focus more on the things we need to do than the things we’ve already done. This so-called “Zeigarnik effect”, named after Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, means our minds are often swimming with all of the tasks, responsibilities, and mental notes that we think we should be focusing on. That’s where Prioritization Matrix can help!

All of these tasks and projects that need doing, this mental to-do list, without a clear hierarchy of importance can make it difficult for us to stay focused and actually get things done.

One way to combat all of this Zeigarnik noise is to note down everything. Make an actual to-do list. Studies have been done, and it has been shown that the very act of noting down tasks can quite simply “make you more effective”.

But, even with a to-do list, before you actually get anything done it’s necessary to have a clear idea of your priorities.

Sounds simple enough, right? Unfortunately, figuring out what to prioritize can be hard. It’s a complicated process that involves weighing up cost against value, effort against time, and for a lot of businesses, will likely involve many different stakeholders.

The solution is to work out a process for determining what to prioritize.

Continue Reading

Customer feedback system is what every business needs to succeed.

Why? Let me explain.

There will always be people in this world that want something from you. Whether you are a business, an individual, or a group, people are needy.

Most company inboxes have a significant number of feature requests. Some of them make a lot of sense and some of them are probably pretty out there.

But whether customers are asking for something that you already have on your roadmap, or something that isn’t even tangentially related to your product, you still owe it to your customers to respond.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• Why is a customer feedback system important?
• How to improve customer feedback with BPM?
• What does a sustainable customer feedback process look like?
• How to use Process Street to streamline your customer feedback process

So, let’s get started!
Continue Reading

Self-control is over-hyped, according to Kentaro Fujita, a psychologist who studies self-control at Ohio State University.

Research suggests that the popular idea of self-control as the ability to resist temptation with willpower is fundamentally flawed.

“Our prototypical model of self-control is angel on one side and devil on the other, and they battle it out. We tend to think of people with strong willpower as people who are able to fight this battle effectively. Actually, the people who are really good at self-control never have these battles in the first place.” – Kentaro Fujita, psychologist at Ohio State University

How does this tie in with productivity? If you ask anyone what is the biggest challenge they face in trying to be productive, a likely response will involve something about a “lack of willpower”, or perhaps a difficulty staying focused.

These kinds of responses represent the popular understanding of what it means to exercise self-control.

The most productive people don’t necessarily have the best self-control, they just know how to work smart.

They’ve also most likely built up a lot of good work habits for saving time and effort, allowing them to alleviate some of the stress or discomfort that is one of the root causes of unproductivity.

In this article, I’ll outline 42 productivity hacks to help you understand how to work smarter, improve the quality of your work life, and build habits that will save you time, energy, and mental strain in the long-term.

Here’s the complete list of productivity hacks:

Continue Reading

Virtual reality recruitment is a growing trend in the recruiting world, thanks to the many benefits it offers. This is especially relevant for employer branding because virtual reality offers an immersive experience that allows candidates to engage with your brand directly. 

Imagine candidates many miles away from you being able to put on a headset, and get an office tour! VR has many promising advantages for remote and hybrid hiring. 

Stick here to learn more about how you can use VR in recruitment and whether VR is really the future of recruiting.

We’ll be covering:

• What does virtual reality in recruitment look like?
• 8 ways VR can be used in recruitment 
• Benefits of using VR in recruitment
• Is VR the future of recruiting?

What does a customer success manager do?

Let’s start at the beginning.

Customer success is vital to a company’s growth because customers are the ones that bring revenue. Although more popular in high-tech sectors, like SaaS product development or cloud services, the customer success manager (CSM) role is gaining more and more popularity in other businesses as well.

But you may be asking, what does a customer success manager even do?

A CSM’s role revolves around making sure customers get their desired outcomes while using the service/product, thus prolonging their life cycles.

In this Process Street article, I will walk you through a customer success manager’s tasks, from onboarding and training the customers, to reducing churn, dealing with critical events, getting and analyzing feedback from customers, and so on.

