Implementing a quality management system (QMS software) is an important investment companies cannot overlook.

One Harvard Business Review study found that companies with an ISO 9001 certification have much higher rates of “corporate survival, sales, employment growth, and wage increases than a matched group of non-adopters.”

For instance, 65% of companies save $25,000 or more in costs within their first year of implementing a QMS.

Adopting a QMS software can also boost efficiency and consistency of work, increase customer satisfaction, raise product value, and reduce unnecessary costs and overall risks.

A good quality management system is all about achieving a quality-driven culture within your company, and as a result, making your product better and marketing it faster. But in order to access these benefits, it’s important that you choose the right QMS solution for you and your company.

In this Process Street article, we’ll be going over the foundation of everything you need to know before choosing your quality management system software.

We’ll be covering:

• What is a quality management system (QMS)?
• Agile QMS
• Best QMS software
• Build your agile QMS with Process Street

Understanding quality and seeking to improve it is arguably the core purpose behind undertaking process improvements. Hence the creation of the Deming cycle.

But where did this philosophy of process improvement come from?

One key person is William Edwards Deming – sometimes referred to as Edward W. Deming. He’s principally a statistician, but one could even call him a philosopher of science.

Deming’s goal was to reapply the scientific method to business processes, and has left us with two main variants of his thinking: PDSA and PDCA.

In this article we’ll outline:

• What the Deming cycle is, with its history
• How to apply the Deming cycle to improve your business processes
• The important distinction between PDSA and PDCA
• How PDSA is employed in the medical field

Deming’s approach is not just about improving processes, but about improving a whole business.

In a recent meta-study from the British Medical Journal, researchers found only 2 out of 73 studies had applied PDSA in a way which fully met criteria. Commenting:

To progress the development of the science of improvement, a greater understanding of the use of improvement methods, including PDSA, is essential to draw reliable conclusions about their effectiveness.

And that’s why we’re writing this article!

Every team needs an agile process. Or two.

Maybe some teams can get by without strictly following documented processes every day, but when it comes to agile software development teams, it’s simply not an option to operate in the dark.

Since software is complex and easy to mess up, processes mean the difference between a great product and a crappy one. Without processes, software teams will spend more time squashing bugs and dealing with support headaches than they will actually developing the product…

The exact reason we created Process Street is to help businesses avoid that nightmarish cycle, and, of course, we use Process Street ourselves to help run the agile processes behind the scenes.

We use regular agile processes like:

• Daily standup meeting
• Sprint planning
• Sprint turnover
• Sprint retrospective

We also run routine QA processes like:

• GitHub pull request procedure
• Weekly WordPress maintenance
• SSL certificate renewal

And, finally, we have a set of training processes:

• Developer onboarding
• How to set up your development environment
• Pull request review failed procedure
• Pull request merge procedure

These are all regular tasks for the team, and the reason they were created was because we found they have a high margin for error.

Scroll down to find the exact processes we use.

If you want to tighten up the way your software team works, hit your sprint targets, and efficiently train new development hires, then this post will show you how. We even reveal the exact processes we use and a workflow diagram detailing the journey an issue takes from start to end.
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HR processes are hard and complex.

From hiring great-fitting talent and helping with their onboarding, to monitoring employee performance and even resolving any employee conflicts, there’s a lot of ground for HR teams to cover – and in such a short amount of time.

Imagine if there was a way for HR teams to time-save, cost-save, labor-save, and take control of their recurring tasks like never before…

Wouldn’t that be a dream?

At Process Street, we rather like turning dreams into reality. That’s why we’ve hand-picked our most effective, most useful HR processes from our extensive library and are presenting it in this ultimate HR process pack.

Think of it as your one-stop-shop for all the human resources processes you’ll ever need:

• Why use workflows for HR processes?
• HR processes #1: Pre-hiring processes
• HR processes #2: Hiring processes
• HR processes #3: Onboarding processes
• HR processes #4: Performance processes
• HR processes #5: Workplace processes
• HR processes #6: Diversity processes
• HR processes #7: Aptitude tests
• Create your own HR processes with Process Street today!

Now, let’s stop dilly-dallying and get to it!
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Did you know that job description templates can make your employee hunting 10x more efficient?

With the estimated cost of $4,129 for a new hire, it’s clear that that empty chair is an expensive one to fill. To make this cost more like an investment for your company than an expense, you want to get your hiring process right. You want to hire the ideal candidate, but where do you start?

At Process Street, we say you start your recruitment process by writing a solid job description. This is no easy task: you have around 14 seconds to convince applicants that your job is the perfect job for them.

Get your job description right and you can draw in the most qualified, skilled and well-fitting applicants. But how do you get your job description right?

