Workflows are the building blocks of your business.
Whatever business you’re in, workflows are your business.
They act as representations of your whole operation. They can be used to smash inefficiencies and increase profits.
…But what are workflows, and why do they really matter?
Why should they be documented, and how can Process Street help you optimize them?
Let’s find out.
From September 1st 2015 to June 23rd 2016 the polls were clear that Britain would vote to remain in the EU.
According to the Financial Times, there were only two weeks over that period where the Leave campaign were ahead.
Yet, when the results came through, British voters had opted to leave the EU with 51.9% voting out.
How did the leave campaign strategy overcome the clear gap held for the year leading up to the vote?
A clear narrative and a range of big promises?
Well, yes. But also by selling those narratives and promises through a slick targeted marketing campaign powered by social media and big data.
According to the Laboratory for Social Machines from MIT Media Lab, Donald Trump was the most influential force on the 2016 election.
More than any television news stations, newspapers, or other public bodies. Donald J Trump, as an individual, was the most powerful influencer on the nation.
This influence was driven by his huge social media following. In March 2016 he had 6.8m Twitter followers, 6.3m Facebook likes, and 4.1m views on his YouTube channel. Now, he has over 22m Twitter followers.
But his eventual success lay deeper than just finely crafted tweet storms.
According to the Powering Productivity report from Planview and Loudhouse, poor processes are the primary cause of company inefficiencies (44%).
Even the largest companies in the world struggle with poor processes, resulting in poor performance and lost revenue.
But these problems are not always the fault of design.
Bad processes don’t just come from poor process management, but often evolve naturally within companies over time. From NASA to SpaceX, processes can become corrupted without anyone noticing.
This phenomenon can be known as the normalization of deviance.
Silicon Valley darling and unicorn health insurance startup Zenefits lost over 50% of its value through 2016.
Why? Poor process management.
Process management might not sound thrilling, but it’s damn important.
Process management refers to how all the different systems within your business link up together to form a coherent whole.
If they don’t link up, they won’t make sense.
And if your business doesn’t make sense… well, you get the stretched metaphor. It’s not good.
Before we dive into what process management is and how it functions, let’s take a look at the high-profile example of poor process management in action.
That’s right, I’m talking about the cautionary tale of Zenefits!
Ever had to listen to yourself repeating the same instructions to coworkers?
Are you struggling to remember how to complete a task you last tackled a month ago?
Remember feeling frustrated by the time and effort wasted?
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Picture this:
Outbound sales feed your team. Your cold-callers are foragers. Your senior sales staff are hunters.
They find the new clients and bring them back to the tribe of engineers and human resources staff who depend on them.
But we live in a more complex world than the hunter-gatherers of old, and with that comes the need for more complex processes.
The key to a successful sales process is understanding the overview.
There are lots of individual processes you can employ to improve different aspects of your sales and they need to fit together into a coherent sales narrative. Some call this narrative a sales funnel, and others a sales pipeline.
If you’ve been reading our content about the importance of processes, you know the kinds of things that happen when standard procedure isn’t followed. Satellites crash, nuclear reactors melt down, and information security disasters ruin huge corporations.
For software companies, failure doesn’t always have such wide implications but it can mean carelessly shipping a product that creates catastrophic problems for your customers and destroys their trust in you. And of course, it’s a pain in the arse for your development team to fix.
In this article, I’m going to go over some famous software disasters where Quality Control dropped the ball, and look over some common quality control methods.
So you’ve decided to hire remote? Good idea.
Working with a remote team can vastly increase your talent pool, save significant amounts on office overheads (on average $11,000 per company), and allow your staff to work in ways which suit them.
Your remote staff are 13% more productive. And, according to Chris Byers, CEO of Formstack, they’re twice as likely to work beyond 40 hours a week. You’re getting more hours, and more out of each hour.
…But don’t get too excited. Managing, training, and onboarding a remote team comes with its own challenges and difficulties. If you fail to train, you train to fail.
Here are 4 crucial points to remember when training a remote support team:
Yes, business process outsourcing is something that Coca-Cola does and spends millions on and something Vodafone uses IBM for to build its customer-related IT requirements, but it’s also for anyone and everyone.
It doesn’t have to be done on a massive enterprise scale, and in fact it can be even more impactful for small businesses because it means the difference between hiring a full-time legal team and using an as-and-when needed one from another company. That’s a massive difference in cost.
When you use an agency, or hire an accounting firm, that’s business process outsourcing. While the term has been taken over by enterprises and maybe shifted to mean something different, at its heart, every business does it. Every business without a full time accountant, legal team, marketing team, designer, IT guy, etc, does it.
It’s enterprise-y because it started out at those levels. Coca-Cola was a pioneer:
“ BPO is […] a subset of outsourcing that involves the contracting of the operations and responsibilities of a specific business process to a third-party service provider. Originally, outsourcing was associated with manufacturing firms, such as Coca-Cola, that outsourced large segments of its supply chain” — Forbes
But no matter what size company you are, there are considerations…
