Ah, the days before I started using project management software.

I don’t miss them.

70+ hour weeks of pure stress and disorganized skitting from task to task, unable to focus on the things that mattered when they needed to get done. It was a lesson hard-learned but one of the most valuable I’ve ever had the misfortune of going through.

So I’ll save you the trouble and show you the best free options on offer.

You don’t need a massive budget or a lot of experience to get the most out of these apps – hence why they’re the best free project management software. Most have paid plans but all are functional with the free version and all will help you and your team organize your projects and get things done on time and to a high standard.

I’ll be covering:

1. Process Street
2. Agantty
3. Airtable
4. Asana
5. Avaza
6. Backlog
7. Bitrix24
8. FreedCamp
9. HiTask
10. KanbanFlow
11. MeisterTask
12. Paymo
13. Pivotal Tracker
14. Podio
15. TeamGantt
16. Toggl
17. Teamwork Projects
18. Todoist
19. Trello
20. Wrike
21. Zenkit
22. Jira
23. Hubstaff
24. Basecamp
25. ProjectLibre
26. Notion
27. Zoho Project
28. Kintone
29. nTask
30. Nifty

Enough talk – let’s get stuck in.

Implementing a quality management system (QMS software) is an important investment companies cannot overlook.

One Harvard Business Review study found that companies with an ISO 9001 certification have much higher rates of “corporate survival, sales, employment growth, and wage increases than a matched group of non-adopters.”

For instance, 65% of companies save $25,000 or more in costs within their first year of implementing a QMS.

Adopting a QMS software can also boost efficiency and consistency of work, increase customer satisfaction, raise product value, and reduce unnecessary costs and overall risks.

A good quality management system is all about achieving a quality-driven culture within your company, and as a result, making your product better and marketing it faster. But in order to access these benefits, it’s important that you choose the right QMS solution for you and your company.

In this Process Street article, we’ll be going over the foundation of everything you need to know before choosing your quality management system software.

We’ll be covering:

• What is a quality management system (QMS)?
• Agile QMS
• Best QMS software
• Build your agile QMS with Process Street

As there are so many different types of recurring work happening in every part of your company, it can be difficult to keep track of what’s working and what’s not.

You can often spend too long looking for answers to questions like these:

“Which processes in the Sales team run smoothly and which take longer than they should?”

“Who in the Underwriting team completes their tasks on time and who misses their due dates?”

“Have we reduced the time it takes HR to complete the onboarding process, for new Account Executive hires in particular?”

“How many different processes is the IT Helpdesk team involved in, and how many tasks have they completed in the last 30 days?”

“How long does it take the Customer Success team to onboard a customer, and which onboarding tasks take the longest to complete?”

Wouldn’t it be useful to have a custom-made dashboard so you can get answers to these types of questions with one, quick glance?

Well, with the launch of Process Street BI Integrations, now you can.

To find out how you can export, store, visualize, and utilize all your Process Street data in the way that you want to, take five minutes to read through the following topics and find out:

• What is Process Street BI Integrations and who is it for?
• How Process Street BI Integrations work
• What benefits Process Street BI Integrations brings
• How to get Process Street BI Integrations

Let’s get started.
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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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If the United Nations Environment Programme is to be taken seriously, the current generation is the last generation with a realistic chance of kick-starting the processes necessary to halt or reverse the looming global crisis of climate change.

“We are clearly the last generation that can change the course of climate change, but we are also the first generation with its consequences,” Kristalina Georgieva, the CEO of the World Bank.

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As humans, we tend to focus more on the things we need to do than the things we’ve already done. This so-called “Zeigarnik effect”, named after Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, means our minds are often swimming with all of the tasks, responsibilities, and mental notes that we think we should be focusing on. That’s where Prioritization Matrix can help!

All of these tasks and projects that need doing, this mental to-do list, without a clear hierarchy of importance can make it difficult for us to stay focused and actually get things done.

One way to combat all of this Zeigarnik noise is to note down everything. Make an actual to-do list. Studies have been done, and it has been shown that the very act of noting down tasks can quite simply “make you more effective”.

But, even with a to-do list, before you actually get anything done it’s necessary to have a clear idea of your priorities.

Sounds simple enough, right? Unfortunately, figuring out what to prioritize can be hard. It’s a complicated process that involves weighing up cost against value, effort against time, and for a lot of businesses, will likely involve many different stakeholders.