We’ve covering what you need to know to start crafting the right job description for your needed role in this Process Street article. We’ve also provided you with 14 of the best job description templates for your company.

• What is a job description template and why do you need it?
• The 14 free job description templates your company needs
• Effortlessly create a killer description with Process Street​​

Let’s dive in!
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Are you in need of some workflow examples to make your teams smarter?

But what makes a team smart?

Several things do, but powerful workflows are one critical ingredient which makes teams smart.

Teams that use workflows don’t set goals and simply hope to reach them; they create checklists (workflows) to make sure they reach their goals.

No wonder 50% of businesses that use workflow management systems say the results are substantial.

It’s incredible.

Teams that use workflows are super organized and able to perform daunting tasks — no matter the long processes involved.

But what types of workflows should you be using this year?

It’s different for every organization; workflow systems are not always one-size-fits-all. But these nine Process Street workflow examples should give you inspiration for how you can build important systems to run your business with.

Our workflow examples:

1. Employee onboarding workflow
2. Customer support workflows
3. Customer onboarding workflows
4. Content marketing or writing workflows
5. Podcast publishing workflows
6. Request and approval workflows
7. Travel workflows
8. Content promotion workflow
9. Standup meeting workflows

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Would you agree to fly on a plane knowing that the crew was simply ‘told’ what to do but didn’t use clear guidelines and instructions?

Probably not.

Sadly, that is how many organizations operate today – without realizing that it may result in a wide range of negative consequences, from employee inefficiency to lost customers and profits.

Telling employees what to do is not nearly as effective as having a set of written step-by-step instructions they can follow, explaining how exactly routine operations should be performed. That’s where standard operating procedures, or SOPs, come in.

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British Airways chief executive described the incident as “catastrophic” as 800 flights were canceled and 75,000 travelers were affected.

Flight compensation website flightright.com estimated that British Airways would have to pay around €61m to passengers for refunds alone under EU legislation. Add to this the cost of reimbursing angry passengers for unexpected hotel stays and other inconveniences, and the total financial damage to British Airways has been estimated at £100m.

Why? Someone turned their data center off and on again.

The entire airline was down for almost 2 days. This wasn’t a natural disaster, it was a process failure.

In this article, we’ll explore how to spot process failures before they occur using a system called Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA). We’ll assess an overview and then delve in deeper to ground our understanding and include a premade Process Street FMEA template to help you run your own assessments in future.

In this article we’ll cover:

• Your free FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) template
• FMEA? What is Failure Mode and Effects Analysis?
• When do we use FMEA?
• Conducting and documenting Failure Mode and Effect Analysis: A user’s guide
• What happened to British Airways?
• Why did it happen?
• How can FMEA help us prevent this happening again?

Cutthroat. Ruthless. Dog-eat-dog.

No, I’m not introducing this year’s hottest action movie – I’m talking about the world of business.

Nowadays, it’s quicker and easier than ever to get a business up and running. Hell, with the emergence of low code and no-code platforms, it’s not just quick and easy but downright simple.

But only 3 out of 4 companies featured in the S&P 500 list will still be relevant – and even exist – in 2027.

With this stark realization, how do startup hopefuls and the Fortune 500 alike know if they’ve got the resources and capabilities to not only stay in the game for the long-haul, but have an overall competitive advantage?

VRIO.

I last discussed VRIO in my post What is VRIO? The 4-Step Framework for Continuous Business Success, where I laid the foundation for understanding what VRIO is, where it came from, and how to navigate the framework.

However, in this post, I’ll be taking things one step further.

I’ll recap what VRIO is (handy for those who don’t already know!), discuss the specific benefits of VRIO analysis, and even provide you with a free VRIO analysis checklist – made by us here at Process Street!

Just read through the following sections to get started:

• What is the VRIO definition?
• The benefits of using the VRIO model for business analysis
• Using Process Street’s VRIO analysis checklist
• Tips for undergoing VRIO analysis with our checklist
• Additional resources for a sustained competitive advantage

The clock’s ticking, so let’s jump in! ⏱

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We send out feedback requests to new blog subscribers so we know what kind of content to write that will be the most useful. Sometimes, the answers surprise us.

In particular, I often get awesome responses that give me insight into how our customers plan and create their processes:

One reader plans out their processes in a spreadsheet because columns make it easy to build the steps out. Another said they analyze a Trello board of tasks and lists to make sense of how a successful project was executed, then writes a process to recreate those steps. And, of course, we have our suggested ways that we have found our customers have the most success with.

In this post, I’m going to go through four methods you can use to document processes accurately, quickly, and naturally.

1. The minimum viable process
2. Turning an archived Trello board into a process
3. Mapping a process in a spreadsheet
4. Turning a screencast into a process

Let’s look at each method in detail.

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