What would happen if you were hit by a bus while walking to work?

Well, other than the morbidly obvious, and the time and money spent hiring and onboarding their replacement…

This is the line of thinking behind the infamous “bus factor” – the minimum number of people who, if out of action, would cause your operations to collapse.

“46% of UK businesses would be forced to cease trading immediately if a key person died or was unable to continue working through illness or injury” – Online Money Advisor, Key Man Insurance: A Definitive Guide to Key Person Insurance

It might not be ideal, but it’s a harsh reality that every team has to face; whether temporarily or permanently, your colleagues aren’t always able to make it into work.

We, here at Process Street, have had more than our share of project delays (and even failures) due to a low bus factor, which is why this post has been written. Today, you’ll learn how to identify risky projects by using the bus factor, and how to mitigate those issues as quickly (and cheaply) as possible.

We’ll be covering:

• What is the bus factor?
• How to calculate the bus factor
• Bus factor elements
• How to increase your bus factor
• The limits of boosting bus factor

Let’s get started.
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Bidding for jobs can be cutthroat.

Not only do you have to create an accurate estimate of how much everything will cost, but you have to do so as quickly as possible to have the best chance of securing the customer.

You don’t want to waste time filling out forms when you could be working, but any mistakes can severely damage your chances of getting the sale (if the estimate is too high) or even ruin your reputation (if the estimate is too low).

That’s why we here at Process Street have created and gathered these 14 free estimate templates.

Instead of having to create your own job estimate form, all you have to do is look through the templates below and see which one you like best. All serve the purpose of giving your clients a professional job estimate document, but allowing you to just fill in basic details instead of creating each document from the ground up.

Just head for one of the following sections and make your pick:

• General free estimate templates
• Microsoft Word job estimate templates
• Microsoft Excel estimate templates
• PDF estimate templates

Gabe Nelson is a content specialist of over 7 years of experience, currently working with bonus.ly. He has a passion and keen understanding when it comes to HR, employee management, and employee rewards. He has written hundreds of content pieces in numerous niches. Currently, he lives in Missouri with his wife and kids.

Your employees are the lifeblood of your business. They provide the support and manpower you need to function and grow. The level of success and the results you achieve will directly reflect the performance of your employees.

Satisfied employees are also more productive and efficient. However, a study showed that as much as 85% of employees are happy with their jobs and only 15% of employees are engaged in the workplace. Happy and engaged workers are more likely to feel personally invested in your business, leading them to work harder and smarter; this results in better products and more satisfied customers.

It’s also vital that employees know where they stand. Not receiving a promotion or a much-anticipated raise because of performance shouldn’t be a surprise to them. Conversely, they should also receive positive feedback for a job well done to keep them moving on the right track; this means that evaluating employees’ performance is an essential role of leadership.

So how do you guarantee an employee’s role is as fulfilling as possible? And how do you communicate how well they are doing in their roles?

In his Process Street article, we’ll be covering:

• Evaluating employee performance
• Creating a recognition system that perfectly fits your employees
• Managing and motivating your employees for success

Let’s jump right in!
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If your processes are designed and run properly, you likely shouldn’t have any delays. 

But what if the great processes that you’ve constructed to the nines are still delivering delayed outputs? Did you miss something? Is the process simply not good enough? 

NO. 

If your processes are good, there could be another reason for delays. The answer: Bottlenecks. 

Think of your processes as a sunny day at the beach. You’ve come prepared with sunscreen, hats, sunglasses, snacks, an umbrella, and tons of water. But in the middle of your beach day, you run out of the water screaming with a jellyfish attached to your leg. 

The jellyfish is the bottleneck, and trust me, it stings just as bad for your business when one of those babies wraps itself around your company processes. 

The only difference is you can’t plan for the jellyfish. You can plan for bottlenecks with an effective process management strategy. 

Here’s how: 

• What is a bottleneck? 
• Signs you have a bottleneck
• Types of bottlenecks 
• How to identify bottlenecks in a process
• How software tools can help with bottleneck management 
• Bottleneck management: Prevention is better than cure

One of the key parts of driving your business forward is being able to identify and tackle muda.

Is a process taking too long? Is it creating a bottleneck? Are your workers struggling to be productive?

In this Process Street article, we look again at what managers can learn from the Toyota Production System about how to improve your business processes.

The specific concept we’re tackling is muda. Muda translates roughly as waste, and refers to the inefficiencies within processes which you can seek to reduce or eliminate entirely.

As Rene T. Domingo outlines in his paper Identifying and Eliminating The Seven Wastes or Muda for the Asian Institute of Management:

The elimination of waste is the primary goal of any lean system. In effect, lean declares war on waste – any waste. Waste or muda is anything that does not have value or does not add value. Waste is something the customer will not pay for.

We’ll look at the core 7 types of waste Toyota see within processes and production systems and consider the claims for the addition of an eighth.

Scaling a business requires a joint effort between many stakeholders. 

This necessity for effective teamwork means that companies need to put the right people in the right positions.

Human resources departments need to have effective systems in place to execute core HR functions – especially in recruitment and onboarding. 

In this post for Process Street, we’re going to take a close look at how human resource management systems (HRMS) work and how they can give your company a leading edge in the war for talent. 

• What is HRMS?
• 5 essential benefits of HRMS
• Challenges of integrating an HRMS
• How to get started with an HRMS
• Integrating your HRMS with simple workflow software

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According to a survey performed by KPMG and Forrester only 34% of decision-makers say they feel confident in their data …

A sad state of affairs.

