Agile is a buzzword. These days, everyone is “doing agile”. Or so they say.

Despite over 90% of senior executives stating agile adoption as a top priority, less than 10% actually consider their firm to be performing with a high level of agility.

As much as people love to wear the badge of agile on their sleeve, there is a great deal of confusion swelling in the dark chasm between the aspiration of agile implementation and reality.

So what is agile?

It’s basically a philosophy of software development that prioritizes iterative development of working software and solutions through cross-collaboration and self-organizing teams.

It’s also an umbrella term for a bunch of development frameworks, but agile doesn’t simply mean kanban or scrum.

Some of the confusion arises when teams equate the agile approach to using an “Agile framework” (usually capitalized).

Frameworks like these are attractive because they’re sold as simplified solutions to difficult project and process management problems.

Sure, these frameworks can be an important part of an agile implementation, but they need more. They need a firm foundation to stand upon.

It’s not enough to simply go through the motions and expect an agile approach to “just work”, especially when transitioning from a more rigid and traditional framework like waterfall.

In order to drive agile success, teams need to adopt agile philosophy. They need to change the way they think about work ownership, management, and their relationship and duty to customers.

Without this vital force, frameworks like scrum and kanban fall flat.

In this article I’ll investigate what it is that separates true agile from the “fake” agile that is often the differentiator between success and failure of a development team. Here’s a quick overview:

• What is fake agile?
• Why fake agile is bad for your teams
• Fake agile vs true agile: How to spot the difference
• Misguided agile leadership
• Understanding true agile
• Questions to ask to help you spot a fake agile team
• The need for agile training
• Tools for agile teams

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You know the importance of having great customer support. As a young company, you take pride in this—it’s what separates you from industry giants. You’re able to give your customers the individualized attention in a fast turnaround time. You’re even able to have relationships with your customers, learning from them and customizing your product to meet their needs.

But at a certain point, your team has done too good a job. Customer satisfaction grows sky-high, your customer base begins to grow, as well as your product itself, offering more features and applications. This means tickets become innumerable and much more complicated. And that’s when plain email support just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Here’s everything you need to know to help you decide whether a switch is in order.

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You click the ‘Contact Us’ page. Nothing happens. First, confusion, then familiar frustration. It was a mailto link. Your computer slows to a grinding halt as a huge, archaic desktop mail app rises from the depths of your hard drive. Checking that the date on your computer isn’t 15 years out, you wonder why mail integration isn’t standard… and what year is it exactly?

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There are many things that Process Street, our process management platform, can be used for including onboarding new clients or launching a website. But an interesting use case that has cropped up recently is using Process Street for managing podcast releases.

Many podcast publishers run a checklist to help them manage the recording, publishing and promoting of each podcast episode. Checklists are a great tool to make sure things get done right, and since Process Street is the ultimate recurring checklist software, it only makes sense that podcasters would gravitate towards our platform.

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If you have a problem, it’s in your best interest to ensure that trying to solve that problem doesn’t end up causing more problems. This is a good way to think about low-code development platforms.

Each business has its own set of tools for solving problems and getting things done, and for the most part, these problems can be solved by existing commercial apps.

But of course, there are certain needs that off-the-shelf solutions cannot meet, and for these needs a business could approach the problem a few different ways.

If a proprietary tool doesn’t exist, then the best option may be for the business to try and build a solution themselves. This is often done from scratch, and it’s called software development.

That’s fine, except it costs a lot of money, takes a long time, and is difficult to make changes once things are in motion. It also means everything gets more complex, because it’s not just the development team you’re bringing onboard, but designers, testers, data analysts and many others as well.

The simple truth is that it takes a small village to develop good software with conventional methods.

However, there are tools that are designed to give businesses the freedom to build their own solutions, without all of the excess baggage.

These tools are known as low-code development platforms.

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The real estate market is known to require a significant level of human interaction, but to what extent is the human touch really necessary for delivering a high-quality service for each and every customer?

The human-intensive nature of real estate creates a large margin for human error. Poor lead management, documentation, appointment coordination, tenant screening, and maintenance supervision are just a few examples of tasks/processes that are difficult to execute consistently without the assistance of automation software working in the background.

“Real estate is a market that is ripe for technological disruption. Whatever can be automated should be automated!” – Jyotirmay Samanta, How to Automate Your Real Estate Business?

