You’ll often hear the question: “Which is better? Kanban or Scrum?” or variations of this eternal deathmatch between two of the most well-established agile methodologies.

People are wasting energy fighting over which methodology trumps another. If you’re an agile organization, you should be placing principle above practice.

It makes a lot of sense to ask questions like “why might I want to use Kanban over Scrum?”, or even “Kanban and Scrum” as opposed to “Kanban vs Scrum”. There are a lot of differences between the two, but fundamentally, they are both agile methodologies, and the principle behind why you might want to use both can be in alignment.

You may even find they can work well together, as part of a unified strategy referred to as Scrumban. You need to consider what approach will work best for your team.

My aim with this article is to approach the question of “Kanban vs Scrum” by clearly presenting both approaches in terms of when, how, and why you might choose to use either of them.

I’ll also talk about the capacity for overlapping Kanban and Scrum approaches, and how some additional tools like Process Street can factor into that equation.

Here’s a breakdown of how we’ll approach comparing “Kanban vs Scrum”:

• What makes a team agile?
• What is Kanban?
• What is Scrum?
• Kanban vs Scrum: Differences
• Kanban vs Scrum: Similarities
• What is Kanban good for?
• When to use Kanban
• Kanban process
• What is Scrum good for?
• When to use Scrum
• Scrum process
• Using BPM for agility

Let’s start with a basic primer on what it means to be agile. Continue Reading

How do you stand out against overwhelming competition? You need an edge; a value proposition isn’t enough on its own.

You need to make sure you’re out-competing the competition by keeping costs down and understanding the value you’re delivering to your customer. But how do you continuously improve your value offering while keeping costs down?

Enter the value chain.

A value chain is a model of looking at all of your business processes and figuring out how to gain a competitive advantage by focusing on developing maximum value in your product or service, while keeping your profit margins in the green at the same time.

Originally proposed by Harvard’s Michael Porter in his 1998 book Competitive Advantage, there’s a lot of ground to cover. Where do you start? What’s the process? What kind of tools exist to make the value chain analysis easier?

Well, if you’re looking for a clear, concise introduction to Michael Porter’s Value Chain model, you’ve come to the right place. Read on for a breakdown of:

• What is a value chain?
• Michael Porter’s original value chain model
• Value chain analysis
• Benefits of value chain analysis
• Value chain analysis process
• Value chain vs supply chain
• Porter’s primary value chain components
• Porter’s secondary value chain components
• Bonus: Porter’s Five Forces

By the end of this article, you should have a firm grasp on the value chain model, with a better idea of how to apply it to your own business. We’ll also investigate how to integrate BPM software like Process Street into the value chain.
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Job loss.

Insolvency.

Falling asset prices.

Complete market standstill.

Ring any bells?

You remember, as clearly as I do, the economic disaster of 2008. A global financial crisis; what could have caused such an economic catastrophe?

One hypothesis: Financial audit failures.

As concluded by the Financial Crises Inquiry Commission (FCIC), financial audit failures were found to have played a significant part in the financial crash.

Just like the FCIC, we at Process Street understand the importance of standards enforced by financial audit processes.

This article has been structured into two sections. The first section looks at the financial audit. The second section considers the International Standards on Auditing (ISA).

The ISA standards are a specific set of rules that operate globally.

Here’s a more thorough breakdown:

• The financial audit: What are financial audits?
• The financial audit: What are the International Standards on Auditing (ISA)?
• The financial audit: The benefits of International Standards on Auditing (ISA)
• How you can use Process Street to help with your external auditing processes
• ISA audit checklist

In the last section of this article, you will get your hands on our nifty ISA audit checklist for free.

You can use this template to conduct an internal check on your finances audits against the International Standards on Auditing. This checklist will save your organization a heap of time, worry, and money.
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How do you know whether you’re going to be successful or not with a new business or product?

Well, you’ll probably look to pour your heart and soul into it. You’ll work hard to make it the best product or service you can. You’ll endeavor to make each and every customer happy.

And well done to you for that.

But you’re not the only one who impacts on whether your efforts are successful.

