$22 trillion.

That was the cost of the financial crisis to the U.S. economy. This created a less than ideal environment for any business to survive in. The period saw 200,000 small businesses vanish into a black hole of recession, engulfing 3 million jobs down with them.

I have said it before, and I will say it again: The 2008 U.S. financial crisis and the devastation it brought was the result of audit process failures. This has been concluded by The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC).

Like the FCIC, we at Process Street understand the importance of following a set audit process. Not doing so can bring devastating consequences on all scales. To country economics, right down to small businesses.

In this article, we will:

• Define the term audit process
• Explain why it is important to follow a set audit process
• Outline an audit process followed by professional auditors
• Show how you can implement this set audit process into your business for free

Read this article and action the advice we give. By doing so you will be protected from common audit process pitfalls and the resulting cataclysmic consequences. You can click on the relevant links below to jump the section of your choosing:

• A definition for audit process
• Audit process: Internal vs external audits
• Audit process: Why are audit processes needed?
• Audit process: The audit process done right
• Audit process: The auditing process
• Audit process: Why do auditors follow a set process?
• Preserve your audit process using Process Street

Alternatively, take the time to read all we, at Process Street, have to say.

Shall we get started?

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70% of all businesses fail within the first 10 years.

Business owners reading this: for every ten of you, 7 will fold.

Despite that morbid start, I begin this Process Street article looking at the operational audit. I will demonstrate how using an operational audit can refine, improve, and evolve your business operations, setting you up for business prosperity. Wouldn’t it be nice to alter the above stat to 100% business success?

A tall order but, as the Westlife song goes, Nothing is impossible – apologies if you are not a Westlife fan. I believe that optimized operational audits play a significant role in driving business success. In this article, I will explain why. You will also find out:

1. What an operational audit is
2. The benefits operational audits bring to Business
3. Operational audit best practices
4. How you can implement internal operational audits with Process Street. These will be recurring processes within your business

To jump to the relevant section, click on the links below. Alternatively, scroll down and read all to become an expert in the auditing world.

• Operational audit: What is an operational audit?
• Operational audit: What do operational auditors do?
• Operational audit: Best practices used by the experts
• Integrating operational audit best practices into your internal operational audit process
• Operational audit: Why you should use an audit checklist to conduct your internal operational audit
• Use Process Street and our audit checklists to conduct your internal operational audit

Let’s get started!

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This is a guest post from internet marketing specialist Deana Kovač at Point Visible, a digital agency providing custom blogger outreach services. In her free time, she enjoys listening to music and singing karaoke – and she just can’t start her day without a hot cup of coffee!

With millions of blog posts being published daily, consumers are exposed to more content than ever before. This is intense competition, meaning not every piece of content is going to stand out.

Statistics show that 65% of marketers rank the production of engaging content as their biggest challenge – yes, churning out quality information can really be a hard task.

The Process Street blog has been going for a while now. Since 2014, to be precise. Along the way, we figured out a pretty solid process for making the most out of old content.

It’s a kind of content optimization: optimize existing underperforming content by making small, but impactful changes.

With a few tweaks to the information and layout that is already there, you can negate the need for time heavy research required for a fresh piece.

Additionally, underperforming content harms your SEO efforts. Google has said as much.

What’s more, recent SEO research suggests that having many low‐value‐add URLs can negatively affect a site’s crawling and indexing.

But don’t worry – we wrote this post so that you can follow our process to weed out and rejuvenate your low-value content.

It’s simple really. By optimizing the same content to perform better, you convert low-value URLs to high-value resources. This can prove to be a very rewarding strategy if implemented correctly.

In this article, you will learn how to fix underperforming content through content optimization, the process of which has been split into two stages:

• Content optimization: How to separate good content from bad content
• Content optimization: Our six simple tips

We also go into some depth as to how you might use Process Street to streamline your content creation workflow, by taking advantage of some of our free checklist templates!
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“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who watches the watchmen?)” – Decimus Junius Juvenalis (Juvenal), Roman satiric poet

We’ve spoken before about the importance of meeting high standards with your work.

We’ve also covered, in detail, how failure to comply with industry standards and bad processes cost Zenefits $7,000,000.

This all happened because they weren’t meeting the standards they should have been with their internal processes.

To help stop you from falling afoul of the same fate, we here at Process Street will be covering compliance audits in this post. These are the guidelines that you will need to follow to avoid penalties from external sources for not doing your work satisfactorily.

