A business in a deep freeze looks the same from the outside. Lights are on. Email goes out. Slack pings. But inside, work has stopped moving. Missed deadlines trigger customer complaints, scattered teams duplicate effort, and institutional knowledge lives in one person’s head. The spiral feels impossible to stop.

You cannot salvage a business from a deep freeze with another all-hands meeting or another project management tool. You salvage it with documented processes that define how work actually gets done, who owns each step, and what happens when things go wrong. Here is why that thaws a frozen operation, and how to start.

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VRIO is a four-step business analysis framework that evaluates whether your resources and capabilities are Valuable, Rare, costly to Imitate, and supported by your Organization. If a resource passes all four tests, you have a sustained competitive advantage.

The framework was developed by strategic management professor Jay Barney and has been used by businesses across the globe for decades. Whether you are a startup founder stress-testing your moat or a Fortune 500 team evaluating a new capability, VRIO gives you a clear, repeatable way to answer the question: do we actually have a defensible advantage?

Imagine a military regiment holding a position of key tactical importance, let’s say a bridge. Situational awareness is crucial. The success of the operation depends on access to information that can inform situational awareness, and provide tactical & strategic advantage. In other words, a situation where information is nothing short of vital.

Such a regiment would have access to a large-scale technological intelligence network: aircraft spotters, satellite-mounted motion sensors, heat detectors, and communication eavesdroppers. Commanders with high-bandwidth taps into the supporting intelligence network should have access to vital information to enable decision-making while in the field.

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Standard operating procedures only work when they contain everything a team member needs to execute correctly. That means the SOP itself is rarely enough on its own. The supporting files, compliance forms, reference documents, training videos, and templates that sit alongside each procedure are what turn a static document into an executable, auditable process.

Attaching files directly to your SOPs eliminates the most common failure mode in process execution: someone following the steps but missing a critical resource because it lived in a different folder, a shared drive, or someone’s email inbox.

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In this article, we’ll take a look at the foremost standard for information security management – ISO 27001:2013, and investigate some best practices for implementing and auditing your own ISMS.

Here is a summary of what we’ll cover in this Process Street article:

• ISO 27001: The basics & why standards are important
• Who needs ISO 27001?
• How to implement ISO 27001
• Free ISO 27001 checklist
• How to get ISO 27001 certified
• Integrating your ISMS with other ISO standards

If you just want the free checklist for implementing and auditing your ISMS, you can grab that here. Otherwise, read on!
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Understanding quality and seeking to improve it is arguably the core purpose behind undertaking process improvements. Hence the creation of the Deming cycle.

But where did this philosophy of process improvement come from?

One key person is William Edwards Deming – sometimes referred to as Edward W. Deming. He’s principally a statistician, but one could even call him a philosopher of science.

Deming’s goal was to reapply the scientific method to business processes, and has left us with two main variants of his thinking: PDSA and PDCA.

In this article we’ll outline:

• What the Deming cycle is, with its history
• How to apply the Deming cycle to improve your business processes
• The important distinction between PDSA and PDCA
• How PDSA is employed in the medical field

Deming’s approach is not just about improving processes, but about improving a whole business.

In a recent meta-study from the British Medical Journal, researchers found only 2 out of 73 studies had applied PDSA in a way which fully met criteria. Commenting:

To progress the development of the science of improvement, a greater understanding of the use of improvement methods, including PDSA, is essential to draw reliable conclusions about their effectiveness.

And that’s why we’re writing this article!

As there are so many different types of recurring work happening in every part of your company, it can be difficult to keep track of what’s working and what’s not.

You can often spend too long looking for answers to questions like these:

“Which processes in the Sales team run smoothly and which take longer than they should?”

“Who in the Underwriting team completes their tasks on time and who misses their due dates?”

“Have we reduced the time it takes HR to complete the onboarding process, for new Account Executive hires in particular?”

“How many different processes is the IT Helpdesk team involved in, and how many tasks have they completed in the last 30 days?”

“How long does it take the Customer Success team to onboard a customer, and which onboarding tasks take the longest to complete?”

Wouldn’t it be useful to have a custom-made dashboard so you can get answers to these types of questions with one, quick glance?

Well, with the launch of Process Street BI Integrations, now you can.

To find out how you can export, store, visualize, and utilize all your Process Street data in the way that you want to, take five minutes to read through the following topics and find out:

• What is Process Street BI Integrations and who is it for?
• How Process Street BI Integrations work
• What benefits Process Street BI Integrations brings
• How to get Process Street BI Integrations

Let’s get started.
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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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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. That’s where Prioritization Matrix can help!

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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In the book The Balanced Scorecard, by David Norton and Robert Kaplan, it is noted that 90% of organizations fail to execute their pre-set strategy.

This is a concerning statistic when you consider that, for a majority of companies considered successful, an emphasis is placed on having formal and pre-established systems to inform, manage, and meet their strategic obligations.

In this sense, can we not infer executing business strategy = business success?

To bridge this gap between strategic ambition and business performance, Process Street has created a Strategic Planning Template, which you can use – for free – right away!

By executing the steps given in this template you will not only develop good strategy, but the delivery of this strategy will also prove successful.

Click here to access our free Strategic Planning Template!

But to accommodate this template, you need to have a solid understanding of strategic planning itself.

In this article, I’ll discuss what strategic planning is, the different strategic planning models – with an emphasis on the Cascade Strategic Planning Model -, why strategic planning is important, and more.

Click on the links below to read through:

• What is strategic planning?
• Strategic management vs strategic planning: What is the difference between these 2 terms?
• Why strategic planning is important
• What are strategic planning models?
• Use Process Street’s strategy planning template to document your strategic plan
• Strategic plan outline: Framework, structure, and governance
• Other strategic planning models and how you can implement them via Process Street

Let’s jump straight to it!
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