“How did I forget to follow up with that client?”

There was a time when I used to think that as another golden opportunity passed me by. It’s tough enough being a freelancer and having to both find clients and secure them in such a competitive scene without adding human error into the mix.

Nowadays, I’ve largely mitigated the frustration that comes with making avoidable errors, letting me massively boost my consistency and productivity, and it’s all thanks to process documentation.

Having a documented process to work through is insanely useful. I’m here to tell you exactly why you need to be using processes in your work and give some freelance tips on how you can start noticing the benefits in no time. Let’s get started.

Continue Reading

Part of the reality of trying to manage operations in organizations of any size, is understanding that sometimes things go wrong.

In an ideal world, we don’t want anything to go wrong. We want our processes to run smoothly and all tasks to be easily completed.

But that isn’t just something which happens. It is, however, something we can work towards.

The first step is to create a critical culture where people can identify when and why a process has had a problem. From there, you can track problems, investigate them, and improve processes to stop those problems occuring.

But you need that first step.

That first step needs to be done each and every time, it needs to be done with the right amount of detail, and it needs to be quick and painless to take.

This is the art of an exception report.

Done well, this can illuminate your problems and be a crucial linchpin in a broader effort to improve processes and, in turn, outcomes.

In this Process Street article, we’ll be looking at:

• What is an exception report?
• Why you should use exception reports in your business
• How you can record exception in Process Street
• How to use Zapier to generate an exception report

Continue Reading

The importance of efficient purchase order management

Effectively managing purchase orders is a critical component of any business with vendor relationships. And yet, according to the founder & COO of Procurify, Kenneth Loi:

“Many organizations unwisely forego purchase orders because they perceive the paperwork to be a hassle that slows things down.”

He’s right. Paperwork is a hassle and does slow things down. However, this is not a good enough reason to forego purchase orders, hence the word “unwisely”.

From creating a requisition to gaining approval and receiving an invoice from the vendor, there are up to 7 documents involved in the purchasing cycle. That is a lot to keep track of for a single purchase.

And this only gets more complex as a business grows.

Maintaining a paper-based system at the enterprise level is virtually impossible. For smaller companies, it’s do-able, just incredibly inefficient.

The frustration and inefficiency that comes with managing piles of paperwork is no longer an unavoidable obstacle to overcome. By establishing an automated purchase order workflow, you can centralize documentation, seamlessly track progress in real-time, and shorten purchasing cycles.

Gone are the days where signing contracts involved figuring out how to connect to a printer, scanner, or photocopier.

And don’t get me started on fax machines.

Now we live in a glorious new world of rapid digital signature workflows.

There are many kinds of digital signatures. Some may think of the high-tech encrypted keys people like Julian Assange have used to prove whether messages came from them or not.

But let’s be honest, outside of our international secret agent daydreaming we’re not likely to need to use those. What we need is the simple act of being able to add our signature on to digital documents with the fewest number of clicks possible.

Those interested in soccer may remember the high profile signing of David de Gea by Spanish giant Real Madrid from Manchester United. Or, actually, you won’t remember it. Because it didn’t happen. The documents were to be sent in the last moments of the transfer window, and the whole multi-multi-million dollar deal fell through due to a broken fax machine.

Digital solutions to contract workflows are important.

That’s why in this Process Street article we’re going to look at:

• The 5 best digital signature tools
• Digital signature integrations you can use today
• How to connect digital signatures with the workflows in your business

Continue Reading

Processes are all the rage right now, and we’re very pleased to be leading the charge in making processes agile and actionable for organizations of all shapes and sizes.

We’ve written countless pieces about creating a process, writing standard operating procedures, or building business systems.

But sometimes we’re guilty of assuming that having a process automatically makes something organized. It doesn’t.

If you’re a solopreneur or working in a startup, managing processes is fairly easy. You have a limited number and you can easily scroll through to find the one you need when you need it.

But what about large organizations? Companies where people on different teams are in different countries? Businesses where different departments speak and operate in different languages?

How can we manage processes on such a large scale, and what does that tell us about managing processes for small businesses looking to scale?

This is where a process library comes in.

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

• What is a process library?
• Why you should build a process library for your business
• Determine your information architecture before building your library
• How you can build a process library in Process Street
• Harnessing the power of Process Street’s templates!

Or, if you’ve just come for the templates, grab them below:

• Process Library Checklist
• The Process for Optimizing a Process

Let’s get started!

Continue Reading

Those of us in the workflow game know Nintex is one of the big tools available on the market.

Their advanced software is great for plotting out complex workflows, running intricate automations, and integrating tightly and natively with other large corporate tools.

But that’s what it is: corporate.

It’s heavy and less agile than many of its competitors, with a restrictive price tag which puts it squarely into the enterprise market.

The Nintex light-version, which comes in at a more reasonable price point, simply doesn’t compete with the other tools that target the small-to-medium business space. It has less features and less functionality than many of the newer and more innovative up-and-comers.

In this Process Street article, we’re going to tackle that niche. What are better examples of workflow software for a small to medium sized enterprise, without missing out on complex functionality?

Let’s take a look.

Continue Reading

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.

Continue Reading

To understand the value of a style guide, you should first try working without one.

You’d get the wrong blue on your logo, jarring copy, and code that can only be maintained by a lone developer.

Writers, editors, programmers, engineers, social media managers, and support agents all need an indication of how their company wants to work, so they can ensure consistency.

The number one goal of a style guide is consistency.

Inconsistency weakens your brand image, makes your company look unprofessional, and hurts conversion rate and revenue. Once you’ve settled on your brand voice and style, the style guide is the document that enforces those values.

Continue Reading

Business process management (BPM for short) gets a bad wrap. Some consider it industry jargon, others an ineffective management “hack”, and almost all see it as boring.

However, there is no better way to increase efficiency and consistency in your business than by managing your processes effectively. To prove it, this post will dive into 17 BPM statistics to show:

• The growing trend of using BPM software
• How common (and important) documented processes are
• The importance and benefits of processes
• The dangers of not managing processes
• Why everyone in your company needs to be involved with your processes

Continue Reading

While we were writing our guide to writing an employee handbook, it was striking how few public employee handbooks there were out there to read. Obviously, most companies don’t want to expose their internal workings, and that’s sometimes for a good reason. However, you can usually trust startups (excluding Uber and Zenefits) to be transparent about their operations.

And, when it comes to transparency, Basecamp’s handbook is an amazing example. It’s both a useful resource for companies looking to write their own policies from scratch, and a genuinely interesting read. In fact, it might be the first interesting company document I’ve ever read.

The handbook got a good amount of buzz and even persuaded 1Password to build an added security feature based on how Basecamp uses the tool abroad. And so, since Process Street is passionate about keeping companies running smoothly (and yes, that does include documented policies and procedures), I thought I’d share with you a few things you can learn from Basecamp’s handbook.

Continue Reading