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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In 2018, Apple rolled out their brand new iPad Pro; top-of-the-line, cutting-edge, very slightly bent- wait, slightly bent?

Customers on social media and several on the MacRumors forums have discovered their iPad Pros exhibited this slight bend straight out of the box.

Of course, Apple’s response was that this was completely normal, and absolutely not a defect.

Despite the publicity Apple gives its “ultra precise” quality manufacturing process, more and more issues like these are appearing. The bendy iPad Pro is looking less like an exception, and more like an increasingly problematic trend.

Here’s a comprehensive quality breakdown (quite literally) of the iPad Pro in question:

It’s interesting to note that while Apple is bragging about premium materials such as the sapphire camera lens cover, tests like the scratch durability test done in the video above pose glaring questions to Apple’s quality standards.

Other quality management blunders from Apple’s recent track record include:

That’s a lot of issues for a company that continues to charge top dollar, push prices up, and boast a reputation as a pioneer in quality assurance.

Obviously, and for whatever reason, there is a problem somewhere in Apple’s quality management process.

Quality control and management is important to ensure the customer gets the value they deserve, and quality management standards like those defined by the ISO 9000 family exist to make quality management work better.

Although Apple has received certification for ISO 27001 (an information security management standard), it doesn’t appear that they have any ISO 9000 certification for quality management. Who knows, if they had, perhaps they wouldn’t have so many QC issues?

In this article, I’ll be looking at the ISO 9000 family of quality management standards, breaking down the basics and giving you a few free checklist templates to get you started with your own quality management system.

Here’s exactly what I’ll be covering:

• What is ISO 9000?
• What is ISO 9001?
• ISO 9000 for quality management systems
• Why is ISO 9000 important?
• Benefits of ISO 9000
• ISO 9000 certification
• Implementing ISO 9000 with Process Street
• Free ISO 9000 templates
• Relevant ISO/SOP articles

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Learning about vendor management is no easy task.

As soon as you search the words ‘vendor management’ in Google, you’re bombarded with details regarding vendor management systems, rather than information regarding vendor management itself.

And considering that 88% of companies use at least one outside vendor, and 47% more than 10 vendors, vendor management is a topic that, at some point in their careers, many employees will need to understand.

That’s why in this informative, easy-to-understand post, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about vendor management – and in layman’s terms.

Specifically, you’ll learn exactly what vendor management is, the benefits of it, and the process of managing vendors successfully. To finish off, I’ll even provide you with (free!) vendor management templates you can jump into and use straight away. Just read through the sections below:

• What is vendor management?
• Benefits of vendor management
• The vendor management process (and its 4 essential components)
• Tried-and-tested tips for successful vendor management
• How Process Street can help with vendor management and vendor relations

Now, it’s time to get a solid grasp on vendor management.

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This is a guest post by Marla DiCarlo, an accomplished business consultant with more than 28 years of professional accounting experience. As co-owner and CEO of Raincatcher, she helps business owners learn how to sell a company so they can get paid the maximum value for their company.

Inventory management.

The mere mention of it may strike fear into the hearts of those working in the manufacturing, ecommerce, or logistics sectors as, after all, it can be rather complicated.

But with the right high-value processes, procedures, and techniques in place, inventory management can be turned from a fear-inducing activity into one which helps your business to truly thrive.

That’s why in this short, informative post, we’ll take a look several inventory management best practices, so you can help your business be more efficient, productive, and better all-around at managing their inventory. Just read through the following sections:

• What is inventory management?
• 13 inventory management procedures for startups and SMBs
• The benefits of using software for inventory management
• How Process Street can help you with inventory management

Now, let’s get started.

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“To put it bluntly, goals are for losers… goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary.” – Scott Adams, Scott Adams’ Secret of Success: Failure

Matching up systems vs goals might seem odd but the truth is that you should be using one and not the other.

Let’s be honest – we’ve all set goals that we’ve never met.