Fortunately for the 66% of decision-makers who cannot rely upon their data, there is an answer *drum roll please* . . . the Enlightenment . . . of data.✨

Who would’ve known a school of thought that revolutionized the 17th and 18th centuries could be harvested to optimize our present-day data management?

“The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on the sovereignty of reason.” Dorinda Outram, Panorama of the Enlightenment

Governed by a philosophy of rationality the Age of Enlightenment (also known as the Age of Reason) made decisions based upon a single source of power or primary source of knowledge. The source of truth and knowledge in this instance was determined by the senses.

Single Source of Truth or SSOT, the focus of this Process Street blog post, also takes the sovereign approach.

However, rather than the senses, the sovereign power for SSOT is a reliance on un-replicated, autonomous, self-contained, and enhanced data.

To find out more about SSOT and how it can enlighten your data processes, keep reading.

Alternatively, to jump to a specific section of the post, click the appropriate link below.

• The path to Data Enlightenment
• ‎What is Single Source of Truth
• The role of data for Single Source of Truth
• ‎How to obtain a Single Source of Truth
• ‎Single Source of Truth in practice
• ‎Single Source of Truth is Data Enlightenment

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This is a guest post from Adam Enfroy. He writes about how to blog like a startup to 450,000 monthly readers at www.adamenfroy.com, & teaches his audience of New School Bloggers the tactics he used to scale his blog to $80k/month MRR.

As a product marketer, increasing your landing page conversion rates through optimization has a significant impact on your bottom line.

You spend most of your time running A/B tests and tracking your conversion rates because you’re trying to optimize conversions and prove the ROI of your PPC campaigns.

Nonetheless, you still can’t seem to grasp why your visitors behave the way they do.

So, what’s your solution?

Using qualitative research to understand the reasons behind your visitors’ behavior so that you optimize your landing page and skyrocket your conversion rates.

In this article, I’ll explain the ROI of qualitative research, different methods to conduct it, and how to analyze your research data within your database. I’ll also demonstrate how Process Street’s superpowered checklists can help you perform optimized qualitative user research.

To jump to a specific section of the post click the appropriate link below. Alternatively, just keep scrolling.

• The value of qualitative user research for landing page optimization
• How to analyze your qualitative user research
• Landing page optimization in action using qualitative user research
• Use qualitative user research and boost your conversion

Ready? Let’s get started.

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In our previous post – What is an SLA? How to Use Service-Level Agreements for Success – we gave you the complete lowdown on SLAs.

From learning what an SLA is to why you need one, and what goes in an SLA to the different types of SLAs available, you learned about the incredible usefulness of SLAs without the high-level, confusing baloney.

It piqued your interest, right?

Perhaps you even thought about making a shiny SLA template yourself, but realized creating an SLA is not exactly an easy endeavor.

Don’t worry.

I too know the difficulty involved with creating SLAs – but they’re needed. They’re there to establish trust and accountability, and at a time when 10 out of 15 companies are rapidly losing the trust of others, creating SLAs for your customers and clients will put you at a great advantage.

That’s why, in this post, I’ll be providing you with additional tips and tricks for creating, editing, and using SLA templates. You’ll also get your hands on easy-to-use Process Street SLA templates, from which you can create an infinite number of SLAs without hardly any effort (I’ll be focusing on one in particular)!

Just read through the sections below to get started:

• Free SLM and SLA templates
• What is the SLA definition?
• How is a service level agreement created?
• Using Process Street’s service level agreement template process
• SLA example templates to use as inspiration
• How Process Street can aid you with further SLA management!

Let’s get rocking and rolling.

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This is a guest post written by Andre Pinantoan who is currently the Head of Growth at AI coaching startup, Fingerprint for Success. He was previously Head of Growth at multiple high growth companies such as Canva.

The COVID-19 pandemic has plunged a lot of us into the deep end, and many people have had to adapt to new ways of working. This includes how to effectively run remote meetings on a regular basis that actually have some productive value.

It’s one thing to hold a virtual conference once in a while. But when it’s one of your primary tools for communicating, coordinating, and just generally getting your team on the same page, it can either be the best thing for efficiency or a complete failure.

Truth be told, research shows that meetings already had a bad reputation pre-COVID. A survey conducted in 2018 with more than a thousand workers in the US showed that one in four people felt meetings are a waste of time. Add to that the “online” factor, and conducting useful meetings starts to get way harder for a lot of people.

I personally felt the steep learning curve during the initial months of adapting to our new way of working. As a team leader, I’ve always felt that being physically present and giving my time to members has been a key way of supporting them. So I had to find a way to channel my presence digitally.

Through these challenges, we’ve learned and adapted. As always, it’s crucial to understand what’s not working and try to make things better. Along the way, we even found some surprising benefits of conducting meetings virtually.

In this Process Street article, I will share the difficulties we faced when transitioning to full-time remote communication and how my team managed to overcome them.

• Problem 1: Too many unnecessary meetings
• Problem 2: Non-verbal cues are harder to express, read, and, utilize
• Problem 3: Introverts get lost in the conversation more easily, and extroverts dominate
• Problem 4: Action points get forgotten post-meeting
• Problem 5: Technological and “ways of doing things” problems
• Problem 6: People get tired and lose concentration faster”
• Collaborate, but don’t forget to connect
• Using Process Street to run remote meetings (that don’t suck)

Let’s get started!
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