Whether you’ve completed a project a hundred times before or you’re faced with a new challenge, having some kind of formal project request form prevents the whole operation descending into a game of broken telephone and wasted resources.

No matter how good your team’s discipline, if all they have to go on when you request a project is a vague message and their memory of the requirements, sooner or later you’re going to have a problem. Either a project will be started which won’t be worth your time or your instructions will be lost in the trickle down to those taking action.

‘Whilst on manoeuvers, a brigadier commanding a certain brigade stationed in Aldershot passed the word to the nearest colonel to him:

“Enemy advancing from the left flank. Send reinforcements.”

By the time it reached the end of the right flank the message was received:

“Enemy advancing with ham-shanks. Send three and fourpence!”’ – Garson O’Tool, relaying a real-world instance of broken telephone from 1914

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Apple is well-known for being innovative and immensely successful, to the point where the company is worth $750 billion (and counting). However, without a healthy dose of workflow analysis they would’ve crumbled under their own business model back in the late 1980s.

“We could no longer afford the limitations that went with our product development processes… The lack of a formal new product development process led to confusion, wasted time, and often caused project teams to ‘re-create the wheel’” – Jackie Streeter (then VP of Engineering at Apple), Apple Rethinks Core Process: Improves Cycle Time

The simple truth is that any company (no matter the size or success) needs to regularly review its workflows and processes in order to keep them up to date and efficient. Tasks should be updated, improved, and automated where possible to save time and money, but without using the best workflow management software around to analyze and improve your business practices, your entire business model itself can prevent your success.

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Is your team confused about responsibility, hierarchy, or who reports to who?

Do you have a clear idea of where there’s room to give a promotion, or which department could do with more hires?

You need to make an organizational chart for your business, no matter what size your company is because it ensures your company can scale consistently with a clear view of its structure. It’s just as important as solid processes because it’s the single source of truth for the architecture of your business.

In this article, I’m going to show you how to create organizational charts using simple free tools, or powerful paid alternatives.

You’ll learn:

• The definition and components of an organizational chart
• The hidden benefits of organizational charts, and why they’re not just a formality
• Creating a cloud-based organizational chart in Google Sheets that you can automate
• How to use templates to create a simple org chart in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and dedicated diagram tools
• How to use different types of charts for alternative organizational structures, like matrix and flat

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Last week we failed to meet a big deadline for the second time in a month. Vinay (Process Street‘s CEO) wasn’t impressed.

“How can you forget something so simple? What’s going wrong?”

Then came the kicker.

“What was your process?”

From missed deadlines to widespread cyber attacks, things go wrong in businesses all the time. The vast majority of problems, however, are caused by following bad processes. Processes might be vital to your business’ success, but unchecked they can just as easily cause you to fail.

The only way to change these weak links in your own business is to have a system of process improvement – a way of constantly improving the processes that power your business.
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Learning how to live stream may be intimidating, but it’s insanity to ignore the marketing opportunities and advantages it creates for your brand and company.

Want to engage your audience beyond your written content? 80% of brand audiences prefer watching a live video to reading a blog post.

Reaching out through social media? Live videos get more than double (+135%) the organic reach of photo posts.

In fact, producing live videos:

• Lets you reach a wider audience
• Encourages active engagement with your brand
• Builds stronger relationships with your viewers
• Provides a wealth of content to repurpose
• Makes you stand out from the crowd

To help you take advantage of live streaming, I’ll break down the benefits of doing it, the platforms and equipment you can use, and the types of streams you can host. If you want to know why, what, and how to live stream to give your marketing efforts a boost, keep reading.
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Your current team can’t handle any extra work. You’ve exhausted your process automation opportunities. You’ve got no choice but to bring in a fresh face.

You could hire a specialist, but they can be expensive and limited in the work you can hand off. You need to hire a virtual assistant.

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Efficiency is vital for startups to scale and survive. To be efficient you have to document your processes to make everything repeatable and scalable.

All of which means nothing if your processes are bad.

“Process innovation” is a fancy term for improving your business’ processes. Instead of haphazardly solving external issues, you focus on improving your core processes and standard operating procedures to make your business efficient and able to grow.
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Podcasts are an awesome way to passively expand your knowledge, especially while you’re walking, in the car, on the train, or doing work that doesn’t require a ton of mental energy.

At Process Street, we’ve compiled a list of podcasts that we personally listen to and would recommend to anyone interested in business, entrepreneurship, marketing, and startups.

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Outsourcing is nothing new. Manufacturing, support, accounting, marketing, and more have all been outsourced for decades to save time and money (although modern outsourcing only really started with IBM).

After all, why bring on an accountant full time when you can outsource your taxes once a year?

Outsourced services have doubled in value since 2000, and with benefits like saving time and money.

Weighing the outsourcing pros and cons, however, shows that it isn’t some magic pill which will make difficult work disappear.

Not only that, but everyone has a different opinion of the types of outsourcing – how the hell do we weigh the pros and cons when nobody agrees on what it even is?

So, to make things easy, we here at Process Street have summed up the advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing vs insourcing, and (if the former) tips on some different kinds of outsourcing you can use.

It’s time to outsource the work you don’t need to do and focus on getting done what really matters.

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Aside from the raw product you’re selling, company culture is everything.

It’s made up of your work environment, ethics, mission, expectations, and goals. You can have a great product, but without a solid culture to back it up, its development can fall apart.

Buffer, for example, has a notable culture of transparency. All employee salaries are published for co-workers and the public to see. They emphasize working out loud and being receptive to one another.

On the other hand, Amazon is noted for its toxic culture that exhausts employees and holds “unreasonably high” expectations.

Which side of the spectrum are you on?

In software companies, it’s important to promote a culture of communication and transparency. What would an issue tracking system look like for a company with poor culture? Pretty desolate.

In this article, I’m going to give examples of how different software companies bolster their QA efforts with a strong culture, and why that’s so important.

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