Writing perfect processes is a dream all Process Street users share.

But a perfect process isn’t necessarily a process where all the steps work perfectly all the way through.

In real life, processes come up against external forces and unforeseen circumstances. A perfect process doesn’t have to predict all these external influences in advance; it needs to be able to adapt to them in real time as they arise.

Fortunately, there’s a concept for this: Process Flexibility.

Process flexibility helps keep our processes working even when everything else is going wrong.

In this article, we’re going to outline what process flexibility is and the main approaches to managing it:

• What is process flexibility?
• What are the main approaches to process flexibility?
• Flexibility by design
• Flexibility by deviation
• Flexibility by underspecification
• Flexibility by change
• How Process Street is designed for agility

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“A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one” – Haley Marie Craig, 7 Phrases You’ve Been Misquoting

Sometimes, you don’t need to be a specialist – just someone who’s flexible enough to weave between disciplines and bring the strengths of all.

A full stack marketer.

These are marketers who have knowledge and experience of all aspects of marketing, from social media and video to user experience and content. It takes a lot of dedication and consistent learning to become one, and it’s often hard to find someone who has that wide of a spread of knowledge.

So, if you’ve ever wanted to brush up your marketing skills, know what the pros and cons of a full stack marketer are, or wondered why you’d bother to hire a non-specialist in the first place, keep reading this post. I’ll cover all of that, plus give a list of helpful resources which can get you started on the track to gaining that knowledge for yourself.

Let’s get started!

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Have you considered that your marketing process could be broken?

Marketing is the engine of growth driving your business, and making sure this engine is well-oiled and optimized for maximum efficiency goes without saying.

Your marketing plan must be well-organized, robustly structured, and efficient. For this to be true, you need to begin with the process behind the vision and make sure that is working at 110%.

In the absence of a tried and tested process that is fine-tuned to the needs and goals of a particular company, the untamed beast of marketing will waste time, money, and resources, and will fail to deliver any meaningful return.

Why is it, then, that so many businesses leave the marketing process as an afterthought?

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We now have the world in our pockets. Our TVs are smart. Our cars soon to be driverless.

We live in the tech futures of 1970s futurists, or at least partly.

Along with predictions of technological development came ideas of utopias and dystopias. The technology we craft creates new use cases, opportunities, and dangers. The tech and its application cannot be separated.

This brings us to larger questions of how we should employ technology, what risks new tech may bring, and what the arrival of these new futures means to us as humans on our little ball of dirt.

This is the sphere of digital ethics.

Process Street was invited to the inaugural World Ethical Data Forum, and it has set our minds rolling over some of these questions and the discussions of what may lie ahead.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• What is digital ethics?
• 3 current hot topics in digital ethics
• 3 challenges discussed at the World Ethical Data Forum
• What to look out for in the future of digital ethics

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The best techniques and technology in the world won’t help you if you don’t know how to use them. Annoyingly, with it being so new, it’s hard to tell what machine learning marketing use cases there are to base your efforts on.

In other fields, the breakthrough tech is being used in medical diagnoses, spam filtering, fraud detection, translation and more. All you need is some inspiration to get started with your own uses.

That’s why this post exists.

I’ll cover, in detail, the key ways machine learning is affecting marketing, and how it can be used to handle some of your business process automation, provide actionable data insights and predictions, and even win $1 million on Jeopardy.

Before that though, if you don’t know what machine learning is (or want a refresher), check out our other posts on the topic below:

• An Introduction to Machine Learning in Business: Analyzing Your Success
• 6 Useful Applications of AI & Machine Learning in Your Business Processes

Let’s get started.

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Here at Process Street, we’re always talking about the importance of workflows.

Workflows help you define what work you do and the order in which you do it.

According to the Powering Productivity report from Planview, poor processes and workflows are the number 1 cause of inefficiencies in organizations. Plus, the Chaos Theory report from Projectplace revealed project managers lost 2 hours 45 minutes each week due to poor workflows.

When you document your workflows and improve them, you optimize your work. This results in better work done more quickly.

It’s one of the simplest ways to improve the performance of your own work, or that of an organization. From basic workflows with only a couple of steps to company wide workflows with multiple stakeholders and variables.

This principle remains true in countless use cases and industries but is most powerful in areas where work benefits from standardized practices.

This brings us to an area of business where standardization is a true sign of quality: accounting.

Effective accounting practices require a strong understanding of how information flows throughout your business.

In this article, we’re going to look at:

• What is the accounting cycle?
• What is a workflow?
• How to construct processes for your accounting activities
• 11 accounting processes you can try today

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Maybe you’re the sort of person who sits down at their desk for 8 hours solid and hammers out as much as possible.

Maybe you use the Pomodoro method or your own task management techniques.

I don’t know what sort of person I am yet.

I used to give it no thought — wake up, lob a coffee down my throat, sit down and start typing.

Lately, my tasks are harder to define and I find myself having trouble with time management and prioritizing.

Right now I’m using Pomello, a Pomodoro timer that lives in Trello and times my work on each card. Click here to get it.

Tomorrow I’ll probably be sick of it and defiantly hammering on the keyboard until it’s time to sleep…

In my seemingly neverending quest to get shit done, I’ve seen a ton of strange methods and lists. And, let me tell you, working at Process Street — a task management system for businesses — I’m making myself practice what I preach.

Here are some of the task management techniques I’ve come across.
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We always seem to be caught up in a never-ending mission to make our businesses better.

You have to ride out crises, fight through external problems, and still improve your performance week on week, quarter on quarter, year on year.

So how do we approach this improvement to get the most from it?

The key is about making improvement part of the daily process.

This approach falls under the umbrella of continuous improvement; what Toyota call Kaizen.

This is the art of taking a million steps forward. Compounding every success and safeguarding against every failure.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• Why Kaizen is important
• What are the other Toyota Production System concepts?
• Things to consider when implementing Kaizen.
• How Samsung use Kaizen selectively to optimize production

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Motivation is a massive factor to your productivity, but you can’t stay motivated without inspiration.

Hell, success comes from surrounding yourself with people who are better than you, so why not learn from the top of the heap?

To help, we at Process Street have put together 30 productivity quotes from the best of the best.

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The following is a guest post from Ryan Gould, Vice President of Strategy and Marketing Services at Elevation Marketing. An expert search, social and content marketer, Ryan leads Elevation Marketing’s digital strategy department, helping brands achieve their business goals, such as improving sales and market share, by developing integrated marketing strategies distinguished by research, storytelling, engagement and conversion.

Without software, you’d be hand-writing purchase orders, using a Rolodex for a CRM, and doing your newsletters via smoke signal.

Alright, maybe that last one is a little far-fetched, but there’s no denying that in the business world, technology is absolutely necessary and enables amazing things.

…But not everyone on your team gets enthusiastic about the prospect of learning a new tool. Even if that tool will help them improve productivity, do a better job, and escape the white-collar equivalent of hard manual labor.

Your goal when rolling out software is always the same: to help your business improve operations, boost efficiency, and enable sales. These days that means staying up to date on technological trends as well.

Deciding which tool is right for you will always hinge on fundamentals, like whether it can automate your vendor payments, purchase orders, employee onboarding, lead management, etc. However, there are other considerations, such as whether your solution integrates with cloud software and is responsive on mobile devices.

But, even after you’ve selected the solution perfect for your operation and your employees – after all the sales demos, comparison docs, and review reading – you’ll find it’s that the human element that trips you up.

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