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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You need to start using a timeline template.

Why?

Whether you’re showing off your company’s milestones to potential investors, breaking down a project into individual tasks for your team, or just organizing your week to come, a timeline template will let you forget about formatting and get straight down to recording and using your relevant data.

Every single one of these is free to use and doesn’t require an email address, account creation, or anything of the sort – I’ve just collected the best templates from across the web in one place for you to have a wide selection. All 18 will be organized into one of four categories:

• Calendar timeline
• Linear timelines
• Project timeline templates
• Spreadsheet timeline templates

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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You need to invest in lean tools.

Why?

Studies show that moving towards a leaner business model can improve productivity by up to 25%, increase stock turnover by 33%, and increase on-time delivery by 26%.

The recognized benefits of being lean are only accumulating, with more and more studies advocating lean approaches in business for both economical and sustainable success.

However, some companies choose not to embrace lean philosophy through fear that the costs related outweigh the benefits gained. With this, we at Process Street have come to help.

You see, this fear has oozed from imperfect implementation and a misunderstanding. With the right lean tools and techniques, lean thinking can easily and successfully be applied.

In this article, we present you with our top 8 lean tools to assist you in implementing lean philosophy for your business or line of work. By using these tools, you will see a transformation, with maximal value and minimal waste.

Along with these tools, we grant you access to our template resources, which you can hop in and use right away for free.

Click on the relevant subheaders below to read the section of choice, alternatively scroll down for all I have to say.

• What is lean?
• The 5 lean principles
• Lean tools: Our top 8 lean tools to assist lean principle application
• Lean tools and the benefits they give
• Lean software tools you should use today

Keen to become lean? Let’s jump in!

“Productivity vs efficiency; which do you think is more important?“

A colleague asked me this the other day and I had to catch myself, because my initial response was:

“Aren’t they the same thing?“

That’s the problem – the words have become so overused and confused that they are almost taken to mean the exact same thing in casual conversation. There are, however, key differences between the two that you should know in order to correctly analyze the performance of something.

Simply put, productivity measures output over time whereas efficiency measures input versus output. Together they can tell you how quickly something is completed, the resources it takes to get there, and (through analysis) whether the whole thing is worth your investment.

There are also dangers associated with these metrics. For example, I tried to spend an hour every night working on one of many projects. Monday was playing guitar, Tuesday was physical drawing, Wednesday game development, Thursday digital drawing, Friday playing piano, and the weekend dealer’s choice.

Not only did I give up within a week and a half, but I couldn’t muster the motivation to do any work on any of my projects for weeks following. It doesn’t matter if you’re using the best productivity apps around; when you’re using productivity and efficiency as your goal, rather than the method to reach it, something will inevitably break underneath you.

So, in this post I’ll go through:

• What is productivity?
• What is efficiency?
• Productivity vs efficiency: Which should you focus on?
• Productivity vs efficiency: What’s the final result?

It’s time to analyze performance and improve your workflows without all the meaningless jargon. Let’s get started.

Enterprise collaboration software is essential to any organization.

It’s the catalyst for hitting those important, internal targets that pave the way for long-term profitability and success.

But collaborating is far easier said than done – and especially for enterprise businesses.

In fact, 86% of employees and executives cite a lack of collaboration as the reason for the failures that have happened in their workplace.

Luckily, there’s a solution: Enterprise collaboration software.

If you’re new to enterprise collaboration software but still want to get your enterprise collaborating like pros, you’ve come to the right place.

In this incredibly-informative, super-streamlined Process Street article, you’ll learn the definition of enterprise collaboration software, find out the benefits of it, and discover the best software for enterprise-wide collaboration, depending on your needs.

Just make your way through these sections:

• What is enterprise collaboration software (ECS)?
• What are the benefits of enterprise collaboration & ECS?
• The best enterprise collaboration tools: Messaging & meetings
• The best enterprise collaboration tools: Sharing & organizing files
• The best enterprise collaboration tools: Project management
• The best enterprise collaboration tools: Managing processes
• Collaborate properly as an enterprise with Process Street!