Read on to get a full 360-view of what the CSM role entails and why it’s so important for a company:

• CSM responsibilities: Customer onboarding
• CSM responsibilities: Collecting & analyzing customer feedback
• CSM responsibilities: Maintaining customer success
• CSM responsibilities: Customer offboarding

Let’s jump right in!
Continue Reading

ISO 9001 certification 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.

Continue Reading

If you’re a Systems Administrator or performing any kind of IT managed service, your daily tasks are often repetitive, complicated, and easy to forget.

Especially if you’re new to the role, things can quickly become overwhelmingly difficult to track & execute effectively. New employees have a library of techniques specific to your setup to learn, and it’s almost impossible to manually track each task in a way that’s easily accessible.

That’s why IT managed service teams worldwide use Process Street to manage & automate their daily workflows, for processes like:

• Network & server security audits
• Reviewing audit logs
• Performing daily backups
• Penetration testing
• VPN configuration
• Firewall audits

In this Process Street article, we’ll show you some examples of how our customers manage their daily Systems Administrator & IT tasks.

You’ll learn everything from how to create workflows that adapt to your current situation to automatically assigning tasks to specific people based on their role in the team.
Continue Reading

In celebration of International Women’s Day, we’re thrilled to shine a spotlight on one of the incredible women leaders here at Process Street – Anne Perry, Director of Solutions Consulting. Anne is a true inspiration to all of us, not only for her remarkable professional achievements but also for the warmth and positivity she brings to our team every day.

As a leader, entrepreneur, business builder, dog-mom, and all-round superstar, Anne embodies everything we stand for here at Process Street. Her commitment to excellence, coupled with her unwavering passion for empowering teams to achieve their full potential, makes her an incredible asset to our organization.

In this blog post, we’ll take the opportunity to get to know Anne a bit better, explore her journey to becoming a leader in her field, and learn from her invaluable insights and experiences. So, without further ado, let’s dive in and celebrate the amazing woman that is Anne Perry!

• Introducing Anne Perry, Director of Solutions Consulting
• Anne’s professional background
• Anne’s role at Process Street
• As a woman in leadership
• Bonus questions!
• Words of love from Anne’s team

Imagine a military regiment holding a position of key tactical importance, let’s say a bridge. Situational awareness is crucial. The success of the operation depends on access to information that can inform situational awareness, and provide tactical & strategic advantage. In other words, a situation where information is nothing short of vital.

Such a regiment would have access to a large-scale technological intelligence network: aircraft spotters, satellite-mounted motion sensors, heat detectors, and communication eavesdroppers. Commanders with high-bandwidth taps into the supporting intelligence network should have access to vital information to enable decision-making while in the field.

Now let’s imagine that an opposing force seven times the size of this regiment began approaching from three directions. Such a force should not be difficult to detect given the field intelligence available; yet that’s exactly what happened according to David Talbot’s story published in 2004’s MIT Technology Review about the U.S. Army’s 69th Armor Regiment holding a key bridge on the Euphrates River in 2003.

This story perfectly illustrates the problem of vertical vs horizontal knowledge.

The problem was, front-line troops had terrible situational awareness because the flow of information was inhibited by a vertical command-and-control structure (rather than a horizontal flow).

Information had to travel up the chain of command so that major commanders in the rear could interpret it, and then send their decisions back down the line. This resulted in huge latency; the information was there, it just wasn’t getting to the people who needed it when it mattered most.

Talbot’s story goes on to contrast the organizational structure of SPEC-OPS forces organized into small teams of two-dozen; rather than being linked to a single central command, the teams were networked to each other with a designated individual per team responsible for managing flow of information (between their team and the others’).

In these special forces units, flow of information was “flat”, or horizontal; leadership contributions & decision making involved every team member, not just the official designated leader.

In this Process Street article, we’ll be looking at how you can implement horizontal knowledge management in your organization.

• Horizontal vs vertical knowledge
• Achieving operational excellence with horizontal knowledge
• 4 step guide to horizontalize knowledge in your organization

Continue Reading

This is a big blog post about Business Process Management software (BPMS).

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:

• BPM basics: The idea behind it
• BPM in practice: How to use it
• A glossary of BPM terms
• A list of top BPM software
• Use cases of BPM software
• Using Process Street for BPM

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.

Continue Reading