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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The real estate market is known to require a significant level of human interaction, but to what extent is the human touch really necessary for delivering a high-quality service for each and every customer?

The human-intensive nature of real estate creates a large margin for human error. Poor lead management, documentation, appointment coordination, tenant screening, and maintenance supervision are just a few examples of tasks/processes that are difficult to execute consistently without the assistance of automation software working in the background.

“Real estate is a market that is ripe for technological disruption. Whatever can be automated should be automated!” – Jyotirmay Samanta, How to Automate Your Real Estate Business?

Some of you property managers out there may claim that diving headfirst into the automation craze sweeping the business world is not such a good idea, as it undermines the face-to-face interactions that play such an important role in the field.

This is not entirely wrong, but all things considered, deciding to ignore new ways of streamlining processes will leave you in the dust as your competitors continue to find new ways of being more efficient.

Plus, some industry thought leaders believe that automation actually humanizes the property management experience even more:

“One of the most effective ways to humanize the property management experience is by providing better communication. Figuring out what residents want in order to improve service can be a complicated and daunting task. But today, a company can easily leverage automated surveys and other forms of real-time communication to glean real, useful feedback from residents.” – Doug Brien – How Technology And Automation Humanize The Property Management Experience

Recently, it was reported that total investment in real estate tech has ballooned from $33 million in 2010 to more than $5 billion in 2017. That is nothing short of astounding, especially when you consider the market’s volatility over the past decade.

Technology is driving the evolution of real estate, and market players need to keep up if they want any hope of leading the charge.

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NW Maids is a maid and cleaning company based in Seattle, WA with over 600 5-star customer reviews and a dedication to the highest standards.

We spoke with founder Ilya Ornatov about how NW Maids uses Process Street daily to drive success rate, boost lifetime customer value (LCV), and reduce employee errors.

The NW Maids story

It was in 2014 that Ilya set sights on the cleaning business and quit his job as a VP of Sales to focus on making the NW Maids vision a reality.

Business is currently booming, with 10 teams operating across the city of Seattle.

As the company has grown, they’ve managed to overcome various obstacles in their mission to simplify the home cleaning experience.

Let’s look at some of the insights they’ve gained, and problems they’ve solved with Process Street.

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This guest post is by Whitney Blankenship, Content Marketing Manager for Omnisend. When not writing awesome content, Whitney is reading up on the latest in digital marketing, ecommerce, and social media trends. Obsessed with pop culture, art, and metal. Powered by coffee. Fastest Googler in the West. Follow on Twitter.

In the ecommerce industry, omnichannel marketing has been a prevalent theme across articles, social media, conferences, and general thought leadership over the past few years.

Everyone is talking about it, but how many retailers are actually using it? How much of this is just theory, and how can we put omnichannel marketing into practice?

In this Process Street article, we’re going to walk you through the ins and outs of using omnichannel marketing for ecommerce. We’ll cover:

• What omnichannel marketing actually is (and more importantly, what it isn’t)
• How it’s different from multichannel marketing
• Reasons to implement an omnichannel marketing strategy for your ecommerce store
• Best practices to help you nail omnichannel marketing
• Plus, 17 free ecommerce process templates for your business

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Whether the number of possible business processes is finite or infinite is debatable. Needless to say, there are a lot.

You can start with a broad, complex discipline like operations, mapping out the general, high-level process, and go on to create a vast amount of sub-processes that fall under the same area.

How granular you go is really up to you, and depends on what is most suitable for the way you conduct business.

There are, however, a number of processes that are absolutely essential to efficiently running any kind of business, regardless of size, industry, or location.

Processes that, without clear documentation and management, will cause bottlenecks that stifle growth or at worst, force an organization to close its doors.

In this post, we’re going to be looking at what we, here at Process Street, have identified as the top 10 business processes that you should care about and focus on continuously optimizing.

These are the big dogs. The greatest hits.

Each process will be paired with at least one fully customizable template that will help you get started or evaluate and refine your current processes depending on what stage you are at in mapping out and implementing your own.

My hope is that you will not only extract valuable insight from this article, but also find ways to apply the templates that have been provided in a way that is practical and useful for your team or organization as a whole.

Let’s get into it.

Oh, and bear in mind, these are in no particular order.

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We’ve all been there. A letter icon on your phone has a five-digit number in the top corner and your apprehension at tackling it grows stronger every day.

You’re drowning in emails.

“In 1993 I didn’t need a system for doing email… and yet, today, I feel like the only way you’re going to succeed at a job… is figuring out how to deal with a high volume of email.” – Merlin Mann, Inbox Zero Google Tech Talk

Lucky for you, there’s a handy method called inbox zero which you can use to blast through your messages and stay on top of your backlog.

Say goodbye to email hell; your easy (and free) solution has arrived.

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Process mapping is a useful tool for what can be summed up as “seeing the big picture and little pictures at the same time”.

That may sound silly to you, but that’s really what it is.

The primary benefit achieved from mapping out your business processes is that you can accurately evaluate each of the steps needed to complete a certain workflow, while understanding exactly how each of them interacts with one another and contributes to the process as a whole.

This ability to evaluate all aspects of a process helps managers identify constraints, opportunities for improvement, and formulate strategies to implement changes without disrupting day-to-day work.

But how do you go about ensuring that the time and effort you put into constructing these maps translates into improved performance?

That’s the question we’ll be tackling in this post.

Before doing so, however, we must acknowledge that there is a huge range of complexity when it comes to methods for process mapping. If you are a small organization it can be as simple as drawing it out on a whiteboard, whereas enterprises use sophisticated mapping software tools like Appian and Lucidchart.

This point regarding complexity and different kinds of process maps leads us to another important sub-topic that needs to be addressed early on – the difference between process mapping and process modeling.

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You can’t earn €38.8 billion in annual revenue by stumbling through your processes.

Specifically, the IKEA supply chain is the glue that holds the company together and allows them to flourish.

From their suppliers through to the product in-store, the supply chain is set up and managed in a way that reduces costs at every stage, makes the products more appealing to customers, and makes the brand as a whole seem more appealing.

It’s genius, really.

So let me show you how they do it.

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I meet so many people who love writing.

Whenever anyone asks me what I do and they find out I’m a writer, they almost always say some variant of the same thing:

“Oh, I would love to write more!”

“I wish I could do that – but I just don’t have time”

“I’ve been meaning to start blogging, but haven’t gotten round to it”

These responses are pretty consistent whether they come from a regular Joe or someone whose business and professional life would benefit from them writing more.

So many companies build a blog and intend to use it properly, only for it to fall into disrepair and get forgotten.

Why?

Because writing isn’t anyone’s core task and is then seen as less valuable.

So what if I told you that you could finish a blog post in 3 hours?

Would 3 hours a week, or even a month, be worth committing to give yourself or your company a functioning and marketable blog? Is that a small enough commitment to open up a new channel or boost your SEO?

It is. You know it. So let me show you how I do it.

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On September 23, 1999, NASA’s $193 million Mars Climate Orbiter was obliterated 57km above the surface of Mars.

What caused such a catastrophic event? Badly implemented processes.

“The problem here was not the error; it was the failure of NASA’s systems engineering, and the checks and balances in our processes, to detect the error. That’s why we lost the spacecraft.”
—Edward Weiler, NASA associate administrator for space science

Despite all of NASA’s precautions, preparatory research and technical developments, the deviation from standard procedure for making sure their units were consistently imperial or metric was what resulted in the disastrous calculation error responsible for the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter, and in turn huge amounts of time, money, and material resources.

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