Imagine if you had an invisible robot running around the internet doing all kinds of tasks for you.

That’s a bot. 🤖

Bots live on Twitter, on Wall Street and in factories.

They cut down on pesky repetitive tasks and do things that would take humans much more time and energy.

Bots started out as weak, experimental and expensive, but the rise of SaaS and automation means that you can have your very own family of bots, living exactly where you work: Slack.

Slack isn’t just a place to chat with your team, it can be extended to:

• Check your emails or aggregate your newsletters into a public channel
• Send notifications from Trello, JIRA, or hundreds of other apps
• Stream tweets that match a certain hashtag or keyword
• Update your calendar
• Save your reminders and to-dos
• Store company knowledge and resources (like a chatbot attached to a wiki)
• …and a million more time-saving (and fun) things

Slack is simple, text-based, searchable and allows you to customize it in creative ways. It’s the perfect environment for simple bots that can replace the need for time-consuming or interrupting tasks, and its Slack App directory makes it easy to find and plug a bot right into Slack ready to use.

But, before we get into all of the cool stuff Slack bots can do, let’s get the basics down first and talk about the original: Slackbot!

Most Slack users know Slackbot as the friendly and helpful character that helps them set up their profile. It sits in always-on mode in your direct messages, occasionally popping up to give you notifications. It’s easy to forget, but you’re missing out on a lot of great features if you overlook it.

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No matter what kind of business you’re in, if you have a supply chain then it’s vital that you have a system of logistics management processes to guide how that chain runs.

Without set, trackable methods for ordering and managing stock, fulfilling customer orders, inspecting your facilities and so on, you’re leaving the success of your business (and the level of waste) up to random human error.

“One participant described a customer who used air freight for items that went into long-term inventory. Another recounted how individuals ordered 100 units of a product which they had not even used 30 units of in the previous year. Uncoordinated buying led to different groups in the same facility paying different prices for the same goods and ordering uneconomically small quantities.” – MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, A Sickly Supply Chain

To stop this kind of inefficiency and needless waste, we here at Process Street have created these 8 free logistics management templates.

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A single Bitcoin in 2010 cost less than one cent. Now, one Bitcoin is valued at about $3,500.

You probably already know about Bitcoin, and that massive jump in value is likely why.

But what about Ethereum which has nearly $30 billion worth of coins in circulation? Or emerging coins like Ripple or Litecoin? Joke currencies like Dogecoin or FedoraCoin? The deeper you dig into the blossoming world of cryptocurrencies the weirder it seems to get.

Don’t let the memes fool you, though. Cryptocurrencies are establishing themselves as the real deal. Their use values are appearing and their massive levels of inflation have already made some people a lot of money!

Given the seeming technological complexities of cryptocurrency, many young people are the forming the public body of participants who are bringing these new currencies into the mainstream. As the New York Times put it:

“Grandpa had a pension. This generation has cryptocurrency.”

In this article, the third of our Process Street Future Finance series after Micro-Investing and Equity Crowdfunding, we’ll look at 3 key areas to equip you with the knowledge to jump on the cryptocurrency bandwagon before it’s too late:

• What is cryptocurrency and how does it work?
• What currencies are available and how do they differ?
• What are the steps to getting started with cryptocurrencies?

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ITGlue is a collaborative, cloud-based IT documentation platform created to help MSPs standardize documentation, create knowledge bases, manage passwords and track devices.

As well as documentation, it lets you stay on top of what’s going on in your network by notifying you when key events happen, like an SSL certificate nearing expiry, or a firewall breach.

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If all you want to know from this E Myth review is whether or not the book is worth reading, then go and buy a copy right now.

Michael Gerber passionately runs through the core reasons why so many small businesses fail from over 40 years of experience, and how to create a business that will be successful.

“Every year, over a million people in this country start a business of some sort… Within five years, more than 80 percent of them – 800,00 – will have failed.”
– Michael E. Gerber, The E Myth Revisited, p. 2

The book is a fascinating insight into the experience of Gerber dealing with not only failing businesses, but the people in charge of them who are often at their wit’s end. His drive to help them and satisfaction in seeing them blossom into true business owners is infectious, leaving you enthusiastic to start your own journey after every chapter.

It’s the same enthusiasm you can hear in Gerber’s voice when we interviewed him on Business Systems Explored to explore why small businesses fail.