Let’s dive straight in. ⬇️

BPO examples are important to know.

Why?

At one point or another, many businesses reach a stage where they need to delegate some intensive processes to another provider.

This delegation, usually called Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), helps small businesses avoid hiring full-time teams to manage and measure the performance of different business processes. BPOs offer benefits from cost savings to a strong competitive edge, and they can help new and upcoming businesses grow more efficiently. 

Delegating one or more business processes doesn’t come without risks, though.

For every function or process that a business outsources to an external provider, the more organizational information they potentially jeopardize. The greatest threats to BPO, chief among them hidden costs that come with outsourcing, can severely damage a business’s customer push-back and satisfaction rates. 

To that end, let’s explore the main risks involved in BPO projects and how to mitigate them, as well as get a quick intro to BPO with specific examples and benefits. 

• BPO examples
• 3 common benefits associated with BPO examples
• 3 risks associated with BPO examples

Some workflow apps you might be using to help manage your processes require constant attention – reporting, updating, or having to contact other colleagues to get them to complete their section of the workflow.

These are interruptions, and according to Professor Gloria Marks from the University of California, with each interruption, there is an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds wasted to get back to the task.

Other workflows experience inefficiencies simply because your current processes take too long. Full stop.

The more time things take, the more work you have to do.

In this article, we’ll guide you through a series of tools which can help you create workflows, follow workflows, and automate workflows.

• Workflow apps for creating templates
• Workflow apps for task management
• Workflow apps for communication
• Workflow apps for storage
• Workflow apps for recording ideas
• Workflow apps for automated reporting
• Workflow apps for task delegation
• Workflow apps for process automation
• Workflow apps for dual-screening
• Start streamlining your processes with workflow apps

Joseph Juran, the Architect of Quality, paved the way for the active pursuit of quality in Business with the Juran Trilogy.

The Juran Trilogy redefined quality management; reducing chronic defects and the costs associated below a 20% industry expectation.

The Juran Trilogy has been shown to give benefits across multiple parameters, increasing productivity, reducing cycle-times, improving human safety, and reducing product failure rates – with a 80% reduction in some cases.

For us as Process Street, the Juran Trilogy is one of our favorite tools for improving business operations. It’s a straightforward methodology that brings results.

Learn how to apply the Juran Trilogy for your business, and improve the quality of operations. Click on the relevant subheader below to jump to your section of choice, alternatively scroll down to read all we have to say:

• What is the Juran Trilogy?
• Using the Juran Trilogy for quality control: Quality planning, control and improvement
• Implementing the Juran Trilogy using Process Street
• Juran Trilogy examples: Quality improvement in the real world

Let’s get started!

I lost $45,000 because I didn’t have a statement of work in place.

What makes it worse (or perhaps better?!) is that it wasn’t even my money.

It was my previous employer’s.

I was managing a website build for a big client and was under huge pressure to meet a tight deadline. So, as many do, I decided to start the project before the client signed the Statement of Work (SoW).

This was a big, expensive, mistake to make.

It cost an additional $45,000 to re-work parts of the build that the client had verbally approved, but hadn’t legally signed off.

Ouch.

(Despite what you might think, this isn’t the reason I don’t work there anymore!)

According to research, 37% of projects fail due to a lack of defined and approved project goals and objectives, which come with a Statement of Work (SoW). This causes around 80% of organizations to spend at least half their time on expensive rework.

“Not using a Statement of Work – SOW during the project initiation is a major cause of project failure” – 4PM, Statement of Work – SOW

But what is a Statement of Work (SoW) and how do you create one?

All will be revealed in this Process Street post, as we go through:

• What a Statement of Work (SoW) is
• Why bother with a Statement of Work (SoW)
• How to create a Statement of Work (SoW)

If you’re in a hurry, grab this free Statement of Work Process Template now, and catch up with the rest of the post when you can:

Click here to access the Statement of Work (SoW) Process Template!

Otherwise, keep reading and we’ll go through this template, in a little more detail, later.

Let’s get into it!