It doesn’t matter what business you’re in – compliance audits are there to make sure that your customers are getting a satisfactory (or, at least reasonable) service.

We’ll cover:

• What is a compliance audit?
• Why is audit compliance important?
• Compliance audit types
• How to prepare for a compliance audit
• Process Street: The natural compliance audit software

Let’s get right into it.

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Job loss.

Insolvency.

Falling asset prices.

Complete market standstill.

Ring any bells?

You remember, as clearly as I do, the economic disaster of 2008. A global financial crisis; what could have caused such an economic catastrophe?

One hypothesis: Financial audit failures.

As concluded by the Financial Crises Inquiry Commission (FCIC), financial audit failures were found to have played a significant part in the financial crash.

Just like the FCIC, we at Process Street understand the importance of standards enforced by financial audit processes.

This article has been structured into two sections. The first section looks at the financial audit. The second section considers the International Standards on Auditing (ISA).

The ISA standards are a specific set of rules that operate globally.

Here’s a more thorough breakdown:

• The financial audit: What are financial audits?
• The financial audit: What are the International Standards on Auditing (ISA)?
• The financial audit: The benefits of International Standards on Auditing (ISA)
• How you can use Process Street to help with your external auditing processes
• ISA audit checklist

In the last section of this article, you will get your hands on our nifty ISA audit checklist for free.

You can use this template to conduct an internal check on your finances audits against the International Standards on Auditing. This checklist will save your organization a heap of time, worry, and money.
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Decisions.

We make a lot of them.

From deciding what we want to wear in the morning to making a bold, life-altering decision like starting a small business, we have to make decisions day in, day out.

In fact, we humans make over 35,000 decisions that we’re remotely conscious of per day.

But not all of those decisions will be smart ones – leading to bad, negative, or even downright harmful consequences.

How can we learn to bypass those bad decisions and, instead, become intelligent decision makers?

DECIDE.

No, that’s not me shouting at you and telling you to decide – it’s me introducing you to a decision making framework and process called DECIDE.

DECIDE has personally helped me make better decisions day-to-day which is why, in this post, I’ll be describing why intelligent people make poor decisions, what DECIDE is and how it came about, and how you can apply DECIDE to both your life and business!

All you have to do is read through the below sections:

• What’s the reason for poor decision making skills?
• What is the DECIDE decision making process?
• DECIDE: 6-steps for making good decisions
• How to make decisions in life and business with DECIDE
• How Process Street can help you win in life and business!

Make the right choice and read on.

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What are audit procedures? Can you define the term with a single definition?

How are audit procedures relevant to your business?

How would you go about implementing audit procedures?

I will stop with the interrogation. I hope though, I have you thinking – I mean really thinking – about the term audit procedure. From my own experience, most people hear the term audit and have a general idea of what this is. But when it comes to defining the term or implementing audit procedures in a business, they struggle.

If you are one of those people, then luck is in your favor for having stumbled on this article. In this article, we at Process Street will take a look at audit procedures, define what they are and how they are implemented.
We then turn our attention to a specific type of audit procedure, namely, the internal audit. Finally, I will introduce to you Process Street’s new, game-changing feature: approvals.

This article is structured as below:

• Audit procedures: What are they?
• Audit procedures: The auditing process
• Audit procedures: Four different types of auditing opinion
• Internal audit: What is an internal audit
• Internal audit: The benefits internal audits bring to your business
• Internal audit: Disasters caused by internal audit neglect
• How you can use Process Street to conduct an internal audit for your business
• Process Street’s approvals feature and its use-value for internal audits
• A whistle-stop tour through Process Street’s free internal audit template resources

In the section A whistle-stop tour through Process Street’s free internal audit templates, you are presented with 19 free templates. I have listed these templates below so that you can plunge right in. Keep reading for more information on each template.

1. Financial Audit Checklist
2. Environmental Accounting Internal Audit
3. Environmental Management Self Audit Checklist
4. Management Systems Audit Checklist
5. ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 Integrated Management System (IMS) Checklist
6. ISO 9001:2015 Internal Audit Checklist for Quality Management Systems
7. PPC Audit Checklist
8. Google Analytics Audit
9. Technical SEO Audit
10. UX Audit
11. ISO 27001 Information Security Management System (ISO27K ISMS) Audit Checklist
12. SQL Server Audit Checklist
13. Firewall Audit Checklist
14. Network SecurityAudit Checklist
15. Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Audit Checklist
16. Diversity Management Monthly Audit
17. Hotel Sustainability Audit
18. Laboratory Safety Procedure Audit
19. Retail Store Audit Checklist

Shall we get started?
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Approvals are everywhere. If you’ve worked on any project involving any kind of deliverables, chances are you’re all-too-familiar with the approval process (or rejection process, depending).

