In 1836, Edward Bulwer-Lytton came up with the adage “the pen is mightier than the sword“.

Bulwer-Lytton was referring to good writing and effective communication being the most powerful tool of all. So powerful that it could win wars.

In business’ modern-day war against tough deadlines, seemingly never-ending workloads, and stiff business competition, Bulwer-Lytton’s adage still rings true.

Particularly when it comes to penning checklists.

Here at Process Street, we’d go far as to say that checklists are something of a secret weapon hidden in plain sight. They maximize productivity, minimize stress and anxiety, and can keep perilous human error at bay.

But the rewards can only be reaped if checklists are well-written.

Not sure how to write checklists properly? Confused whether you’re penning checklists the right way or not?

I’ve got you covered in the following sections where you’ll learn what checklists are used for, why they’re so useful, on top of being given tips and tricks for writing checklists from 15 thriving companies:

• What are checklists?
• Why are checklists so useful?
• Tips & tricks for writing checklists from 15 thriving businesses
• Writing checklists: The key takeaways
• Use Process Street for writing checklists efficiently and effectively!

Now, it’s time to march onwards!

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At Process Street, we’re all about checklists. We use them for absolutely everything.

I have a checklist for my daily tasks, a checklist for writing this blog post, and even a checklist for planning our monthly sprint!

Basically, no task is too big nor too small for a checklist.

But it got us thinking – what are the best ways to use checklists to get maximum value from them?

My personal view is that they’re most useful for highly regular recurring tasks, like a sales call or dealing with an IT support ticket.

My reasoning here is that following the checklist gives you incremental benefits, so the more you follow it the more you benefit. Moreover, the more you follow a business process, the more you understand it’s faults and failings, allowing you to make improvements. Therefore, using a checklist to follow a business process for a task which you do multiple times a day will give you the highest efficiency savings and output increases.

This is compounded if you use a tool like Process Street due to its automation potential; you can automate data entry for data gathered during the task, you can trigger another action in another app, or you can automate the approval process for a completed task.

So I think I have a pretty strong case for why the most common actions benefit most from checklists, but that doesn’t necessarily tell us how they can work best for you.

In this article, you’ll look at a few different ways of employing checklists and get great insight and input from across the industry, as part of Process Street’s original research.

• Checklists in the workplace: Notes and ad hoc checklists for organization
• Checklists in the workplace: Employee tasks and recurring processes for efficiency
• Checklists in the workplace: Idea generation and getting good work done
• How not to use checklists in the workplace
• Gaffes and mixups; the hilarious happenings of checklists gone wrong!
• Start using Process Street checklists in your workplace today!

Let’s get started.

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Fleet management is so much more than simply owning and operating vehicles. It’s a complex interplay of many different factors and optimizations – much like the concept of business process management.

In recent years, more and more tools for fleet management optimization are emerging. Fleet management is changing.

Projected growth of the fleet management industry to about $30 billion by 2022 is largely driven by advances in technology – and the rate at which fleet management companies adopt this emerging technology will largely impact the rate of this projected growth.

And it seems fleet management companies are aware of this.

The National Conference of State Fleet Administrators (NCSFA) recommended in a 2018 survey of 44 state and university fleet participants that fleet management companies begin implementing “robust fleet management policies and procedures” as well as “accelerating the implementation of technology to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of fleet management practices”.

That same survey showed that 38% of repairs and 39% of preventative maintenance work were insourced, on top of the in-house work that is done as part of routine fleet management. Just another incentive to tighten up your processes and streamline all of that manual work with a good, solid process.

In this article, we’ll be looking at how you can use Process Street to implement robust fleet management policies and procedures. I’ll cover:

• What is fleet management?
• What is fleet management software?
• Fleet management templates
• Using Process Street for fleet management

Let’s start by making sure we’re all on the same page; what exactly is fleet management?
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This is a guest post by Rahul Varshneya, the co-founder and President of Arkenea. Rahul has been featured as a technology thought leader in numerous media channels such as Bloomberg TV, Forbes, HuffPost, Inc, among others.

Several organizations use a wide range of tools to execute and monitor their internal processes. These systems are interfaced by human agents who pass on the data output from one system as input to the next system in the pipeline.

Because of the non-automatic nature of manual execution, manual data entry work makes these processes slow and error-prone.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had these interfaces taken care of automatically?

That’s right, we are talking about Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – a transformational paradigm that optimizes such processes by automating repetitive, rule-driven tasks.

According to Forrester Research, RPA market revenue is expected to gross $1 Billion USD in 2019.

With RPA and by using RPA tools, your internal processes can be finished faster and more efficiently. It would free your agents from trivial data entry and data exchange tasks so you could deploy them to do more strategic process initiatives.

In this article, we at Process Street will present 5 best practices for RPA. We will then introduce our favorite RPA tools, so you can walk away with actionable robotically automated processes.

This article has been structured as the following:

• How does Robotic Process Automation eliminate tasks from structured environments?
• Software silos and how they affect your teams
• How to break silos with the implementation of Robotic Process Automation
• How to achieve exceptional results with Robotic Process Automation implementation
• RPA tools: Process Street’s top four RPA tools
• How you can use Process Street’s RPA tool capabilities

Let’s get started!