Some of you property managers out there may claim that diving headfirst into the automation craze sweeping the business world is not such a good idea, as it undermines the face-to-face interactions that play such an important role in the field.

This is not entirely wrong, but all things considered, deciding to ignore new ways of streamlining processes will leave you in the dust as your competitors continue to find new ways of being more efficient.

Plus, some industry thought leaders believe that automation actually humanizes the property management experience even more:

“One of the most effective ways to humanize the property management experience is by providing better communication. Figuring out what residents want in order to improve service can be a complicated and daunting task. But today, a company can easily leverage automated surveys and other forms of real-time communication to glean real, useful feedback from residents.” – Doug Brien – How Technology And Automation Humanize The Property Management Experience

Recently, it was reported that total investment in real estate tech has ballooned from $33 million in 2010 to more than $5 billion in 2017. That is nothing short of astounding, especially when you consider the market’s volatility over the past decade.

Technology is driving the evolution of real estate, and market players need to keep up if they want any hope of leading the charge.

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You have probably used Linux today — especially if you don’t have an iPhone. And if you browsed the web today, there’s a big chance that the website you visited was served by Linux, too.

Linux is an operating system, but unlike software like Microsoft Windows and macOS, Linux was developed by a self-organized community of volunteers.

Over time, with the effort of over 10,000 developers and evolving processes to manage the scale of work, the Linux kernel has grown to over 20,000,000 lines of code in total. It forms the stable foundation for…

• Every Android phone and tablet on the planet
• 66% of the world’s servers
• 100% of the top 500 supercomputers

This technology didn’t come from an orchestrated team with a thick policy book and layers of management. It came from a few carefully-chosen and culturally-embedded policies, and a shared mission.

In this post, I look at how a technology so essential, complex and important could have been produced so effectively without traditional management structure. But first…

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Maybe you’re the sort of person who sits down at their desk for 8 hours solid and hammers out as much as possible.

Maybe you use the Pomodoro method or your own task management techniques.

I don’t know what sort of person I am yet.

I used to give it no thought — wake up, lob a coffee down my throat, sit down and start typing.

Lately, my tasks are harder to define and I find myself having trouble with time management and prioritizing.

Right now I’m using Pomello, a Pomodoro timer that lives in Trello and times my work on each card. Click here to get it.

Tomorrow I’ll probably be sick of it and defiantly hammering on the keyboard until it’s time to sleep…

In my seemingly neverending quest to get shit done, I’ve seen a ton of strange methods and lists. And, let me tell you, working at Process Street — a task management system for businesses — I’m making myself practice what I preach.

Here are some of the task management techniques I’ve come across.
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The following is a guest post from Ryan Gould, Vice President of Strategy and Marketing Services at Elevation Marketing. An expert search, social and content marketer, Ryan leads Elevation Marketing’s digital strategy department, helping brands achieve their business goals, such as improving sales and market share, by developing integrated marketing strategies distinguished by research, storytelling, engagement and conversion.

Without software, you’d be hand-writing purchase orders, using a Rolodex for a CRM, and doing your newsletters via smoke signal.

Alright, maybe that last one is a little far-fetched, but there’s no denying that in the business world, technology is absolutely necessary and enables amazing things.

…But not everyone on your team gets enthusiastic about the prospect of learning a new tool. Even if that tool will help them improve productivity, do a better job, and escape the white-collar equivalent of hard manual labor.

Your goal when rolling out software is always the same: to help your business improve operations, boost efficiency, and enable sales. These days that means staying up to date on technological trends as well.

Deciding which tool is right for you will always hinge on fundamentals, like whether it can automate your vendor payments, purchase orders, employee onboarding, lead management, etc. However, there are other considerations, such as whether your solution integrates with cloud software and is responsive on mobile devices.

But, even after you’ve selected the solution perfect for your operation and your employees – after all the sales demos, comparison docs, and review reading – you’ll find it’s that the human element that trips you up.

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A support rep’s life becomes much easier when their help desk seamlessly fits into their workflow. Tools are simple to use. Tasks get accomplished faster. A personalized help desk lets your rep do things their way, so they can solve human problems instead of figuring out software.

The more you customize your help desk, the more useful it is to your team. While all help desks have customization options, not all help desks can be personalized to the same extent.

To spare you the trouble of perusing lengthy FAQs and comparing free trials, we took a deep dive into the features of four popular software— Freshdesk, Help Scout, Zendesk, and Groove—to decide the best help desk of them all. Here’s what we found.

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