Podcasts are like hacks for your everyday life. They allow you to passively improve your knowledge and gain valuable insight into almost any topic you could imagine, whilst doing pretty much anything.

All of that time spent walking to the store, commuting to work, preparing a meal, working out; it’s all time you could be utilizing to improve yourself and your business.

This article is a selection of the best business podcasts from our team at Process Street; we’d recommend them to anyone looking to devote themselves to self improvement, stay sharp and keep pace with the cutting edge of business trends and insights.

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All businesses have recurring tasks that have to be accomplished on a regular basis.

This inevitably leads to some sort of written process that helps guide team members on how to accomplish that particular task. As a company grows these processes should get updated, automated, and reviewed for relevancy. The point of this is to ensure that the team is as efficient as possible and that the process is helping as opposed to hindering.

This is where business process testing comes into play.

A study conducted by Łukasz Tartanus of Procesowcy.pl found that 69% of the companies they surveyed had documented and repeatable processes built out. However, only 4% of the 236 participating companies measured and managed them! A GAP analysis isn’t needed to determine a quick win on how to improve efficiency.

This post gives a high-level overview of what business process testing is, the pros and cons of BPT, and outlines the methodology.

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On September 23, 1999, NASA’s $193 million Mars Climate Orbiter was obliterated 57km above the surface of Mars.

What caused such a catastrophic event? Badly implemented processes.

“The problem here was not the error; it was the failure of NASA’s systems engineering, and the checks and balances in our processes, to detect the error. That’s why we lost the spacecraft.”
—Edward Weiler, NASA associate administrator for space science

Despite all of NASA’s precautions, preparatory research and technical developments, the deviation from standard procedure for making sure their units were consistently imperial or metric was what resulted in the disastrous calculation error responsible for the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter, and in turn huge amounts of time, money, and material resources.

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Have you ever wished you could get some of those pesky work tasks done more easily while on the move, or out-and-about? Those routine tasks and emails that take so much time out of your day, that you would give an arm and a leg to be able to automate?

Or, picture this: you easily send a quick follow-up email, record meeting notes in real time, create new projects, send surveys, schedule meetings, and much more by simply talking to Siri.

You can do all of this and more with Shortcuts for iOS 12 in combination with Siri and Process Street, using the power of Zapier integrations.

Shortcuts, formerly known as Workflow, puts Siri in the control seat of your business workflows, with more power and usefulness than ever before. Using custom phrases recorded and added to Siri’s library of voice gestures, you can trigger a series of actions across multiple apps.

There are two ways to use Shortcuts. The best option is the Shortcuts app itself, which is where you can create your own workflows from scratch. The app also comes with a gallery of suggested shortcuts curated by Apple. Separate from this, Siri will recommend shortcuts based on your daily iPhone activity. You can see these in Settings under Siri & Search.

Here’s a quick list of all of the ideas I’ll be covering in this post, before we dive in:

• 1. Dictate meeting notes straight to your CRM
• 2. Send an electronic contract when timing is crucial
• 3. Master your calendar in an instant
• 4. Kickstart your client onboarding process
• 5. Get paid faster by sending your invoices ASAP
• 6. Assign your team members on the go
• 7. Grab and archive snapshots of your working screen-space during a technical audit
• 8. Jump straight back into your drafts, anywhere, any time
• 9. Dictate an email to your assistant
• 10. Manage your tasks with a dynamic to-do list

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The following is a guest post from Henry Howlett, Junior SEO Executive at Absolute Digital Media.

Who wants to receive a parcel three days after it was due to arrive?

Definitely not your customers.

They pay for the type of parcel delivery they require, whether it is Standard Delivery, the best cheap Next Day Delivery or even Same Day Delivery — they expect it to arrive on time, safe and sound.

In fact, more people than ever shop online, and prefer to receive their goods through the post than walking into a store and paying for it at a till. The need for reputable parcel delivery is only growing, and is unlikely to settle any time soon.

