The following is a guest post by professional copywriter and freelance writer Michael Schultheiss, owner of Inkwell Freelance.

Imagine if your support staff had no set guidelines for handling a ticket.

It would be like you pulled in a group of random people from the street, sat them down at the helpdesk, and expected to see a job well done.

Instead of a job well done, it’d probably look more like this:

That’s essentially what you’re allowing when you fail to standardize processes. Your company’s operations consist of tasks that must be completed on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis to ensure that it runs smoothly. But if these processes aren’t standardized, you’re inviting chaos.

These could be core processes like dealing with a customer support request, or tasks that recur less often like SSL certificate renewal.

Every task — regardless of how often you do it — requires rules that define the scope, quality, and methods to be followed. If you don’t standardize these rules, you can’t have visibility over whether you’re ensuring quality and reducing human error.

In short, running your business will be an operational nightmare.

To help you avoid that, in this article we’ll look at process standardization as follows:

• What is process standardization?
• The benefits of standardization
• Common concerns about standardization
• How Process Street can help you standardize

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Being secure online is of greater and greater importance. As businesses operate almost entirely online and sensitive information finds itself living full time in the cloud, we have to make sure we have appropriate measures in place to keep information safe.

One tried and tested way of promoting security is the use of failsafes in login systems. This is what’s referred to as Two Factor Authentication (2FA) or Multi Factor Authentication (MFA).

This means that someone could get hold of your email and password, yet your data is still kept safe.

Whether you’re already familiar with the terminology or not, you’re certainly familiar with the concept.

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

• Why is two factor authentication important?
• What two factor authentication is
• The 2 classic examples of 2FA: banks and Apple
• How you can implement two factor authentication in your team
• Free Process Street template: How to enable two factor authentication with Authy, Google, and Slack

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[ Download our Free Ebook ] – Click here to download our free 111 page ebook on “How to automate the tasks you hate at work using Zapier“.

Business vs Casual, Zapier vs IFTTT

Whether it’s Coke vs Pepsi, Ariel vs Persil or Hawaiian pizza vs everything good in the world, rivalries are everywhere. They make for fantastic spectator sports and can help improve our lives by showing the flaws in each side.

In our efforts to help you guys automate as much of the laborious shovel work in your lives as possible, we came across two main competitors; the great battle that is Zapier vs IFTTT.

Okay, so maybe “battle” is over-dramatizing things a little; it’s not as if they’re running massive smear campaigns. Still, the competition is real, as both Zapier and IFTTT have earned their spots on the map for being darned good pieces of kit. This got us thinking; which is better?

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Like any employee who works at a young startup, last month I was given a task which threw me far out of my depth.

Even though I’m an audio tech graduate whose final project was video-based, I can’t say that my skills destroying VHS tapes and creating feedback loops translated too well.

Either way, the task was clear:

Create a 5-minute demo video for Process Street showing off most of the features, with screen recordings and slides.

It took me much longer than it should have. But, in the end, I polished it off nicely and got back to doing what I’m better at — writing articles (phew).

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Tracking your work and what you do may sound a little simple (however, we’ve proven before that it’s not necessarily the case). But just imagine having lots of people working on the same project at the same time. That’s when it actually becomes not so easy to track what’s going on.

Online collaboration tools are on the rise with businesses who want to track their employee’s workflow – especially remotely. You might have already seen our previous article comparing Asana and Trello, but instead of comparing the user experience we will look at the features and usability of each app.

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No matter how foolproof you think your operations are, human error will always pose a threat. Heck, it’s already responsible for 52% of security and data breaches, was the root cause of a host of famous tragedies, and can strike at any time.

But what exactly is human error, and how can we limit its effects if it can’t be completely prevented?

To answer that question, we here at Process Street have broken it down for you. In this article, you’ll learn:

• The four types of human error
• How the different types of human error are caused
• The single technique to combat each type in your business

It’s time to stop leaving your success open to random chances of failure.

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The following is a guest post by Darren Chait, Co-Founder at Hugo. Hugo is the meeting note platform that keeps your team connected with what your customers are thinking and saying. It enables fast-moving teams to make meeting insights shareable and actionable in their existing tools.

As a startup guy, my world is full of buzzwords. We’re disrupting a space, have pivoted, got our minimum valuable product (MVP) out to our total addressable market (TAM) and even had a ‘.ai’ domain name. Undoubtedly, one of my ‘favorites’ is ‘team alignment’.

While team alignment is not a new concept and certainly not unique to fast-growing technology businesses, I’m fascinated with my peers’ obsession with this utopian concept. It’s understandable. Why wouldn’t you want your team moving forward in unison with precise coordination and execution? Why wouldn’t you listen when experts warn that misalignment kills startups?

In this guest post, I’ll share our story and perspective on team alignment and some easy-to-implement solutions to achieve this ideal state with your team.

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Have you ever had a project which never seems to end? One which you either underestimated or kept adding tasks to as you went along?

That’s exactly what setting out your project scope will prevent.

By analyzing the elements of your projects before starting, you can set out the scope of the work in order to prevent extra work getting added (without adjusting the necessary resources) and avoid taking on projects too large for your team to handle.

Not to mention that the principles behind project scope can be applied elsewhere in your business too.

“I call this the Scopi-locks principle.

Don’t make your product too big, because no-one will adopt it. Don’t make your product too small, because it’s not worth adopting. You have to [get it] just right such that it’s worth poor people pulling it into their lives and, when they do, that they get some value out of it.” – Des Traynor (co-founder of Intercom) on product scope

Let’s get stuck right in with project scope by breaking down what it is, what you need to know before creating it, and how to use it in action.

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I’ve been obsessed with science fiction since I was a young teen, so coding has always appealed to me. I was fascinated by the idea that it is possible to write a program that behaves randomly — to me, that was already deep in the realms of sci-fi!

That obsession fueled my first forays into code, and resulted in a ton of fun bots. For example, this one that describes scary-sounding places by combining words at random, and this one that paints PNGs in block colors.

It’s nothing fancy. I’m hardly a master programmer, and you don’t have to be either. With a basic grasp of coding and APIs, you can create genuinely useful software for fun and profit. In this tutorial, we’ll look at creating a Telegram bot from scratch.

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The app market is booming and revenue is soaring.

According to TechCrunch, citing a report from AppAnnie:

Global app downloads topped 175 billion and consumer spending exceeded $86 billion in 2017, thanks to growth in emerging markets including China, India, Brazil and Russia…

One of the benefits of targeting this huge and growing market is that the Appstore and PlayStore are largely closed ecosystems. You can promote your apps directly to potential users in the one marketplace they are using to access apps.

The AppAnnie report also notes that app usage is up, with the average user spending 3 hours a day within apps on their phone. This means your app, once downloaded, is competing with the other apps on a user’s phone rather than countless other websites across the web.

So how do we get these downloads?

According to another report co-authored by AppAnnie and Adjust, titled The Complete Guide to Mobile App Marketing: App Store Optimisation, two thirds of all app downloads are organic. This means the app has been found in the store as a result of a user’s search, rather than being directed there by adverts on Facebook, Google, or elsewhere.

To harness these downloads and drive consistent traffic to your app, you need to have a strategy for app store optimization: ASO.

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

• What is ASO?
• How to build a process for keyword optimization
• What are the best platforms to help you drive downloads?

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