I moved house not too long ago.

Now, I’ve always been a pretty terrible record keeper in my own life.

To remedy this I tried the hoarder technique. If I thought something was even remotely important, I’d throw it in a box file and vow to come back to it one day in the future.

It was only when I came to moving, and thought I’d try to Marie Kondo my crap away, that I dug out all my box files and the piles of messy paper inside them.

I’ll be really honest with you – it’s not an approach to records management that I would recommend.

Your business probably creates exponentially more records than I do, so you certainly can’t use an unthought-out approach to records management either.

That’s why we’ve decided to take some of the basics of records management, explain them, and give you a series of actionable ways to get started taking control over the lifecycles of records in your company.

In this Process Street article, we’ll be looking at:

• What is records management?
• Why is records management important?
• The 5 key steps to records management
• How to build a records management process

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This is a guest post from Pauline Farris, a translator who speaks Portuguese, English, Spanish and Italian. She travelled the world to immerse herself in new cultures and learn languages. Today she is proud to be a voting member of the American Translators Association and an active participant of the Leadership Council of its Portuguese Language Division.

The world of business is changing fast and there’s no time for hesitation.

In every domain, competition is getting strong and the market is getting less tolerant of mistakes. This is why more and more companies worldwide are embracing Business Process Management (BPM).

BPM is a management system which aims at improving a company’s overall performance through optimization of important business processes, appropriate management, and maintaining those changes which have been made.

The BPM market is expected to grow to approximately USD $16 billion by 2023, with a 14% CAGR between 2017 and 2023 (Business Process Management Market Research Report).

This shows that companies on a global level have recognized the need for improvement, development, and change.

Can business process management help your organization achieve its goals? It’s time to take a deeper look. Here is an exploration of the main benefits of adopting BPM and the reason why the BPM market is thriving worldwide.

This Process Street article will include:

• A brief primer on Business Process Management (BPM)
• The 9 benefits of BPM: How to boost your business
• How you can get started and reap the benefits of BPM today!

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Startup life is hard enough when you’re trying to get a product off the ground.

But the challenge doesn’t stop at your first investment round.

The growth stage of a startup is where a whole load more are likely to flounder. You’ve made big promises to your investors and you’re struggling to meet those targets – not ideal.

Achieving the first stages of growth necessary to access further venture capital, or generate revenues you can rely on, is not easy. Your customers have higher expectations for your product and your team is expanding and professionalizing all while you’re still trying to improve output.

Fortunately, conferences exist where you can go to watch lectures, promote your product, and realize that everyone else is fighting the same issues at the networking events.

One growing scene at the moment is the European SaaS market.

Not as mature as its American cousin, the SaaS market in Europe has an explosion of companies and all of them are vying for that next stage of growth.

That’s why we went down to SaaStr Europa to find out what advice the speakers and panels would have for the 2019 cohort.

In this Process Street article, we’ll cover the key business growth lessons from a series of headline lectures:

• Logging in to Paris
• The Answers to Everything – with SaaStr, G2, Twilio, and CircleCI
• Hackathon to Unicorn – with Talkdesk
• Happy Customers at Scale – with New Relic
• The Rules You Can Break – with Tradeshift
• Freemium at Scale – with Typeform
• Process Street won the prize!

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Yahoo! lost $350 million to their sale price after the reveal that a security breach had caused 3 billion accounts to be compromised. They learned the hard way that if you have sensitive data you’ll also need measures to protect it.

You need an easy way to secure your processes without providing extra hoops for your team to jump through and get confused over.

That’s why we here at Process Street let you set task permissions in your checklists.

This feature lets you hide tasks from viewers with variable permission levels within your checklists. You’re left with a checklist that shows different tasks to different people based on what you think they should see.

The best thing? It solves your security and clarity issues while providing a singular location for your data to be stored, making it easy to review.

Enough dilly-dallying, let’s get to it!
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If you want to grow your business, you need to know how to allocate your resources to make it happen. How do you figure out the steps you need to take, or the processes you need to implement to make it happen?

You conduct a gap analysis.

Simply put, the gap analysis is a tool designed to help you understand where you are, and what you need to do in order to get to where you want to be.

In this article, I’ll be breaking down the basics and running through a process for getting started with performing your first gap analysis.

Here’s what this Process Street article has in store:

• What is a gap analysis? In simple terms
• Common use cases for gap analysis
• Different types of gap analysis
• The gap analysis process
• Gap analysis tools
• How to streamline the gap analysis process

Let’s get started.

What is a gap analysis?

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In 2018, we saw more than 3.8 billion email users worldwide. 3.8 billion and increasing. That is almost half the worlds population on email.

From this statistic, Process Street gives to you both good news and bad news. The good news is that you have a fantastic method to communicate with your customers.

The bad news?

Business and consumer emails sent and received per day will exceed 293 billion in 2019, which is forecast to grow to over 347 billion in 2023.

Email after email multiplied into the billions loses your line of communication to the spam folder.

How do you make sure your emails are noticed and stand out from this crowd? The answer, by sending follow up emails.

In this Process Street article, we will look at the basics of follow up emails. We provide email templates to help you get started and processes for follow up email campaigns.

We will help you stand out.

In this article you’ll find:

• Who needs a follow up email?
• How to write a follow up email.
• Why do you need to write follow up emails?
• Five follow up email templates.
• How to write an email campaign.
• How you can use Process Street to help your email campaign.

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What exactly is an “audit“?

