All posts in Business Operations

How to Create a Runbook: A Guide for Sysadmins & MSPs

create a runbook

How do you name a new server, export config data, or fix that one really annoying bug that keeps popping up every 2nd Thursday? Well, create a runbook!

For prepared IT professionals, that information is stored in a runbook. A runbook is a set of standardized documents, references and procedures that explain common recurring IT tasks. Instead of figuring out the same problem time and time again, you can refer to your runbook for an optimal way to get the work done. What’s more, you can also delegate tasks and onboard employees more effectively if you have documentation to train them with.

Whenever you do a task, think of this quote:

“Will you remember how to do these things 6 months from now? I find myself having to re-invent a process from scratch if I haven’t done it in a few months (or sometimes just a few days!). Not only do I reinvent the process, I repeat all my old mistakes and learn from them again. What a waste of time.” — Tom Limoncelli, The Operations Report Card

In short, the less time wasted figuring out how to do a task, the better it’ll be for your business efficiency, productivity, and sanity.

This post will look at:

First, let’s look at two example runbooks to give context on what I’m going to talk about.
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Don’t Micromanage! It Destroys Your Team. Do This Instead

micromanage HEADER

“Don’t micromanage!” you may have heard. But what if your team’s errors destroy the business!?

It’s hard watching someone make mistakes, especially if you already know how to avoid them.

Staying silent while they slip up (or even do things in ways you would not) is harder.

That doesn’t mean you have an excuse to micromanage them.

Micromanagement is the ultimate controlling management style. It’s demoralizing and counter-intuitive, as the desire for control to make sure everything goes to plan only creates more problems in the long term.

That’s why in this Process Street article, we’ll be looking at the following:

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Mobile Business Process Management in the Palm of Your Hands

mobile business process management

Mobile Business Process Management (BPM) has become an essential aspect of the modern business world. With the increasing need for remote work and rapid decision-making, organizations require a more flexible and efficient way to manage their business processes. 

To address this need, we’ve made our leading BPM software available in the palm of your hands. Your Android phone or tablet can now access the same data inside of Process Street as your browser. But what does that really mean for you and your organization? 

Let’s get into it!

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7 Steps To Procurement Management To Optimize Processes Responsible for ~70% of Revenue

procurement management

Procurement management directly impacts an organization’s bottom-line and can be responsible for 70% of revenue. With this in mind, it’s important to get procurement right.

The world of procurement has undergone tremendous changes in the past couple of years. Changes of particular importance when thinking about procurement management include:

  • Digital transformation: With 85% of organizations believing that this digital transformation will change the way they deliver services over the next 3-5 years.
  • Thinking about suppliers beyond price: With a greater focus on supplier synergies. The importance of supplier visibility regarding the procurement steps is realized.
  • Moving to effective change management: Organizations focus on a smooth change management plan, with procurement leaders agreeing change management is the biggest roadblock to achieving procurement goals.
  • Risk management and preparing the unexpected: With transparent procurement systems reducing risk exposure. Only 65% of procurement leaders have little or no visibility in their supply chain.

With this in mind, in this Process Street article, we explain how you can create a procurement management solution that leverages a digital transformation (using Process Street as your procurement management software), thinks about suppliers beyond price, and incorporates effective risk and change management.

Click on the relevant subheader below to jump to your section of choice. Alternatively, scroll down to read all we have to say on procurement management.

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How to Run a Security Audit: The Ultimate Guide (+ Free Templates)

Your Ultimate Guide on How to Run a Security Audit (+ Free Templates)

Readers, I’ll let you in on a little secret…

Between you and me, I was hacked; by my best friend no less! Thankfully, it was just an irritating prank, but it served to teach me a lesson.

Despite my grandiose beliefs that I knew everything I needed to know about all things digital, I hadn’t the faintest idea about how to spot a fraudulent message from a legitimate one. And this kind of threat is one of the biggest risks businesses face today.

In 2005, 157 data breaches were reported in the U.S., with 66.9 million records exposed. From 2005-2014 there was a 500% increase in data breach frequency.

That number almost doubled in 3 years to 1,579 reported breaches in 2017.

Although data breaches have since declined (1,506 issues were reported in 2019), IBM’s 2020 Data Breach report filed a 12% rise in data breach costs over 5 years, increasing to ~$3.92 million per incident.

The growing number of breaches and associated costs seems to be consequential of continuously changing hacking methods and an expanding number of entry points (that comes from digitization).

Security audits allow organizations to set up tougher walls of safety, as an adaptive defense against data breach threats.

With this in mind, Process Street created this article as your ultimate security audit guide, with access to our free security audit checklists and processes.