If you’re running a small business that isn’t getting off the ground, want to know how to create a business that works, or have ever thought about how you could make a successful business to fuel your ideal lifestyle, then keep reading.

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The following is a guest post by Erin Vaughan. Erin currently resides in Austin, TX where she writes full time for Modernize, with the goal of empowering homeowners with the expert guidance and educational tools they need to take on big home projects with confidence.

Most industries have already acknowledged that workflow tools save their companies money and time, while also promoting compliance and accountability. However, in the construction world, contractors remain stuck in the pre-internet era of paper filing systems and faxed work orders.

They keep their schedules in their heads, have a wallet stuffed with paper receipts, and use “fill-in-the-blank” copies of contracts and work orders. It’s the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” methodology to accounting and administration.

However, this highly manual process means tons of opportunities for human error.

There’s the customer who never got a receipt because the original paperwork for her work order was lost. There’s the client who wants special terms added to their contract, all of which has to be handwritten and added to the back of a cookie-cutter contract template — and a thousand more things that can and will go wrong.

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I didn’t used to see the point of surveys…

I’m much more comfortable with scraping data, using software and relying on trends based on in-depth studies. I didn’t understand how it could be beneficial to read unstructured feedback from a few hundred people until I conducted a survey myself.

It’s not easy to know if what you’re doing is important for your ideal user or reader. You might believe that a certain marketing campaign or product feature is going to be the next big hit that brings customers, but without hearing the opinions of your audiences, you’re making another shot in the dark.

In July, I sent out the first reader survey we’ve done at Process Street. I built the processes and learned the benefits as I went along, and in this post I want to share them with you.

As a result of the survey, we received hundreds of common problems to solve in our articles, allowing us to create relevant and high-converting content. And, speaking of conversions, the follow-up conversations with respondents landed us a few new users and customers!

For a quick email template and a few hours of data entry, I’d say it’s well worth trying. In this article, I’m going to show you exactly how we surveyed our readers, and how it’s helped us improve our marketing and product. But first, an explanation of what I mean by feedback.

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Project proposals are how you can get management to act on your ideas. They’re the bottom-up version of a project request form.

They are how you can influence your company’s future.

Writing a project proposal isn’t rocket science, but it is a vital skill for being able to successfully pitch projects that you know will benefit your team and business as a whole. Casual conversations aren’t enough – you need to give a formal document which addresses concerns before your manager, CEO, and stakeholders have a chance to voice them.

Plus, having a set template for writing a proposal gives you a document which you can reference throughout the entire project. Instead of having to rely on notes and your vague memory of a water cooler conversation, you have set instructions to follow, and a defense against anyone who says that the project isn’t worth it.

It’s a great example of effective business process management – if anyone questions you, you can show them the project proposal and say “this was approved, and so this is what we’re going to do”.

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According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics there were 32,000 dedicated electrical inspectors in the workforce in 2014.

That’s a good number of electrical inspectors and a great deal more electrical inspections!

Yet, much electrical inspection work is still being done with pen and paper, creating mountains of paperwork and making effective sharing of information difficult.

That’s why we’ve created this Process Street electrical inspection checklists process-pack.

We want to make sure the inspectors using our platform can make the most of the software to speed up their processes, record and compile information more easily, automatically generate reports, and ultimately keep making the world a safer space.
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Maybe some teams can get by without strictly following documented processes every day, but when it comes to agile software development teams, it’s simply not an option to operate in the dark.

Since software is complex and easy to mess up, processes mean the difference between a great product and a crappy one. Without processes, software teams will spend more time squashing bugs and dealing with support headaches than they will actually developing the product…

The exact reason we created Process Street is to help businesses avoid that nightmarish cycle, and, of course, we use Process Street ourselves to help run the agile processes behind the scenes.

We use regular agile processes like:

• Daily standup meeting
• Sprint planning
• Sprint turnover
• Sprint retrospective

We also run routine QA processes like:

• GitHub pull request procedure
• Weekly WordPress maintenance
• SSL certificate renewal

And, finally, we have a set of training processes:

• Developer onboarding
• How to set up your development environment
• Pull request review failed procedure
• Pull request merge procedure

These are all regular tasks for the team, and the reason they were created was because we found they have a high margin for error.

Scroll down to find the exact processes we use.

If you want to tighten up the way your software team works, hit your sprint targets, and efficiently train new development hires, then this post will show you how. We even reveal the exact processes we use and a workflow diagram detailing the journey an issue takes from start to end.
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