So, to ensure your customers remain satisfied with the delivery service your business provides, as well as save money and invaluable time, take into consideration these tips for enhancing your shipping processes:

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“How did I forget to follow up with that client?”

There was a time when I used to think that as another golden opportunity passed me by. It’s tough enough being a freelancer and having to both find clients and secure them in such a competitive scene without adding human error into the mix.

Nowadays, I’ve largely mitigated the frustration that comes with making avoidable errors, letting me massively boost my consistency and productivity, and it’s all thanks to process documentation.

Having a documented process to work through is insanely useful. I’m here to tell you exactly why you need to be using processes in your work and give some freelance tips on how you can start noticing the benefits in no time. Let’s get started.

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Web design is more than how something looks. It dictates everything from your audience’s initial impressions to how easily they can navigate your site, and can be easily messed up entirely if you don’t have the right processes to prevent mistakes and remember key tasks.

That’s why we’ve collected this pack of web design process templates.

“… a well-designed user interface could raise your website’s conversion rate by up to a 200%, and a better UX design could yield conversion rates up to 400%.” – Goran Paunovic, covering this Forrester report in The Bottom Line: Why Good UX Design Means Better Business

Over the course of these 13 templates we’ve provided documented processes to make the most common web design processes, tasks, and actions run smoothly every time. These include:

• Animation Design Process
• Social Media Image Design
• Usability Test Plan
• Usability Testing Template
• Blog Image Design Process
• Web Design Process
• Website Design Client Onboarding Template
• UX Design Process
• Brand Identity Design
• Header Design
• Graphic Design Process
• Logo Design Process
• Website Launch Checklist

Better still, all of these are free, ready to use, and can be edited to suit your needs should you want to customize your processes. Let’s get right to it!

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Bullet journals are an amazing way to boost your organization and productivity, and to just de-clutter your mind.

Using bullet journaling can really help when it comes to reducing stress, being more efficient, and generally getting more done.

I’ve been bullet journaling for a while now and I want to share with you how I’ve used bullet journals to create order and structure in regular life and, in particular, in my professional life!

You see, I write about how businesses can better organize themselves and how to make sure the work which is being done is at a high standard every time.

In short, I write normally about something called business process management.

And it occurred to me that I could pull together everything I know about processes and my experiences with bullet journals to really accelerate my work.

I realized I could use my bullet journal to discover my most important repeatable processes, and then use the principles of business process management to improve how I approach these processes.

The two fit together perfectly.

That’s why, in this Process Street article, I’m going to cover:

• What is bullet journaling?
• What is process management?
• How you can turn bullet journals into processes
• Bullet journal ideas for work

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Writing perfect processes is a dream all Process Street users share.

But a perfect process isn’t necessarily a process where all the steps work perfectly all the way through.

In real life, processes come up against external forces and unforeseen circumstances. A perfect process doesn’t have to predict all these external influences in advance; it needs to be able to adapt to them in real time as they arise.

Fortunately, there’s a concept for this: Process Flexibility.

Process flexibility helps keep our processes working even when everything else is going wrong.

In this article, we’re going to outline what process flexibility is and the main approaches to managing it:

• What is process flexibility?
• What are the main approaches to process flexibility?
• Flexibility by design
• Flexibility by deviation
• Flexibility by underspecification
• Flexibility by change
• How Process Street is designed for agility

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Project management is the key to sticking to your budget and deadline, whilst keeping the most important tasks at the forefront of your company. Without it, you leave the future of your business at the mercy of your teams and employees (which, in case you weren’t aware, is not a good business model).

For such an important process, the project management steps are a little muddy, with sources citing differing numbers of steps, timelines, etc. Then again, it’s a massive topic with a huge margin for error; how the hell do you convey these steps when the project could be anything from “get winter clothes in stock” to “grow to $220,000 monthly recurring revenue”?

Well, we here at Process Street hate making things complicated, so we’ve simplified the project management steps of any and every undertaking to five easy stages.
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