We’ll be covering:

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SOC 2 Compliance Made Easy (with Process Street & Drata)

soc 2 compliance faster easier than ever

SOC 2 has a reputation for being difficult and complex. You could argue that this is by design, since you need help from a small group of top-notch, pricey experts to be compliant. 

A kinder view is that it’s just how info security operates (there’s no one-size-fits-all fix). 

To set up the right protections, a company has to either create them according to the risks they face, or narrow down a huge list of possible controls, again, considering the risks. 

In a nutshell, SOC 2 goes with the first option: it sets broad criteria and lets each organization come up with controls to meet those criteria, based on their unique risks. Sounds reasonable, but it’s not exactly a walk in the park for those who aren’t experts.

That’s where both workflow automation and compliance automation software can come in handy.  

In this post I’ll introduce you to Drata and Process Street, two essential tools that, when used together, provide a complete solution to help you speed up and simplify your yearly SOC 2 compliance.

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The Ikigai Concept For Business: How to Find Your Business Purpose Fast

How to Find The Purpose of Your Business Through The Ikigai Concept Header

What is the ikigai concept for business?

Ikigai, which means “a reason for being”, is a Japanese word that has gently risen to the forefront of the business world, like a whale coming up to greet the dawn. It is a welcome wave of thoughtfulness and quiet in the face of a usually loud, blustering, profit-at-all-costs model.

The Ikigai concept beckons to us, asking us to consider the question: What do I get up for in the mornings? For most of us, the answer is not “money”.

Money, for most people, is a means to an end. If you ask people at the end of their lives what they wish they could have done differently, the answers are not usually “I wish I’d made more money”. They’re along the lines of “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends”.

Heart matters, both in our personal lives and in business. It seems a bit short-sighted to assume otherwise or to see business as totally apart from our personal values. The industrial revolution saw people exchanging their labor for money and becoming increasingly alienated from the joys of pouring their hearts into their creative endeavors and trade. They became cogs in the wheel of the factory that is capitalism.

We still have a top-down structure in many work environments today, but some companies have begun to embrace a horizontal knowledge approach, where managers and employees are on the same level and treated as equals. The more we learn about what makes employees happy, hopefully, the more we will move towards those models, of which the Ikigai concept is a prime example.

While ikigai is generally applied to finding purpose in your personal life, this Process Street post will look at how the same 4 concepts can be applied to your business as well:

Make sure you’re sitting comfortably. Let’s begin.
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9 Free Templates for a Successful Change Management Plan

9 Free Templates for a Successful Change Management Plan

Flicking through articles on my tablet, I came across a study conducted by McKinsey and Company, creating an aha moment when thinking about the term business change.

The study looked at 2000 executives from 900 companies across multiple industries. More than half of respondents stated that, in five years, their change efforts failed to meet business goals and sustained results over time.

We at Process Street wanted to know why?

Trying to navigate business change without a formal process is like plonking an elephant into a china shop…

It can get messy.

What you need is a change management plan, to bring structure and control to the change process. If you ignore change – whether that be external to your business, internal, expected, or unexpected – or fail to respond appropriately, then there can be shattering negative consequences.

With our 9 free change management plan templates, you can effectively guide your business through change. These templates are just what you need to succeed in an ever-changing business landscape.

Scroll down to find out what a change management plan is and why it is needed, before moving onto our top 9 free change management plan templates. Alternatively, you can use the links below to jump to your section of choice.

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Best Marketing Automation Software: 10 Tools to Autopilot Marketing Emails

Marketing automation software

Marketing your product to a wide audience is a real challenge for many businesses. Acquisition costs can be high and effective optimization of approach requires bucketloads of data.

According to research from Aberdeen Group, users of marketing automation software are 17 times more likely to track all their data than those who don’t employ these platforms. This drives improvement and is one of the primary reasons that users of marketing automation decrease customer acquisition costs year on year at over twice the rate of their competition.

Modern marketing methods mean that multiple in-depth campaigns can be run without all the unnecessary administration and time-consuming efforts of the past.

There are many automation tools to choose from on the market and in this article we’ll run through 10 of the best, giving you a breakdown of what each offers.

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How to Write a Proposal and Get What You Want (Free Templates)

 

A proposal has a lot of different purposes, but there’s only one good way to write one: the way that pulls together all of the information in a concise and persuasive way and helps you get what you want … whether that’s a whole new software system, or just a tweak to your marketing strategy.

This Process Street article isn’t about a business proposal — also known as a quote — but instead about the document required when formally pitching an idea for action and execution by managers or department heads.

To explain how to write a proposal document and get what you want, we’ll go through the following:

Let’s get started.
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