The solution is to work out a process for determining what to prioritize.

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HR processes are hard and complex.

From hiring great-fitting talent and helping with their onboarding, to monitoring employee performance and even resolving any employee conflicts, there’s a lot of ground for HR teams to cover – and in such a short amount of time.

Imagine if there was a way for HR teams to time-save, cost-save, labor-save, and take control of their recurring tasks like never before…

Wouldn’t that be a dream?

At Process Street, we rather like turning dreams into reality. That’s why we’ve hand-picked our most effective, most useful HR processes from our extensive library and are presenting it in this ultimate HR process pack.

Think of it as your one-stop-shop for all the human resources processes you’ll ever need:

• Why use workflows for HR processes?
• HR processes #1: Pre-hiring processes
• HR processes #2: Hiring processes
• HR processes #3: Onboarding processes
• HR processes #4: Performance processes
• HR processes #5: Workplace processes
• HR processes #6: Diversity processes
• HR processes #7: Aptitude tests
• Create your own HR processes with Process Street today!

Now, let’s stop dilly-dallying and get to it!
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“Global stock markets post biggest falls since the 2008 financial crisis.” – The Guardian, 9th of March 2020

Business risk can come out of no where at any time.

It was a Tuesday morning and my phone buzzed me out of my groggy, lethargic state, flashing open the above notification. The Coronavirus had hit businesses and our economy hard, potentially costing 2.7 trillion globally.

A viral risk, that went viral. Was something like this not foreseeable?

In this Process Street article, we turn our attention to the concept of business risk. As we write this article, the corona crisis is unfolding. We were warned about the risk of a virus outbreak but it appears we weren’t as prepared for it as we could have been.

But viruses are not the only risk we face. The 2020 Global Risk Report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) highlights a host of other risks, which we’ll turn our attention to in this article.

To get started, click on the relevant subheaders below to spring to that section. Alternatively, scroll down to read all we have to say regarding the concept of business risk.

• Confront business risk with a risk management process
• Business risk: What is it and why risk items need to be identified
• Business risks: Global business risks from the World Economic Forum
• What is a risk management process and how do we use it?
• Incorporating the Global 2020 Risk Report results within your risk management process
• Risk item 1: Extreme weather, cause, and economic effect
• Risk item 2: Climate action failures, cause, and economic effect
• Risk item 3: Biodiversity loss, cause, and economic effect
• Risk assessment: Why sustainability is part of a good risk assessment
• Sustainability risk management: How you can document your processes with Process Street

Belts and braces on, let’s jump to it!
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Customer feedback system is what every business needs to succeed.

Why? Let me explain.

There will always be people in this world that want something from you. Whether you are a business, an individual, or a group, people are needy.

Most company inboxes have a significant number of feature requests. Some of them make a lot of sense and some of them are probably pretty out there.

But whether customers are asking for something that you already have on your roadmap, or something that isn’t even tangentially related to your product, you still owe it to your customers to respond.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• Why is a customer feedback system important?
• How to improve customer feedback with BPM?
• What does a sustainable customer feedback process look like?
• How to use Process Street to streamline your customer feedback process

So, let’s get started!
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In the book The Balanced Scorecard, by David Norton and Robert Kaplan, it is noted that 90% of organizations fail to execute their pre-set strategy.

This is a concerning statistic when you consider that, for a majority of companies considered successful, an emphasis is placed on having formal and pre-established systems to inform, manage, and meet their strategic obligations.

In this sense, can we not infer executing business strategy = business success?

To bridge this gap between strategic ambition and business performance, Process Street has created a Strategic Planning Template, which you can use – for free – right away!

By executing the steps given in this template you will not only develop good strategy, but the delivery of this strategy will also prove successful.

Click here to access our free Strategic Planning Template!

But to accommodate this template, you need to have a solid understanding of strategic planning itself.

In this article, I’ll discuss what strategic planning is, the different strategic planning models – with an emphasis on the Cascade Strategic Planning Model -, why strategic planning is important, and more.

Click on the links below to read through:

• What is strategic planning?
• Strategic management vs strategic planning: What is the difference between these 2 terms?
• Why strategic planning is important
• What are strategic planning models?
• Use Process Street’s strategy planning template to document your strategic plan
• Strategic plan outline: Framework, structure, and governance
• Other strategic planning models and how you can implement them via Process Street

Let’s jump straight to it!
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