I’ve got bad news.

Statistics show that no matter how hard you try, your project is probably going to fail.

To be a little more specific, only 2.5% of companies complete their projects 100% successfully.

“Failure is an unavoidable part of any project process” – ProjectManager, 5 Notorious Failed Projects & What We Can Learn from Them

Yet the cost of project failures is staggering. Failed IT projects alone cost the United States around $150 billion in lost revenue and productivity. And it’s frightening! Failure scares us all.

But, the good news is, failure, and how it affects you and your project’s overall success and profitability is controllable. If you can catch, or even predict, failures early enough, you can execute damage control measures and prevent them from completely derailing your project and its profitability. You can even use them to improve your project.

How can you catch or predict failures early?

By using a project tracker.

A project tracker is a snapshot of your entire project. It gives you and the project team a clear picture of how the project is performing, where the weak spots are, and which areas need the most attention.

Let me explain this concept further by taking you through the following topics in this Process Street article:

• What is a project tracker and what does it do?
• Are project trackers really necessary?
• What happens if you don’t track projects properly (with a real-life example)
• The most effective way to track projects

Let’s get going!
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I shouldn’t be here.

I should be sitting in a field, sipping a lukewarm cider, waiting for Aerosmith to come on stage and blow me away.

I should’ve been at the Glastonbury music festival; the UK’s (muddier) equivalent to Coachella.

But thanks to Covid-19 I’m not.

I’m stuck in my hot, stuffy office.

Although it’s heartbreaking, I’m not the only person affected by the decision to cancel the biggest event in my calendar, and music festivals and social occasions aren’t the only events to get canned because of the pandemic.

Most business trips, in-person meetings, and big, costly conferences have also been canceled or postponed.

In fact, talking of conferences, the number of canceled conferences is said to be costing the economy billions. As a direct example, the losses from major tech conferences alone have soared beyond $1 billion.

But, before you start contributing to these losses and canceling your own conferences, there is another way.

Welcome to the world of virtual conferences.

As more and more businesses start to think of new, innovative ways to carry on with ‘business as usual’ during this troubling time, this Process Street post takes a look at the virtual conference. Not only is it a stop-gap until the virus disappears and normal life resumes, but it’s a great permanent replacement for the traditional, physical conference.

Join me as we discover the answers to the following questions:

• What is a virtual conference?
• Why run a virtual conference?
• What should I consider when running a virtual conference?
• How do I run a virtual conference (with Process Street)?

Plus! On top of all that, we’ve developed four virtual conference process templates that you can use, for free, to help you plan and run the best, kick-ass virtual conference.

If you’re itching to see them, dive in and take a sneak peek:

Or pop into any of the other templates in this post directly from this list:

• Planning a Virtual Conference Checklist
• Running a Virtual Conference Checklist
• Process for Troubleshooting Virtual Conference Issues Checklist
• Hosting a Live Webinar Checklist

Take that Covid-19! We’re going virtual…
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During a routine cryogenic proof test on 28th February 2020, SpaceX’s Starship SN1 prototype suffered a catastrophic failure.

Musk indicated that the failure was due to bad welding at the base of the rocket, around the area of the puck that is designed to bear the engine thrust load.

Starship SN3 suffered a similar fate during a round of pressure testing, where the lower of the two tanks collapsed due to test configuration mistakes.

Of course, this is the whole point of testing; failures such as these are half expected, and should be planned for accordingly. Failures like SN1 and SN3 pave the way for future successes like the Crew Dragon launch to the ISS. Failure is an essential ingredient that is necessary to push the limits of understanding.

But it does raise an interesting and important question – when failure is a statistical inevitability, what role does process standardization and quality management play in the prevention and meaningful gain of failure?

In this Process Street article we’ll be looking at AS9100D, the foremost aerospace quality management standard. How can you implement, maintain, and utilize AS9100D to proactively mitigate failure, as well as a tool to learn from errors and failure to drive improvement and optimization?

We’ll cover:

• What is AS9100D?
• AS9100D vs ISO 9001
• Importance of aerospace quality management
• Benefits of AS9100D
• Free AS9100D templates
• How to implement AS9100D with Process Street

Want to skip straight to the templates? No worries! Here’s a preview of the free templates to come and a list that you can use to cut straight to the chase.

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Click here to visually map and improve your business processes now!

Did you know that visual information is processed 60,000 x faster than text?

This explains why the average person remembers only 20% of what they read but 40% of what they see. This also explains why most companies use a form of visual management to communicate with their employees.

Let’s do a little test to see if people, in general, respond better to visual cues than text.