The International Organization for Standardization defines it as:

“[the] systematic, independent and documented process for obtaining objective evidence and evaluating it objectively to determine the extent to which the audit criteria are fulfilled.” – ISO, from ISO 19011:2018 – Guidelines for Auditing Management Systems

That’s another way of saying someone takes a look at what you’re doing, gathers some evidence, and compares that evidence to what you’re supposed to be doing (in other words, a set of clearly documented requirements).

In the case of ISO, these requirements are known as standards. ISO 9001 is a standard. ISO 14001 is a standard.

Importantly, this understanding of audit implies that there are a few main things being considered by the auditor:

• What’s documented by the company (e.g. internal processes, policies, and SOPs)
• Evidence gathered to support how these policies, procedures, and SOPs are implemented in practice
• The requirements defined by the ISO standard being audited against (e.g. ISO 9001)

Audits performed by companies to assess and analyze their own management systems are known as internal audits. Many resources for guiding companies on how to perform internal audits exist, and foremost of these is the ISO 19011 standard.

For most management system standards, internal audits are an important requirement. Even guideline standards like ISO 26000 for social responsibility depend on reports to evidence the success of their implementations.

As such, ISO 19011 defines a set of guidelines; a framework for companies to plan, implement, and improve upon their audit programs, for auditing the implementation of management systems.

Since the first edition of ISO 19011 was published in 2002, many new management system standards have been published.

These standards often share a common structure, including certain requirements, terms, and definitions being used. That means ISO 19011 can be used to devise highly economic audit programs, wherein knowledge and processes can be shared and applied across various management systems.

By considering how they might take a broader approach to management system auditing and integration, companies implementing ISO management systems stand to save time, money, and confusion when preparing for and implementing internal audits.

The goal of this post is to provide a spring-board for understanding ISO 19011, and how to get started with internal ISO auditing. In this post, I’ll cover:

• What is ISO 19011
• 7 principles of ISO auditing
• Different types of ISO audit
• Key elements of an ISO audit
• 8 free ISO audit templates

If you just want the free ISO audit templates, then here they are:

• ISO 19011:2018 Checklist for Auditing Management Systems
• ISO 9001:2015 Audit Checklist for Quality Management Systems
• ISO 26000:2010 Social Responsibility Performance Assessment Checklist
• ISO 45001:2018 Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Audit Checklist
• ISO 27001:2013 Information Security Management System (ISO 27K ISMS) Audit Checklist
• ISO 14001 Environmental Management Self Audit Checklist
• ISO 9004:2018 for Sustainable Success in QMS Self Audit Checklist
• ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 Integrated Management System (IMS) Checklist

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When it comes to managing what work gets done, we’re often faced with a choice: is this a project, a process, …or both?

Different tasks need different approaches.

You need multiple techniques in your skillset and understanding the difference between projects and processes, and how this impacts on work, makes for a very useful tool.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• Project vs Process: What’s the difference?
• What is a process?
• What is a project?
• The principles of process management
• How projects can become processes
• Get started with process management today

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Organizations exist to create value for their stakeholders. By setting objectives, developing strategies, following through and continuously improving processes, value is created.

That’s the ideal situation, at least. In reality, it’s not always as simple as making a plan and sticking to it. There’s always the risk that certain events could affect the success of these plans.

It’s the job of management to make adequate preparations to ensure that systems are in place to continue hitting objectives, even when the beast of unforeseen circumstance rears its head.

Enterprise risk management (ERM) is a direct solution to these kinds of uncertainties, allowing management to oversee the continual creation of value on a complete, integrated, organization-wide level.

By utilizing an effective ERM system, you can rest assured that the organization will see a consistently high success rate in terms of hitting objectives and KPIs.

Stakeholders of all kinds, from customers, suppliers, government and regulatory bodies are all increasingly interested in how businesses are implementing ERM. A well-implemented ERM system could set the foundation for many high-quality, long-term client relationships.

Equally, not having a proper system for enterprise risk management could mean your business is perceived as less competent, and could even result in loss of clients and damage to brand image.

In this post, I’ll discuss:

• Introduction to and basics of enterprise risk management
• Benefits of a well-implemented ERM system
• Core ideas of ERM
• Examples of different ERM approaches
• The enterprise risk management process
• Implementing ERM
• Automating ERM

To begin with, I’ll start by breaking down the full scope of an ERM system, and some basic definitions.

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When you’re building a business, a team, or any kind of system, you need ways to understand how well you’re doing.

You want to be able to look at your performance and set base standards which have to be met, and be able to contrast those standards with an understanding of what best practice looks like.

You want to understand where on that scale of performance you are at.

It’s why we use things like KPIs, OKRs, or other goal/objective driven metrics.

But those metrics, as useful as they are for some things, are often hard to apply to qualitative data.

This is where maturity models can become an incredibly useful tool.

One model we’ll discuss here is the Capability Maturity Model, and the CMMI Institute alone appears to have about +8500 accredited users of this model (interestingly, in 2018 ~80% were pairing it with agile methodologies).

The problem, though, is that maturity models are often shrouded in complex terminology and overly-convoluted systems. How am I supposed to implement one in my business if people can’t understand it?

In this Process Street article, we’ll tear through the jargon and look at:

• What is a maturity model?
• What are the current limitations of business process maturity models?
• Which are the best business process maturity models?
• What is a Capability Maturity Model (CMM)?
• What is the Agile ISO Maturity Model (AIMM)?
• How does Process Street fit in your maturity model?

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