This is a guest post from Mary Hampton is a content marketer, sharing experience on writing, education, and self-development in her publications. In her free time, she enjoys writing fiction as well as reading it.

Businesses are constantly under pressure to stay ahead.

This makes anything that can provide increased performance an important edge – especially if it doesn’t have too many drawbacks.

In a market where even the smallest optimization can go a long way, business process management just might be what you’re looking for.

Today’s Process Street article takes a look at pretty much every reason why you might want to implement a BPM suite for your business.

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Offboarding a team member is never easy.

Relationships aside, the logistics of making sure that the ex-employee isn’t a security risk, their old tasks are accounted for and covered, and that there will be someone to take their place (with the appropriate training) is a tall order to meet.

That’s why this post will show you everything you need to know about offboarding an employee, including:

• Why offboarding is important
• How to effectively (and safely) offboard an employee
• How to make opportunities out of them leaving

I’ll even throw in some free templates you can follow to make sure that your offboarding goes right every time.

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As humans, we tend to focus more on the things we need to do than the things we’ve already done. This so-called “Zeigarnik effect”, named after Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, means our minds are often swimming with all of the tasks, responsibilities, and mental notes that we think we should be focusing on.

All of these tasks and projects that need doing, this mental to-do list, without a clear hierarchy of importance can make it difficult for us to stay focused and actually get things done.

One way to combat all of this Zeigarnik noise is to note down everything. Make an actual to-do list. Studies have been done, and it has been shown that the very act of noting down tasks can quite simply “make you more effective”.

But, even with a to-do list, before you actually get anything done it’s necessary to have a clear idea of your priorities.

Sounds simple enough, right? Unfortunately, figuring out what to prioritize can be hard. It’s a complicated process that involves weighing up cost against value, effort against time, and for a lot of businesses, will likely involve many different stakeholders.

The solution is to work out a process for determining what to prioritize.

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We recently released 5 checklist templates designed specifically to help Appfolio users manage a handful of core property management workflows more effectively.

The following templates are a continuation of our effort to support property managers who are already using a software tool to manage their processes.

This time we’ve customized the templates for Propertyware users, and in the following weeks, we will release another set of templates designed for property managers who use Buildium.

Propertyware, a subsidiary of RealPage, is a cloud-based, end-to-end property management platform that helps you manage the entire renter life-cycle, from online payment processing to customer portals and work order management tools.

Based in San Francisco, California, Propertyware is one of the oldest full-service property management platforms out there, and has built a loyal customer base of over 2,000 companies.

If you are one of those companies, we hope you will find these checklists useful and integrate them to improve productivity and overall business performance.

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Deepwater Horizon – arguably one of the most catastrophic industrial disasters of human history, and the estimated largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry.

It also happens to be one of the most abysmal failures of quality management by any company, period.

On an otherwise unsuspecting evening of April, 2010, approximately 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico, the first in a chain of quality management related failures became glaringly apparent as the emergency response protocols were enforced after an oil leak in the drilling well was discovered.

The oversights were as follows:

• Lack of proper quality assessment resulted in weak, potentially contaminated cement or “drilling mud” used in the initial failsafe failing to properly block the leak.
• Fluid pressure tests were not properly carried out and clear warnings were ignored.
• Rising oil and gas levels were not properly monitored.
• The final failsafe on the ocean floor, designed to close the leaking pipe shut, failed to close due to the conditions of the drill pipe.

The aftermath of this chain of negligence left 11 people dead, caused over 130 million gallons of oil to leak into the Atlantic Ocean, and cost over $62 billion in damages.

Not one point of failure, but four. Clearly not an anomaly, this disaster was the result of a series of systematic failures that uncover a dark truth about the reality of cost-cutting and disregard for quality control.

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If the United Nations Environment Programme is to be taken seriously, the current generation is the last generation with a realistic chance of kick-starting the processes necessary to halt or reverse the looming global crisis of climate change.

“We are clearly the last generation that can change the course of climate change, but we are also the first generation with its consequences,” Kristalina Georgieva, the CEO of the World Bank.

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Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a way of visualizing a software program using a collection of diagrams. That is one of the simplest ways to define it.

In equally simple terms, it is a modeling language used to analyze, design and implement software-based systems.

However, UML diagrams can be applied to more than just software engineering and development.

There are over a dozen types of UML diagrams that are used for a range of different purposes and have significant variances in complexity.

One of the simplest types, which also happens to be the most suitable diagram for modeling business processes, is called the activity diagram.

This is the diagram we will be focusing most of our attention on in this post, though we will take a quick look at some of the other common types for the sake of context and because you may also find them useful beyond the purpose of process modeling & optimization.

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Business process reengineering isn’t useless jargon or management gone mad – it’s a vital aspect of any business that wants to adapt, improve and survive.

Whether you’ve discovered a new tool that revolutionizes the way your processes work or you’ve realized that a process is being ignored to the point of being useless, this is the perfect way to get your team back on track and performing at their best.

Read on to find out:

• What business process reengineering is
• Why (and when) you should bother with BPR
• How to use BPR (with detailed instructions)
• How famous brands have used BPR to radically improve their processes

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It’s no secret that documenting and analyzing your business processes is vital to creating a healthy business.

Yet, despite the benefits of bpm software and business process mapping being readily talked about, value stream mapping doesn’t get the same share of attention.

This is a mistake.

Value stream mapping is just as, if not more, important to reducing waste and increasing your business’ efficiency than standard process mapping.

That’s why I’ll be showing you how to make a value stream map from start to finish, with no wasted time and no needlessly confusing terms.

Let’s go.

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SWOT: Whether or not the acronym conjures images of riot gear and armored vehicles for you, we are of course talking about a business methodology for evaluating the internal and external factors governing the performance of your business.

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. A SWOT analysis is a way of evaluating a part of (or even a whole) business, based on the criteria of each of the words in the acronym.

If you just want to dive right in and skip the details, here’s the template, as promised:

When you actually run it, conditional logic will show only the tasks relevant to you, to save you a whole lot of manual work and messing around in the long run.

If you’re interested in learning how to use the template, plus some best practice SWOT principles, real-world use cases and some post-SWOT advice, read on.

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