It’s no secret that one of the hardest parts of business is the competitive nature of the market.

What your competition looks like, how it’s constructed, and what opportunities their weaknesses provide you, are crucial factors which can determine your success.

This is where you’ll need to do some kind of competitive position analysis.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at a framework which is designed to help you understand your competition called Porter’s Five Forces. We’ll cover:

• What is Porter’s Five Forces Model?
• Porter’s Five Forces – Force 1: Threat of new entrants
• Porter’s Five Forces – Force 2: Threat of substitutes
• Porter’s Five Forces – Force 3: Bargaining power of customers
• Porter’s Five Forces – Force 4: Bargaining power of suppliers
• Porter’s Five Forces – Force 5: Competitive rivalry
• Resolving the 5 Forces: An Economic Moat

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Approvals are everywhere. If you’ve worked on any project involving any kind of deliverables, chances are you’re all-too-familiar with the approval process (or rejection process, depending).

Documents, prototypes, reports, mock-ups, wireframes, storyboards, and even more internally-facing elements like simple holiday leave requests. All of these represent different kinds of approval process, and approvals are an integral workflow element.

Approvals can also represent a major bottleneck.

Consider how you are currently approving work in your business. Perhaps you have a vague process involving emails, and if you’re particularly attentive you might be tracking it in a spreadsheet.

These methods are slow and prone to delays. You have no way of tracking anything reliably, you are more likely to miss approval windows, and information has to be sent manually between individuals.

What’s more, it’s quite difficult to improve this process without the proper system in place. You need to make sure you’ve got the right tools to optimize your approval process.

Process Street‘s approvals feature is the solution to this problem.

We created the approvals feature to make the process of approving work as fast and easy as possible.

With approvals, you can:

• Get notified as soon as work is ready for approval
• Approve (or reject) work with zero friction using a clear, streamlined interface
• Approve on-the-go, from your phone’s email inbox
• Synergize with many other Process Street features to optimize process efficiency
• Save time and stay on top of your workflow

In this post, I have a trove of templates to showcase the approvals feature. All of the templates in this article are custom-built to make your life easier.

They also take advantage of Process Street‘s other powerful features like rich form fields, conditional logic, dynamic due dates, and role assignments.

So, read on for:

• A quick introduction to approvals
• Different types of approval process
• How to add approval tasks in Process Street
• Approval process best practices
• 20+ free approval process templates (each use-case explained)
• How to approve tasks straight from your phone
• Optimize your approvals with more process street features
• More great workflow automation resources

Read on to learn how to hit the ground running with the approvals feature.

Only 23% of surveyed CEOs believe that they have comprehensive information about the risks of their business.

Can you confidently state that you belong in that 23%?

Even if you are not a CEO, as an employee, are you sure you know all the risks within your workplace?

If not, then keep reading.

In this article, you will learn about risk and how to manage it, specifically via risk mitigation. You are also provided with a thorough list of Process Street resources and templates. These are designed for you to gain a good understanding of business risk, risk management and risk mitigation.

This article is structured as below:

• A definition of risk
• What is risk management
• What is risk mitigation
• Risk mitigation application
• Risk mitigation and risk management: A broader picture

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Services, services, services.

We seem to be in a world of managed services.

Everyone’s outsourcing nowadays. And when they’re not outsourcing, they’re insourcing in an outsourced way.

It’s all very confusing.

That’s why we’ve decided to break down the core document which tends to regulate and organize this kind of service provision: the humble service-level agreement (SLA).

Service-level agreements, amongst other things, bolster trust in and between organizations – making it clear what needs to be done, to what standard, and when.

Trust is a hugely important thing in business. Accenture’s Competitive Agility Index found:

following a drop in trust, a company’s index score drops 2 points on average, negatively impacting revenue growth by 6% and EBITDA by 10% on average.

One of the main ways to keep trust alive in your business is to know what is expected of people and to hold them to it. Enforce reliability.

SLAs are one mechanism to help you in that battle.