From broken New Year’s resolutions to a failed career as the next big rockstar, goals have a nasty habit of not being met.

Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert thinks much the same in his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life.

He identifies that everything wrong with goals can be solved by instead applying a regular system to complete your tasks.

I scoffed at first but then realized that I’d done precisely that to lose 70 lbs in six months and learn the piano.

That’s why today I’ll cover:

• What are goals?
• What are systems?
• Systems vs goals
  • Systems replace motivation with routine
  • Goals are hard to follow up on
  • Systems are consistently rewarding
  • Goals carry a more negative mindset
  • Systems are more realistic and flexible
• Turning goals into systems
• How to build systems

Let’s get started!

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It was my first time visiting Sweden, and somehow I found myself hauling two baskets of milk containers to deliver to the local supermarket. Feeling like a recycling heroine, my ego was soon deflated when I realized my efforts were something of commonality in this country.

Recycling is part of the Swedish supermarket’s environmental management strategy and has contributed to the country’s 99% recycling rate. It is results such as these that make Sweden one of the most environmentally friendly countries in the world.

In fact, many Swedish corporations place the present and prevailing problems facing our environment on a pedestal. Why?

If you read my last post on business sustainability, you will understand how the environment impacts our economy. It is due to this deep-seated connection between economies and ecosystems that make environmental management so important.

Environmental management acts to safeguard nature from potentially damaging business operations, constructing a win-win situation benefitting the economy and the environment.

In this article, we at Process Street explain exactly what environmental management is, why it is needed, and how you can implement environmental management into your business today. We also have a bunch of free templates to help you apply environmental management strategies.

Let’s crack on and find out exactly what environmental management is.

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If there was a list of the “Top Ten Problems” facing humanity in the next few decades, what do you think would be at the top?

Well, it turns out Richard E. Smalley made such a list in 2003, and placed predictions about a looming global energy crisis at the top.

His prediction focused on the problem of the amount of energy being consumed, against the amount of energy being produced (as well as available sources of energy production) alongside the projected boom of human population to around 8-10 billion by 2050.

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of attention placed on the topic of energy efficiency and the relationship between energy consumption and climate change.

It is an undeniable fact that our global climate is rising in temperature. The science is there to prove it; the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and many other international organizations have acknowledged that recent years have been the hottest since records began.

As a result, intense weather like heat waves, hurricanes, heavy rains, tropical storms, and rising sea levels all becoming more and more commonplace.

Despite the rising tide of climate crisis, the demand for energy supply is at an all-time high. The global economy is insatiable in its demand for energy to sustain economic growth and development.

How should organizations prepare themselves for the inevitable challenge of sustainable adaptation, and for ensuring they have the tools in place to facilitate the systematic energy management approach that will be the core of efforts to improve energy efficiency in the future.

“Energy efficiency is the most promising means to reduce greenhouse gases in the short term,” – Yvo de Boer, Former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

A systems-scale approach is necessary if organizations want to seriously engage with difficult problems facing sustainable business and adapt for the future of energy management.

ISO 50001 is a standard designed to help organizations establish efficient and effective energy management systems (EnMS) and improve energy performance.

Based on the principles of continuous improvement and popularized by the ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 management system standards, by implementing these standards companies stand to reduce energy efficiency costs, lower carbon dioxide emissions and prioritize the preservation and sustainable engagement with the environments in which they operate.

This article will provide an introduction to the ISO 50001 standard, with a simple explanation and tips for getting started with an implementation of your own using Process Street.

Thankfully, recent changes have made it easier than ever to implement ISO 50001 (and any ISO management system standard), so that will be a big focus of this article.

Here’s a breakdown of what I’ll be covering here:

• What is ISO 50001?
• What are management system standards (MSS)?
• Whis is ISO 50001 important?
• Benefits of ISO 50001
• How to get ISO certified
• ISO audits
• Transitioning from ISO 50001:2011 to ISO 50001:2018
• Using Process Street for ISO management

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