If you want to employ approaches like business process management in your business it’s best to have a solid understanding of how these theories work.

One crucial aspect of using these theories correctly is understanding their development.

It’s common for managers to want to employ cutting edge ideas in their business, but without a deep understanding these methods can be misapplied.

These errors will reduce the effectiveness of your process management and hold your business back.

It’s not just business where process improvement efforts are regularly being undermined! In a recent meta-study from the British Medical Journal, researchers found only 2 out of 73 studies had applied the PDSA process improvement methodology 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.

In this Process Street article, we’re going to look at some of the fundamentals and pick out key historical thinkers whose work we can trace from in order to better inform how process improvement methods should be done. Including:

• Who is Frederick Winslow Taylor?
• What is Taylorism?
• What W. Edwards Deming can teach us about continuous improvement
• Why Taiichi Ohno helps you cut waste in your business
• What Ludwig von Bertalanffy tells us about systems
• How Bill Smith changed the way we view defects
• What Ray Dalio can show us about company culture

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Whether you’re submitting a draft of an article for review, collating a report for senior management, or presenting a product design, you probably need someone to sign off on your work.

This happens day in day out in organizations all around the world.

Yet, the sign off process can be slow and littered with delays.

Anyone who has worked in software development will know the pain of submitting work for review, only for revisions and changes to drone on and on. The time spent waiting can sometimes be as much as the time spent working.

And this, friends, is bad for business.

Last week I published an article on Muda – waste in production systems – and laid out the different ways poor processes create waste and damage business performance. One of those wastes is referred to as Time on Hand, or waiting.

In this article, we’ll look to cover the most common occurrence of this waste: the approval flow. We’ll look at:

• What an approval process is
• What common approval workflows are
• Best practices for approvals
• How you can use Process Street to streamline your approvals

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Documented processes don’t just save you time, money, and give a consistent method for your team to follow. They make everything you do more reliable and efficient, even increasing project success rate by 70%.

Unfortunately, getting started is the hardest part. Whether you don’t feel like you have time to set up your management system or just don’t know what to use for your needs, it’s difficult to get over the initial learning curve.

That’s why I’m going to outline the 9 organizational tools you can use to get started right now.

From their pros and cons and best use guidelines to general tips on what to do with your organizational tools, this post will cover:

• Process Street
• Office 365 (Microsoft Word and Excel)
• Trello
• Airtable
• Google Suite (Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Drive)
• Zapier
• …and 4 process management techniques to get you started

It’s time to learn what organizational tools you need to manage your processes, and how to use them.

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Humans are responsible for 70% of airplane crashes, 90% of car wrecks, and 90% of workplace accidents.

But people are also a core part of business. The same factors that make humans irreplaceable — nuanced judgement, emotion, and creativity — also make humans a pain to manage.

You don’t get these problems with computers, but computers are also dumb. Mostly too dumb to carry out processes without human intervention.

Humans are the chaotic variables in your processes. Humans make spelling errors in your marketing emails, create security risks in your software, and forget pretty much anything that isn’t written down.

And it’s because of human error that businesses need processes.

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After Elon Musk’s successes sending Falcon Heavy into space with his Roadster attached, the fanfare around his achievements has reached new highs.

But not everything is rosy for Musk.

Tesla is struggling. It’s not hitting its production targets for the Model 3, and this is not for the first time.

The goal for Tesla has been to hit 5,000 units per week and though Musk is confident of reaching that figure the Model 3 production has been mired by continually failing to meet demand.

It’s not enough just to have a good product, you also need to have high performing production systems in place to take that product effectively to market.

In this Process Street article, we’ll tackle the machine which builds the machine and we’re going to look at:

• What a production system is and what a good one looks like
• The production system of the future and how Elon Musk wants to build it
• Why a production system isn’t just for manufacturing
• How you can build production systems for your business
• Why Tesla’s Gigafactory is Musk’s most ambitious project yet

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Documenting processes is great in theory, but creating and following them can be a pain.

Your processes need to be standardized so that everyone’s performing the same tasks consistently. However, that often leaves you with either a large, complex and unusable process which covers every situation or lots of smaller, specialized processes which become difficult to manage or track.

Conditional logic saves you all of that trouble by letting you create processes which change to suit the situation at hand.

By setting rules for your processes to follow and update based on their outcome, you can simplify your processes and make even the most complicated task list easy to navigate. All optional tasks can be automatically hidden from view until (and if) they are required to keep your dashboard clear and encourage teams to avoid taking shortcuts.

Nobody wants to work through a horribly complex process that you know you won’t need half of to complete your task.

However, as with business process automation, conditional logic’s power is best shown through examples, so today I’ll be showing you both how to use it and giving eight example processes which take advantage of it, including client onboarding and user support.

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In 2014 an employee at Xchanging named Amanda Barnes created a software robot she called “Poppy”.

Poppy’s job was to help automate the tedious task of validating insurance premiums — something which could be easily done by a computer if it was fed structured data.

Before Xchanging built Poppy the robot, they were processing 500 premiums every few days. With Poppy, the same 500 items take just 30 minutes to process.

Rather than kicking Poppy out of the office in case she starts taking jobs, the Xchanging team welcomed her warmly because she saved them from laborious, mechanical work.

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When it comes to hiring staff you’ll go through multiple important stages to vet the candidates and make sure you choose the right one.

For many managers, the interview is the most important step.

The interview allows you to ask questions and interact with the other person; verify their claims, test their knowledge, and start to figure out whether you would be happy working with them in future. This allows you to go beyond simply the information on a CV.

As Ray Dalio, founder and CEO of Bridgewater Associates, phrased it:

Weigh values and abilities more heavily than skills in deciding whom to hire.

Knowing about the human sat in front of you is crucial to a successful hire.

In this article, we’re going to give you a selection of Process Street templates which should help the whole process run smoothly:

• Key tips on how to conduct an interview
• 5 interview processes with questions
• How to connect a job application form to Zapier to automate your hiring
• 5 hiring processes to cover everything else

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The franchise model of doing business is a decidedly American affair.

The concept marries the power and scale efficiencies of large corporate bodies with the entrepreneurialism and hard work of mom-and-pop small business.

According to the United States International Trade Association:

there are over 780,000 franchise businesses that directly employ over 8.8 million people and account for over $890 billion in direct economic output.

The franchise model is one of the powerhouses of the US economy and features countless household names – McDonald’s being one of its truly global successes.

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

• What a franchise is, and the costs associated with starting one
• What the 2016 film The Founder tells us about the origin story of McDonald’s
• The role the Founding Fathers played in the history of franchises
• What systems McDonald’s used to propel their franchised successes

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Some people seem like naturals when it comes to sales. Their smooth talking and deep product knowledge entices customers and makes them feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Source

A high performing sales person is a huge asset to a company, and they’re often paid very well as a reward!

• Maybe you want to start a new business and need to jump into the sales role to get your fledgling startup off the ground?
• Maybe you want to build a sales team to crush sales goals while you focus on your specialty?
• Or maybe you just want to get into sales as a career and need to know how to get up to speed fast?

Well, in this Process Street article we’ll cover solutions to each of these conundrums. We’ll look at:

1. How Salesforce hit their sales goals
2. 10 top tips the sales experts have for a beginner
3. How Close.io CEO Steli Efti builds outbound sales teams
4. What steps you need to take to build sales processes (with a load of premade templates to help you get started!)

“A goal properly set is halfway reached.” – Legendary sales guru, Zig Ziglar.

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