In this Process Street article we’ll answer the following questions:

• Free SLM and SLA templates
• What is a service-level agreement (SLA)?
• Why do you need a service-level agreement?
• What are the different types of SLA?
• What is in a service-level agreement?
• What kinds of companies use an SLA?
• What are some SLA examples?
• What are the alternatives to SLAs?
• How you can use SLAs with Process Street

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It’s 8 am. Your alarm buzzes.

You roll out of bed, perform your morning ablutions, and then sit down at your desk, ready to take Monday by the horns. Which you do, because you’re working from home, and not some crummy, cramped office which is full of distracting coworkers.

Ahh. Bliss.

It’s 8 am. Your alarm buzzes.

You realize you were dreaming.

This rose-tinted view of remote work – and being part of a virtual team – was exactly that: A dream.

Although working remotely can be wondrous, it isn’t always easy.

As members of virtual teams (like myself) will tell you, there are countless challenges and hurdles teams must tackle – from maintaining a healthy work-life balance to establishing a culture of asynchronous communication – before a virtual team can reap the rewards of increased employee productivity, lowered business costs (Cisco saved over $270 million a year!), and improved employee happiness.

Luckily for you, this blog post contains everything you need to help your virtual team not only excel but become excellent.

Read through the sections below to get a proper handle on all-things virtual teams:

• Virtual teams definition
• What makes strong, successful virtual teams?
• How top remote companies go about managing virtual teams
• Overcome virtual team challenges with Process Street!

Now, it’s time to wake up, smell the coffee, and learn exactly how to instill and sustain a masterful, virtual team!

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From humble beginnings as a simple clone of the then-popular first-person shooter Quake, Half-Life would eventually become the first installment of one of the most successful video game series of all time.

Today, Valve Inc. is one of the most renowned, innovative, and successful game development companies worldwide, boasting one of the largest video game digital distribution service platforms on the planet, a range of pioneering virtual reality hardware and an impressive roster of instantly recognizable and widely-loved game titles.

Specifically, the development of the original Half-Life makes for an interesting case-study, and represents a model of innovative agile organizational management.

Half-Life is remembered as one of the best games of all time, and the intense environment in which it was created – where the Cabal process was born – is testament to that legacy.

Companies like Valve, Zappos, Semco, and even Google have come up with different models to enable the potential of their workers. These methods give power to the employees to pursue their own entrepreneurial pet projects.

Tesla’s innovation is equal part production process as it is the product; you need only look to the hulking Gigafactories to find evidence of this.

Similarly, Facebook’s success is not just in the service it offers users, but also how it was designed to scale to billions of users.

The process of organizational management is always an important factor in the outcome of these hugely successful products.

In this post I’ll be looking at democratic methods of organizational management, with a particular focus on Valve’s Cabal process. I’ll also mention a couple of other interesting examples of holocratic organizational management, and talk about our own internal structure at Process Street.

Here’s a quick breakdown of each section, if you want to jump ahead:

• What is organizational management?
• Valve’s Cabal game design process
• Zappo’s holocratic organizational management system
• Semco’s organizational management success story
• How digital democracy plays a role in organizational management
• Process Street’s organizational management structure

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“… 71% [of organizations] said their leaders are not ready to lead their organizations into the future. Only 25% of organizations said they had a ready and willing successor identified for one out of 10 critical leader positions.” – Brandon Hall Group, State of Leadership Development 2015: Time to Act is Now

Great leadership is like electricity.

Without study, it’s a one-shot, lightning-in-a-bottle event. However, with a solid theory to explain how it works and how to harness it, you can use it to power your team like a well-oiled machine.

That’s why it pays to know your leadership theories, and why this post from the Process Street team will teach them to you.

Using these theories of leadership you can analyze your leadership style and find out what kind of leader you are and how to more effectively manage your team.

We’ll be covering:

• Great man theory
• Trait theory
• Behavioral theory
• Contingency theory
• Transactional theory
• Transformational theory
• Situational theory
• Leader-member exchange theory
• Power and influence theory

However, before we get stuck in, let’s have a quick recap on why these theories matter…

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