Look at these two depictions of a traffic light below.

One is a sentence describing a traffic light, and one is an image of a traffic light. Both traffic lights are on different colors:

1. The traffic light is on red.

2.

At the end of this Process Street post, we’ll see which color traffic light you remember! No cheating mind!

In the meantime, I’ll take you through the following topics to explain what visual management is and how you can use it to effectively communicate with your employees:

• What is visual management?
• Why use visual management?
• The 3 golden rules of visual management
• Implementing visual management with Process Street

Ready?
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I’ve just read an article.

The first two lines scared the living crap out of me:

“Dihydrogen Monoxide. It’s everywhere. It’s in our bodies, it’s in our houses, and it’s in the air we breathe.
If we consume too much of it however, we will die.”
– Critical Risk Analysis for Our Daily Lives, Harvard

As a self-confessed worrier, you can imagine what happened when I read that.

Sheer. Blind. Panic.

Until I read the next line;

“Dihydrogen Monoxide is just the chemical name for water”

Yes, I did feel silly. But it did get me thinking.

About ‘risk’ of all things.

Risk is everywhere, in everything we do.

As we’ve just read; there’s a risk of dying from drinking too much water. There’s a risk of catching coronavirus every time we leave the house. Risk of breaking an ankle slipping on spilled coffee at work. Risk of choking on a toast crumb.

So, given that everything in work and life is so risky, how are we able to work and live?!

Through managing the risks we face.

Which brings me to the point of this HAZOP post.

HAZOP (which stands for Hazard and Operability) is a way of managing risks. It’s a technique that identifies potential hazards and functional flaws in new or existing systems and processes.

To get to grips with how to manage risk with HAZOP, we’ll cover the following topics in this Process Street post:

• What is HAZOP?
• How to conduct a HAZOP
• Where did HAZOP come from?
• Who uses HAZOP?
• How to implement HAZOP with Process Street

If you need a little convincing, here’s a sneak peek of the free HAZOP Process that we’ve created. Check it out and get it for free below.

Pour yourself a glass of Dihydrogen Monoxide, and let’s get started!

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“They’re going to lose their houses, they’re going to lose their jobs…this is like, the end of capitalism, this is like the dark ages all over again” – The Big Short

Debuting in 2015, The Big Short is an American comedy-based drama showcasing the 2007-2008 financial crisis. I remember watching the movie, in quiet disbelief that a financial failure of such magnitude slipped through all areas of caution, potential management, and mitigation.

The 2008 financial crisis was the result of unsuccessful systemic risk management.

A crisis that the Federal Reserve Board estimated to have cost every single American ~$70,000.

For me, this single example communicates the importance of understanding, managing, and mitigating systemic risk items. With that in mind, we begin this article on systemic risk.

In this Process Street article, we will explain what systemic risk is and how it differs from conventional risk. You are given tips to help you identify prevailing systemic risks so you can be proactive, plan for, and manage these risks for your business and line of work.

Before concluding the article, we acknowledge climate change as a potent systemic risk that urgently needs to be addressed and managed. For this, we give you free template resources, uniquely designed to support the movement towards business sustainability. A movement that runs hand-in-hand with carbon footprint reduction.

Click on the relevant subheader below to jump to that section. Alternatively, scroll down to read all we have to say about systemic risk.

• Risk management: Conventional risk vs systemic risk
• Systemic risk: An explanation for the concept
• Systematic risk: The difference and its relation to systemic risk
• Systemic risk examples
• Identifying systemic risk elements: Too big to fail, too interconnected to fail
• Systemic risk mitigation: Approaches to managing systemic risk
• Global systemic risks of today, a new challenge
• Climate change as a systemic risk
• Using Process Street to become more sustainable, mitigating against climate change

Let’s get started!
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This is a guest article by Dan Fries – entrepreneur, investor, and writer. Dan shows bootstrapped entrepreneurs and business owners how to prepare for an exit by making better long-term financial decisions.

The only constant thing in business is change.

Whether you are seeking to grow your business or looking to adapt your model to evolving market conditions, implementing strong change management techniques is key to keeping your business agile and sustainable.

Effective change management techniques have many different elements, some of which Process Street has covered before. For instance, checklists for teams can help you to keep a careful track of the development of your team, and these ten templates that optimize creative workflow management can provide your team with the flexibility and creativity they need to stay ahead.

One of the biggest obstacles to applying change management techniques in the contemporary workforce is the rising number of freelance, remote workers.

