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!

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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:

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Sales will make or break your business

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.

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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.

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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:

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What is Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)?

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…

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Just like the basic ideas of processes and the division of labor, business process modeling was born in the mechanical industry.

In the winter of 1921, Frank Gilbreth presented a paper to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers entitled “Process Charts: First Steps in Finding the One Best Way to Do Work” — an excellent title by any standards, and something that turned a lot of businesses onto the idea of modeling their processes so they can optimize them.

Gilbreth, the paper’s author, is probably better known as the author and central character of the 1950s novel Cheaper by the Dozen. While I’ve never read it, it amused me to find it that an industrial engineer-turned-management consultant wrote a novel with time and motion study as an underlying theme.

Gilbreth was an interesting character, but also a man laser-focused on exactly what processes are for: finding the one best way to do work.

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If there ever was a three-word phrase that sounded dull enough to be a sedative, it’s business process management. 

It’s probably the vagueness that’s so off-putting. Which process? Managed how? Who’s business? In the last chapter, I went deep into what a process is and then why processes are important. I’ll recap so you don’t have to skip around.

A process is “a collection of interrelated work tasks initiated in response to an event that achieves a specific result”.

But what happens if that process isn’t achieving the result, or if it’s not achieving it very effectively? Every business has goals, but the interesting part — and what business process management actually is — is the exact steps a business will take to achieve those goals.

These goals could be anything from sending a newsletter on time every week to hitting $1,000,000 in revenue. Whatever the goals, your business processes are the roadmap for getting there. Not so boring, right?

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Let’s start off with something lighter than outright, embarrassing failure…

What’s your general feeling about assembling flat-packed furniture?

After putting together a desk and a couple of chairs yesterday, I’m still irked. Every hole is drilled about half an inch wrong so you have to have some kind of vice to align the damn thing, but that’s not the main problem…

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In this episode of Business Systems Explored we speak to Kate Erickson of the fantastic Entrepreneur on Fire.

Kate’s talking to us about how her content helped propel EOFire to one of the biggest podcasts ever made, and how she’s about to do it all over again with her new blog, Kate’s Take. Kate lets us in on her marketing processes for creating high quality, actionable resources and how she makes damn well sure these resources are a perfect market fit.

Use the links below to listen to the episode, or subscribe on iTunes so you never miss out.

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