Note that RPA does not aim to eliminate jobs. It aims to reduce the burden of mundane and repetitive tasks of the existing staff so they can work on more strategic initiatives.
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Perhaps you’ve heard about checklists. Perhaps you know someone who uses checklist templates. Who knows, you may even have a simple checklist template or two you use in your own business.

Chances are, if you clicked this link, you’re interested in learning about simple checklist templates. Or specifically, how you can use them to run your business more efficiently.

You probably already know the basics – why checklists are useful, and the value of using a BPM software like Process Street. But you want more.

You want to know the essential checklists, the ones all the top CEOs and successful executives are using. You want ready-made checklists that will save you time, money, and confusion, and you want to learn about some of the immediate benefits of using simple checklist templates, straight from the mouths of those who have used them to run successful businesses of their own.

Well, you clicked to the right article. Here, I’ll be looking at an extensive correspondence between our content team and a number of successful SMB owners who just happen to be simple checklist template champions.

Whether it’s daily, weekly, monthly, or otherwise, we’ve devised this article as a resource that will help you understand how you can use simple checklist templates in your business.

Breaking it down, we’ll look at:

• Benefits of simple checklist templates
• What simple checklist templates are successful business owners using?
• Simple checklist template essentials: Recommendations from top business owners
• How to build a simple checklist template with Process Street

But first, what is simple checklist template, anyway?
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Deadlines.

Meetings.

Presentations.

As an employee and business owner, your agenda is jam-packed full of to-dos. It can sometimes be difficult to stay afloat. This is why we at Process Street have created this article to make your working life a lot easier.

We’re going to look at making checklists for the effective management of your work.

We asked business owners and employees across the globe: What tips or tricks would you give someone for making checklists?

We gathered our responses, sieved out significant commonalities, and wrapped up our findings to produce this article.

Click on a subheader to jump to any section, or scroll down to read a full in-depth account on making checklists.

• ‎Making checklists: Why use checklists?
• Making checklists: Tip 1 – Split up your large projects
• Making checklists: Tip 2 – Keep your checklists manageable
• Making checklists: Tip 3 – Group your tasks
• Making checklists: Tip 4 – Keep a record
• Making checklists: Tip 5 – Regularly update your checklists
• More tips for your checklist templates
• How to make superpowered checklists using Process Street

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How do you stand out against overwhelming competition? You need an edge; a value proposition isn’t enough on its own.

You need to make sure you’re out-competing the competition by keeping costs down and understanding the value you’re delivering to your customer. But how do you continuously improve your value offering while keeping costs down?

Enter the value chain.

A value chain is a model of looking at all of your business processes and figuring out how to gain a competitive advantage by focusing on developing maximum value in your product or service, while keeping your profit margins in the green at the same time.

Originally proposed by Harvard’s Michael Porter in his 1998 book Competitive Advantage, there’s a lot of ground to cover. Where do you start? What’s the process? What kind of tools exist to make the value chain analysis easier?

Well, if you’re looking for a clear, concise introduction to Michael Porter’s Value Chain model, you’ve come to the right place. Read on for a breakdown of:

• What is a value chain?
• Michael Porter’s original value chain model
• Value chain analysis
• Benefits of value chain analysis
• Value chain analysis process
• Value chain vs supply chain
• Porter’s primary value chain components
• Porter’s secondary value chain components
• Bonus: Porter’s Five Forces

By the end of this article, you should have a firm grasp on the value chain model, with a better idea of how to apply it to your own business. We’ll also investigate how to integrate BPM software like Process Street into the value chain.
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From humble beginnings as a simple clone of the then-popular first-person shooter Quake, Half-Life would eventually become the first installment of one of the most successful video game series of all time.

Today, Valve Inc. is one of the most renowned, innovative, and successful game development companies worldwide, boasting one of the largest video game digital distribution service platforms on the planet, a range of pioneering virtual reality hardware and an impressive roster of instantly recognizable and widely-loved game titles.

Specifically, the development of the original Half-Life makes for an interesting case-study, and represents a model of innovative agile organizational management.

Half-Life is remembered as one of the best games of all time, and the intense environment in which it was created – where the Cabal process was born – is testament to that legacy.

Companies like Valve, Zappos, Semco, and even Google have come up with different models to enable the potential of their workers. These methods give power to the employees to pursue their own entrepreneurial pet projects.

Tesla’s innovation is equal part production process as it is the product; you need only look to the hulking Gigafactories to find evidence of this.

Similarly, Facebook’s success is not just in the service it offers users, but also how it was designed to scale to billions of users.

The process of organizational management is always an important factor in the outcome of these hugely successful products.

In this post I’ll be looking at democratic methods of organizational management, with a particular focus on Valve’s Cabal process. I’ll also mention a couple of other interesting examples of holocratic organizational management, and talk about our own internal structure at Process Street.

Here’s a quick breakdown of each section, if you want to jump ahead:

• What is organizational management?
• Valve’s Cabal game design process
• Zappo’s holocratic organizational management system
• Semco’s organizational management success story
• How digital democracy plays a role in organizational management
• Process Street’s organizational management structure

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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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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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