Documents, prototypes, reports, mock-ups, wireframes, storyboards, and even more internally-facing elements like simple holiday leave requests. All of these represent different kinds of approval process, and approvals are an integral workflow element.

Approvals can also represent a major bottleneck.

Consider how you are currently approving work in your business. Perhaps you have a vague process involving emails, and if you’re particularly attentive you might be tracking it in a spreadsheet.

These methods are slow and prone to delays. You have no way of tracking anything reliably, you are more likely to miss approval windows, and information has to be sent manually between individuals.

What’s more, it’s quite difficult to improve this process without the proper system in place. You need to make sure you’ve got the right tools to optimize your approval process.

Process Street‘s approvals feature is the solution to this problem.

We created the approvals feature to make the process of approving work as fast and easy as possible.

With approvals, you can:

• Get notified as soon as work is ready for approval
• Approve (or reject) work with zero friction using a clear, streamlined interface
• Approve on-the-go, from your phone’s email inbox
• Synergize with many other Process Street features to optimize process efficiency
• Save time and stay on top of your workflow

In this post, I have a trove of templates to showcase the approvals feature. All of the templates in this article are custom-built to make your life easier.

They also take advantage of Process Street‘s other powerful features like rich form fields, conditional logic, dynamic due dates, and role assignments.

So, read on for:

• A quick introduction to approvals
• Different types of approval process
• How to add approval tasks in Process Street
• Approval process best practices
• 20+ free approval process templates (each use-case explained)
• How to approve tasks straight from your phone
• Optimize your approvals with more process street features
• More great workflow automation resources

Read on to learn how to hit the ground running with the approvals feature.

Hospitals have developed something of a reputation for being rife with bad processes. When processes aren’t adequate, the result is an abundance of “workarounds”.

For example, when equipment or supplies are missing, a nurse might waste time running around searching for what is needed, and once the item is found, return to their previous duties.

One study indicates that nurses spend 33 minutes of a 7.5-hour shift completing workarounds that are not part of their job description.

This may well “put out the fire” so-to-speak, but really it is just a hastily applied band-aid that does nothing to treat the root cause of the problem.

More time is wasted and more problems will arise in the future because nothing has been done to prevent the initial problem from happening again.

Individual nurses are not at fault here; workplace culture often values expertise in the form of those who “get the job done”, which tends to pull against the notion of spending time building good processes (time in which the job is perhaps not “getting done”).

So how to approach the problem of problem solving?

In a lean context, problem solving can be distilled into two simple questions:

• What is the problem and how did it happen?
• How can we make sure that it doesn’t happen again?

The 8D, or eight disciplines methodology, is a problem solving process – most likely one of the most widely used problem solving processes out there. It is used by many different countries, in many different industries, and many different organizations.

8D is designed to help you put out those fires, and make sure they don’t happen again.

In this article, I’ll introduce you to the 8D problem solving methodology and provide you with an outline of the basic process that you can hopefully apply in your own business, plus how you can enhance 8D with other tools and methodologies like Six Sigma, FMEA, and Process Street.

Here’s what I hope you’ll take away after reading:

• An understanding of the basics of 8D
• Advantages of using 8D
• The purpose and objectives of each phase of the 8D process
• An understanding of how to use 8D for problem solving
• How 8D works with other problem solving tools
• How you can use Process Street to maximize the potential of the 8D framework

Let’s begin with the origins of 8D – what is it, and where did it come from? Continue Reading

Only 23% of surveyed CEOs believe that they have comprehensive information about the risks of their business.

Can you confidently state that you belong in that 23%?

Even if you are not a CEO, as an employee, are you sure you know all the risks within your workplace?

If not, then keep reading.

In this article, you will learn about risk and how to manage it, specifically via risk mitigation. You are also provided with a thorough list of Process Street resources and templates. These are designed for you to gain a good understanding of business risk, risk management and risk mitigation.

This article is structured as below:

• A definition of risk
• What is risk management
• What is risk mitigation
• Risk mitigation application
• Risk mitigation and risk management: A broader picture

Continue Reading