In this Process Street post, we’ll cover the following seven key principles for managing change within a modern, remote workforce:

• Change management principle #1: Develop your strategic vision
• Change management principle #2: Master the art of communication
• Change management principle #3: Build a business transformation team
• Change management principle #4: Encourage communication with customers
• Change management principle #5: Use a business process management suite
• Change management principle #6: Assess your workforce’s response to change
• Change management principle #7: Get your team together
• Apply change management principles using Process Street

Let’s get stuck in.

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What caused the global financial crash in 2008?

Failures of AIG, Lehman, Merrill, and other major financial firms? Disproportionate risk-taking by banks and lenders? Deregulation within the financial industry? Development of new ways to finance mortgage products? Excessive lending and borrowing in the housing market?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes.

However, these causes only tell half the story behind the financial meltdown that morphed into the biggest global recession since the Great Depression (Covid-19 aside).

What was the root cause? The real reason behind the enormous cost to the economies of many countries and the lost fortunes of millions of families?

A lack of total quality management (TQM).

Paul Moore, former head of group regulatory risk at HBOS (part of the Lloyds Banking Group since 2009), dubbed this crisis as ‘the biggest quality failure of all time.’

Total quality management stems from the belief that mistakes can be avoided if everyone is behind the continual process of detecting, reducing, and eliminating errors.

If organizations from within the financial sector believed in putting quality first, and positioned culture and people above profit margins and structure, the events leading up to the crisis could have been avoided.

Just imagine how different things might have been had the financial sector been managing their quality in a similar way to ISO 9001!

We’ll continue to explore this concept later but, before we do, let’s look at what else we’ll cover in this Process Street post:

• What is total quality management (TQM)?
• Total quality management’s 5 core principles
• TQM’s benefits (& how it might’ve stopped the financial crisis)
• Create and use a TQM framework with Process Street!

Let’s get going!

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If you’re on the front lines fighting COVID-19 and want to use these processes to help your facility, please contact us and we will set you up with a free account*

COVID-19 hit hard, and many communities, organizations, and small businesses are struggling to shoulder the increased pressure put on by circumstances of economic downturn and uncertainty.

This article is an attempt to offer some aid in the form of 8 free coronavirus workplace templates, to help you improve efficiency in your organization by streamlining and automating manual tasks in recurring COVID-19 processes.

Some of these templates are straightforward, linear processes, while others are more complicated processes with various different outcomes. They will all be embedded below with relevant descriptions and links to sources.

The Process Street checklists in this post were all informed by procedures established by the following leading health authorities:

• World Health Organization (WHO)
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
• Government of Alberta’s Emergency Coordination Centre (ECC)
• New York Department of Health (DoH)

Each process template will be embedded below with a description. The article will be structured as follows:

• Coronavirus template quick-links
• How to use these coronavirus workplace templates
• 8 COVID-19 procedure templates to organizations and businesses fight coronavirus in the workplace
• How to use Process Street for crisis management in a downturn

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This is a guest post by Derek Jones from Deputy, a global workforce management platform for employee scheduling, timesheets, and communication. With a focus on Emerging Retail, Derek helps business owners and workforce leaders simplify employment law compliance, keep labor costs in line, and build award-winning workplaces. Derek has over 16 years’ experience in delivering data-driven sales and marketing strategies to SaaS companies like MarketSource and Griswold Home Care.

One of the many factors that can help guarantee the success and growth of a business today is employee performance.

Most organizations know this. Therefore, they want employees that are as efficient as possible. However, that is easier said than done, especially in industries where activities often run at odd hours or even 24/7.

For such industries (like healthcare, hospitality, and retail in particular), one of the most important things they’ll need to manage is shift work scheduling.

Through optimization, the task of scheduling shift work will have a structure to minimizes employee burnout and improve overall performance.

Employees that work in an enabling environment have a higher chance to properly complete all important tasks – on schedule.

In view of that, in this Process Street article, we will:

• Discuss some of the issues and challenges that surround shift work.
• Take a look at up-to-date research regarding employee performance.
• Summarize 3 shift-work goals you can incorporate to optimize your shift work schedule.
• Give top tips on shift work scheduling to maximize employee productivity and retention.

Click on the relevant subheaders below to jump to that section, alternatively scroll down to read all, and find out how you can optimize your shift work schedules today!

• Schedule optimization: Using BPM in shift work
• Shift work scheduling: The top 3 shift work issues
• How do common shift work issues impact employee performance?
• Schedule optimization: 3 goals to optimize your shift schedule
• Shift work scheduling: Scheduling tips and tricks for shift work

Let’s jump right to it!
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