You need a way for your teams’ processes to be done right, done on time, and documented in a way that allows those processes to be improved over time. So you come to Process Street, which enables anyone in your organization to execute each process with consistency, visibility, and accountability.
By now you’ve experimented with some of the pre-made workflows. Maybe you’ve even built a few yourself. You’ve seen what’s possible when it comes to capturing your core processes and sharing them across your company.
But are you getting the most bang for your buck?
In this post, I’ll cover the top 11 features of Process Street workflows and how to use them to optimize your own processes and become a master of modern process management.
If there’s a particular feature you’re interested in, feel free to skip ahead:
Major setbacks. Lengthy delays. Unnecessary bottlenecks. When important items aren’t rejected or approved in time, progress is halted.
Take the United States’ government shutdown in 2019.
The shutdown meant the U.S. Small Business Administration – which backs entrepreneurs and small businesses with financial loans – could no longer approve loan applications.
The result? Small businesses turned to high-cost, short-term lenders, entrepreneurs couldn’t buy the necessary products their business relied upon, and the delay itself caused widespread anxiety among those who were relying on loans being granted. Financially-speaking, the lack of approvals caused a delay of $2 billion in SBA lending.
At Process Street (if you don’t know our app, it’s state-of-the-art BPM software!) we know how important it is for teams to get items approved or rejected, so that business processes and projects can be completed on time.
That’s why we’ve introduced approvals.
With approvals, decision-makers can give the go-ahead (or rejection) regarding important items, on top of providing any necessary comments.
Want to know more about this game-changing feature and how it can dramatically improve workflows for your team? Read through the following sections:
Career aptitude tests are powerful tools for both employers and employees alike. They can be used to gain insight into personal tendencies and make informed responses to career and hiring decisions.
Tests like these can differ in:
Purpose (i.e. for career placement, selection, counseling, or training)
What they measure (i.e. what they are designed to measure, be it personality type, skills, work approaches, values, or vocational interests)
What they predict (i.e. performance, quality of work, management potential, career success and satisfaction, your next job)
Format (online, paper form, in-person)
Standardization and rigor (how subjective or objective are the test results?)
Some tests are highly structured, with definitive quantifiable outcomes; others are more flexible, and designed to be personally interpreted.
This article will look at six different types of aptitude test, broadly defined, and run through the process of how you can build your own aptitude tests using Process Street.
Like any employee who works at a young startup, last month I was given a task which threw me far out of my depth.
Even though I’m an audio tech graduate whose final project was video-based, I can’t say that my skills destroying VHS tapes and creating feedback loops translated too well.
Create a 5-minute demo video for Process Street showing off most of the features, with screen recordings and slides.
It took me much longer than it should have. But, in the end, I polished it off nicely and got back to doing what I’m better at — writing articles (phew).
Whether you’re submitting a draft of an article for review, collating a report for senior management, or presenting a product design, you probably need someone to sign off on your work.
This happens day in day out in organizations all around the world.
Yet, the sign off process can be slow and littered with delays.
Anyone who has worked in software development will know the pain of submitting work for review, only for revisions and changes to drone on and on. The time spent waiting can sometimes be as much as the time spent working.
And this, friends, is bad for business.
Last week I published an article on Muda – waste in production systems – and laid out the different ways poor processes create waste and damage business performance. One of those wastes is referred to as Time on Hand, or waiting.
In this article, we’ll look to cover the most common occurrence of this waste: the approval flow. We’ll look at:
What an approval process is
What common approval workflows are
Best practices for approvals
How you can use Process Street to streamline your approvals
Yammer could be described as Facebook for enterprises. It’s an enterprise social network that supports a range of integrated apps to combine the usual company and team group emails into one easily scannable feed.
It has a main ‘public’ feed that could be compared to the office water cooler, as well as invite-only groups for departmental discussions and idea sharing (football banter and posting silly gifs).
Even though some companies have offices in different countries, Yammer breaks these boundaries and promotes collaboration between teams, departments and branches, inviting comments, likes and other familiar social features.
Part of the idea behind the ‘public’ nature of Yammer is accountability. No one can say they didn’t get the email or didn’t hear about the meeting if it was published openly on the company Yammer. The same goes for Process Street checklists, because now activity is pushed directly to the Yammer feed for all to see and interact with.
Yammer now has over 14,000,000 users from more than 300,000 enterprises and is establishing itself as a home for open communication by promoting ‘working out loud‘.
We’re on a mission to make Process Street the simplest, most powerful checklist tool ever made. That means creating new awesome features, and making the ones we have even more awesome!
Today we have a neat little release, which allows you to attach files and images to comments.
This significantly opens up Process Street as a two-way communication channel, allowing you to download a form, complete it and re-attach it, for example. Or attach screenshots of a completed job to a task.
We have released a new version of Process Street today, with a few small features and a lot of security, speed and data integrity updates.
The biggest difference you will notice is the introduction of Task Headers. These allow you to break up a process into sections using headers. To turn a task into a header, simply add a colon “:” to the end of it.