This is a guest post by Nicole Cowart, an online marketing executive. She works at a cloud-based company that offers smart business solutions. She is currently studying for her Master’s degree in Web Development.

Digital marketing is the future of marketing and doing business. Most successful companies currently have their online websites and stores that generate more traffic.

Nevertheless, online marketing is also the right place for beginners who are taking their first steps in the business realm.

Even if you’re not a professional marketer, you can still design and execute a successful content strategy that helps you establish your status in the online world. All you need is a good process for it.

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Organizations, including businesses, do not exist in a vacuum. Every organization is embedded in a wider web of societal, political, and environmental systems, that spans from smaller local networks to expansive and complex global systems.

As IAG puts it:

“Sustainability is neither a program nor an initiative, it’s considered simply good management.”

This statement recognizes the link between an organization and the social, environmental and economic wellbeing of the communities in which they operate.

An organization’s relationship to the society and wider environment in which they exist and operate is a key factor in their ability to succeed and thrive. It can also be an insight into their general performance.

ISO 26000 is a set of guiding principles for businesses and organizations to use to steer them in a more socially responsible direction.

In order to better contribute to the health and welfare of their supporting societies and environments, businesses must enforce principles of ethical and transparent behaviour.

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We recently released 5 checklist templates designed specifically to help AppFolio users manage a handful of core property management workflows more effectively.

The following templates are a continuation of our effort to support property managers who are already using a software tool to manage their processes. This time we customized the templates for Propertyware users, with a focus on keeping rental processes running smoothly.

Deepwater Horizon – arguably one of the most catastrophic industrial disasters of human history, and the estimated largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry.

It also happens to be one of the most abysmal failures of quality management by any company, period.

On an otherwise unsuspecting evening of April, 2010, approximately 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico, the first in a chain of quality management related failures became glaringly apparent as the emergency response protocols were enforced after an oil leak in the drilling well was discovered.

The oversights were as follows:

• Lack of proper quality assessment resulted in weak, potentially contaminated cement or “drilling mud” used in the initial failsafe failing to properly block the leak.
• Fluid pressure tests were not properly carried out and clear warnings were ignored.
• Rising oil and gas levels were not properly monitored.
• The final failsafe on the ocean floor, designed to close the leaking pipe shut, failed to close due to the conditions of the drill pipe.

The aftermath of this chain of negligence left 11 people dead, caused over 130 million gallons of oil to leak into the Atlantic Ocean, and cost over $62 billion in damages.

Not one point of failure, but four. Clearly not an anomaly, this disaster was the result of a series of systematic failures that uncover a dark truth about the reality of cost-cutting and disregard for quality control.

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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.

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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.

What is an ISO audit?

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Data shows that creative design is reshaping products, portfolios, and industry standards at more than 70% of companies.

If creative design is so important, doesn’t it also make sense to invest time and money on writing a good creative brief?

Before the actual work of designing an infographic, launching a PPC campaign, or even beginning to pull ideas together in the early stages, you need to be sure that you have a solid creative brief.

The creative brief is the foundation upon which the work of any creative project will be done, but all too often projects fall short because of poorly written, bloated, non-actionable, ambiguous creative briefs.

And what’s arguably a bigger problem than a poorly written creative brief? The process (or lack thereof) that led to its creation.

In this Process Street article, I’ll try to address the elements that make up a good creative brief, but perhaps more importantly, I’ll look at how to build a process for creative brief writing; one that’s consistent, reliable, and gets the job done.

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