Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth…
– Mike Tyson

Which, let’s face it, happens to most start-ups and entrepreneurs. Around 75% in fact.

You have the best idea. You spend days, weeks, and months perfecting a 40-page business plan filled with five-year forecasts, 18-month roadmaps, and in-depth marketing strategies. You confidently pitch it to stakeholders and investors.

And then?

Then you get punched in the mouth.

Potential investors go quiet or “haven’t had time to read it” and you’re left with an expensive, wasted deliverable and a chunk of time that you’ll never get back. Worse still, your product isn’t any nearer launching and you haven’t secured any buy-in or investment.

What. A. Waste. Of. Time.

Traditional business plans are of little use to start-ups, and of no real interest to investors.

But what’s the alternative?

A one-page business plan inspired by Eric Ries’s Lean Start-Up methodology and specifically designed for emerging entrepreneurs: The Lean Canvas.

The Lean Canvas is a living framework that allows you to quickly capture your idea or concept, thoroughly validate it, and then continuously share, improve, and most importantly move on it.

Ok, I know what you’re thinking:

• How can a one-page Lean Canvas possibly replace a 40-page business plan?
• How can I tell the entire story of my business on one-page?
• Is a Lean Canvas really enough to help me secure investment or buy-in?

I have the answers to all these questions and more in this Process Street post.

Ready to dodge some punches?
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When you’re doing any kind of content marketing, you want to be able to understand how well you’re doing. You want to be able to look at the performance of the content you’re creating and feel assurance that you’re:

1. Driving forward key goals and objectives tied to your content strategy;
2. Continuously optimizing and improving the quality of your content in order to hit those goals.

Especially when you’re creating this kind of content that involves a degree of creative input (writing!) it can be difficult to measure quality.

This is where maturity models come in. Maturity models can be a great way to build and assess how successful an organization or system is at achieving continuous improvement.

Ultimately, it’s the idea that you’re constantly seeking to test and improve the way in which your organization runs. You’re not standing still.

We’ve written before about more generally applicable Capability Maturity Models, but this post takes a look at our internal Blog Asset Maturity Model (BAMM) process that we use to audit and continuously improve the quality of our blog content.

In this Process Street article, we’ll cover:

• How to assess content quality
• Content marketing metrics to measure success
• What exactly is a maturity model?
• Our internal process for quality control: The BAMM review
• Using processes to systematize content creation – more reliable and higher quality

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Process Street is a simple, free and powerful way to manage your team’s recurring checklists and procedures.

Process Street helps you automate tasks, track progress, and manage documents — plus it integrates with over a thousand of your favorite apps.

Thousands of businesses in every industry use Process Street to make their recurring work fun, fast and faultless. We’ve been listening closely to our customers, and Process Street 3.0 proves it. Sign up for a free trial and take Process Street for a spin.

Processes are a part of daily life for every person in every role in every business. We designed Process Street to power any kind of process: employee onboarding, rental property inspections, new client onboarding, firewall security audits, monthly sales forecasts, and many more.

We’ve built strong lines of communication with businesses who use Process Street every day; with the launch of Process Street 3.0, their feedback has helped us make our platform:

• More powerful, with greater control to orchestrate and automate complex multi-departmental workflows.
• More intuitive, with a redesigned user experience to help you implement and manage all your processes even faster.
• More accessible, with new time-savers like application speed improvements, single sign-on, and a slick iOS app.

Before we dive into all of our 3.0 features, you have to check out our new explainer video! As you watch, consider what it can mean for your business if every person on your team knows what to do, and when.

Satisfying, right?

The feeling of working together to get processes done right, and right on time.

Ok let’s jump into it.
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This is a guest post by Gabe Nelson. Gabe is a content specialist with over 7 years of experience, currently working with Semaphoreci.com. He has a passion for programming and has written hundreds of content pieces in numerous niches. Currently, he lives in Missouri with his wife and kids.

Let’s face it: the longer your software takes to get from ideation to iteration, the more irrelevant it becomes.

With the innovation of new paradigms and working methods to meet the right here/right now demands of consumers in a hyper-connected world, your developers need workflows that will deliver your software into production environments the second they’re able to.

The millisecond micro nanosecond, even.

Managing your software deployment processes and procedures to not just keep up with, but stay ahead of, the competition can seem like a Sisyphean task, but it doesn’t have to be.

Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) together constitute the light at the end of a software developer’s tunnel. No doubt that’s why implementation is commonly described in terms of “pipelines” – CI/CD takes you straight through the problems.

More specifically, CI/CD pipelines make it easy for developers to deploy working code into functional and error-free production environments. That’s because these workflows do a great job of automating entire pipelines of your team’s code releases and updates. This frees up developers to create new features and processes instead of spending hours debugging faulty code.

In this Process Street guest post, I’ll do a quick walkthrough of the basics of CI/CD, then dive into how CI/CD can generate more value for and quicken your software deployment.

• What is CI/CD?
• Commit to the build
• Automate testing throughout deployment cycle
• Initiate software deployment
• Documenting your deployment life cycle
• The value of CI/CD pipelines in software deployment

Read on…
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Imagine you knew absolutely everything there was to know about the company you buy from. I’m talking about their goals, values … even the challenges they face. It would be pretty radical right?

Or rather, the company in question would be radically transparent.

Radical transparency is a phenomenon that’s gaining traction, and this post is here to tell you why. I’ll be taking a look at what radical transparency means and how the approach is put into practice at Gitlab, a DevOps platform founded upon an open-source ethos.

To jump to a specific section of the post click the appropriate link below:

• What is radical transparency?
• A brief introduction to GitLab
• What does radical transparency look like at Gitlab?
• A look into GitLab’s employee handbook
• What does radical transparency look like in practice?
• Radical Transparency: Concluding thoughts

Let’s get started
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