SIPOC stands for Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs, and Customers. It is a one-page framework for defining a business process end to end: who feeds it, what goes in, what happens inside it, what comes out, and who receives it.

A SIPOC diagram is the fastest way to pull a fuzzy process into focus. You draw five columns, fill them in, and suddenly the hidden dependencies, missing handoffs, and unclear ownership are on the page where you can fix them. It is the default starting point for most Six Sigma, Lean, and business process management work, and it has become even more useful in the AI era, where you cannot hand a process to an agent until the inputs, outputs, and boundaries are spelled out explicitly.

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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?

If your Joint Commission audits feel like a fire drill, you probably have a workflow problem.

Our partner Improv, just published an article detailing how to use Process St to prepare for a Joint Commission audit. Read more from Dr. Sarah Inman and Kai deSilva on how to build a bulletproof compliance system while avoiding binders and burnout.

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In wealth management, precision isn’t optional. Atlas Fiduciary Financial,—founded in 2020 and managing a $220M+ portfolio—has rapidly become a trusted leader, offering fee-only, conflict-free guidance to high-net-worth clients.  However, as the firm scaled, their legacy CRM tools couldn’t handle the complexity of their financial services process management. They needed a modern solution that delivered process automation in financial services and true financial process management software capabilities. Continue Reading

Managing investments in tech startups demands precision. With a portfolio spanning 30 companies, including notable investments like Currensea, Willo, and Sidekick, and 12 successful exits under its belt, 1818 Venture Capital (eighteen-eighteen) was no stranger to pressure. Behind the scenes, their intern onboarding workflows were growing increasingly complex. Relying on lengthy email chains, scattered documents, and an evolving compliance process, the firm needed a more structured approach. Continue Reading

Client onboarding is key to customer success, but scaling it across global teams is a challenge. Salesforce, a worldwide SaaS leader with 49,000+ employees, solved this by using Process Street to standardize and automate its onboarding process.

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While it might seem new and intimidating, machine learning in business is already bringing massive benefits to companies and consumers alike.

From increasingly effective product suggestions to accurate journey time predictions and advanced customer analytics, machine learning is an incredibly powerful tool which lets you analyze every important aspect of your business without wasting human hours on the task.

But what exactly is machine learning, and how do you go from knowing that to actually using it?

“Instead of using labels to teach an AI what each object it’s looking at is, this DeepMind project teaches itself because it learns to recognise images and sounds by matching them up with what it can see and hear.

This method of learning is almost exactly like how humans think and learn to understand the world around them.” – Vaughn Highfield, How Google DeepMind is learning like a child: DeepMind uses videos to teach itself about the world

In this article we will cover:

• What is machine learning?
• Benefits of machine learning in business
• Applications of machine learning in business
• Different types of machine learning in business
• Real-world examples of machine learning in business

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Where did The E Myth Summary come from? Michael E. Gerber is the answer.

And when Michael E. Gerber gives you advice for starting a business you listen to it.

With a career spanning over 40 years and working with hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide, Gerber’s expertise is invaluable to anyone looking to start their own venture. Lucky for us, he’s written several books on the topic, the most famous of which I’ll be summarizing in this post.

This E Myth summary will take the core business tips from Gerber’s work and condense them into a single post. It’s all of the value, proven with examples from companies like Facebook and Zenefits, and it doesn’t need you to spend 40 years to learn it.

In particular, I’ll be covering:

• Balancing your business personalities
• Creating a business, not a job
• Working on your business, not in it
• Why your business needs systems
• The idea of your business being your product
• Motivating employees with the idea behind their work
• Make topics human to make them interesting

Let’s get started.

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How do you name a new server, export config data, or fix that one really annoying bug that keeps popping up every 2nd Thursday? Well, create a runbook!

For prepared IT professionals, that information is stored in a runbook. A runbook is a set of standardized documents, references and procedures that explain common recurring IT tasks. Instead of figuring out the same problem time and time again, you can refer to your runbook for an optimal way to get the work done. What’s more, you can also delegate tasks and onboard employees more effectively if you have documentation to train them with.

Whenever you do a task, think of this quote:

“Will you remember how to do these things 6 months from now? I find myself having to re-invent a process from scratch if I haven’t done it in a few months (or sometimes just a few days!). Not only do I reinvent the process, I repeat all my old mistakes and learn from them again. What a waste of time.” — Tom Limoncelli, The Operations Report Card

In short, the less time wasted figuring out how to do a task, the better it’ll be for your business efficiency, productivity, and sanity.

This post will look at:

• The 2 types of runbook
• How to create a runbook
• Running your IT processes with Process Street
• Transfer workflow information into Pages

First, let’s look at two example runbooks to give context on what I’m going to talk about.
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“Don’t micromanage!” you may have heard. But what if your team’s errors destroy the business!?

It’s hard watching someone make mistakes, especially if you already know how to avoid them.

Staying silent while they slip up (or even do things in ways you would not) is harder.

That doesn’t mean you have an excuse to micromanage them.

Micromanagement is the ultimate controlling management style. It’s demoralizing and counter-intuitive, as the desire for control to make sure everything goes to plan only creates more problems in the long term.

That’s why in this Process Street article, we’ll be looking at the following:

• What is micromanagement?
• The pros and cons of micromanagement
• How to spot a micromanager
• How to offset micromanagement with OKRs
• Using process management to remove the need for micromanagement

Let’s get started.
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