At Process Street, we’re always asked about the best ways to construct, track, and analyze processes.

There are loads of techniques in the school of business process management to help you with these three concerns but in this article, we’re going to give you an introduction to process mining; a data driven way to create, understand, and optimize your processes.

We’ll cover:

• What is process mining?
• 9 process mining tools to automate your analysis
• How to act on your mined results to optimize your processes

We cover solutions for enterprises all the way down to basic approaches for startups. Jump in!

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Are you ever at a loss when it comes to planning your tasks? A good chunk of the time, I feel exactly like that.

That’s ok. Task management exists because planning and executing projects is hard.

Last night, I sat down with my wife and we wrote down everything we’ll need to do when we move house. It was two A4 sheets of paper before we even started breaking it down into subtasks. Two A4 sheets of paper.

The amount of items a human can hold in working memory is around 7, so when it comes to projects, of course you’re lost if you’re not planning them properly.

Don’t worry. There’s a simple way to do it, and once you’ve got that down, you’ve learnt it forever. And the start of it, just like I sat down to do last night, is writing everything down.

Here’s how to brain dump your tasks and make sense of them.

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Staying safe and secure online has always been important but now more and more people are waking up to the fact that we need to take extra steps to protect our various accounts.

Banking online. Shopping online. Communicating online. Running a business online.

These have all rapidly become standard in today’s world. Given how embedded the internet is in our lives we need to take the necessary steps to stop people taking advantage of our online presence.

I recently put out a post explaining how to enable two factor authentication (2FA) across your accounts, including this handy checklist for enabling 2FA with Google and Slack.

Today, we’re going to look at password managers. 1Password vs LastPass vs all the rest!

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• Why you should use a password manager
• The Challenge: Can third party password managers be better than your inbuilt systems?
• What do the 6 leading password managers offer and which one is right for you?

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This article is a guest post from Dillon Forrest, a front end developer, startup guy and content creator. Follow him on Twitter for more posts.

If you’ve ever wondered how to attract and retain engineering talent, this post is for you.

Engineers are notoriously difficult to find, screen and onboard. Every candidate who receives your job offer has likely received several others too. And once they do accept, it’s only a matter of time before another company tries to poach them.

It’s time to ask yourself if your developers are really happy, or are your company’s development processes driving them away?

Let’s take a deep dive into the world of Daria the Developer, discussing five common workflow problems, and giving you tips on how to manage developers.

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Lots of text editors, like Word or Evernote, feel too ‘formal’ for proper note taking. They’re clunky and don’t work in harmony with my erratic train of thought at a meeting, lecture or presentation.

Lately, I’ve got instructions introducing me to new projects via video or voice recording, which I’d try to summarize in bullets, expand on and create to-do list items from the notes. When I was done writing and listening, I’d usually be left with a big mess of text that needs organizing, which would take more time still to go through and fix. With this method, I’d need to listen to the recording at least twice to get my notes.

Instead, now I use WorkFlowy to take and edit notes. Here’s how.

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Screencasts are true powerhouses in team communication; they allow us here at Process Street to convey everything in a concise manner with both visual and audial cues, whilst giving the viewer a resource that they can run through as many times as they want.

Unfortunately, many teams put off using screencasts because you have to:

• Spend time recording it
• Wait for the file to export
• Wait for the video to convert
• Wait for the video to upload
• Remember you recorded a video that has now finished uploading
• Manually send it to the right team member

Whilst conversations are more likely to be forgotten or lost, their ease makes them the go-to method for communication (or, at best, a Skype call). This is a huge mistake.

Using just a couple of free screencasting apps you can record your video, spend three seconds saving it and then have it automatically sent to to the right person. Rather than waiting for your time zones to match up or the other person to reply, you can record, save, then get on with the rest of your day.
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Generating and sending invoices can be a time-consuming process. A properly designed invoice helps a business get paid and provides legal protection for both parties.

Think about it, all the hours and energy you put into completing a project will have an invoice at the end of it. Invoices are the tool that provides freelancers with the ability to receive income. That’s why we over at Process Street sat down and thought up a way to make getting paid even easier; a template which serves as a custom invoice generator.

Never again worry about charging your clients the wrong amount, or even sending them an invoice with an outdated logo or set of information. All you need to do is plug your information into this template and away you go!

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Tracking your work and what you do may sound a little simple (however, we’ve proven before that it’s not necessarily the case). But just imagine having lots of people working on the same project at the same time. That’s when it actually becomes not so easy to track what’s going on.

Online collaboration tools are on the rise with businesses who want to track their employee’s workflow – especially remotely. You might have already seen our previous article comparing Asana and Trello, but instead of comparing the user experience we will look at the features and usability of each app.

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Staring at the tiny LCD progress bar of the vending machine in a lobby, I realize nothing pisses us off more than indefinite waiting times. Especially people waiting for their coffee, their cheap flight comparisons, or their computer to finish doing whatever it’s doing.

Since the creation of software, there has always been loading times. An early example comes from Bob Stahl’s way-ahead-of-its time article in February 1986’s Computerworld.

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In our increasingly mobile-first world, we’ve come to rely on getting business done on the phone much more than ever before.

The difficulties of efficiently managing email on a smartphone has likely been a major factor for the rise in team communication software like Slack.

However, it doesn’t need to be this way. And we can’t let it be this way.

That’s why this Process Street article is dedicated to exploring the different email apps for iPhone in order to find which ones have which strengths, and to crown an overall winner.

The apps will be judged primarily on how well they achieve their intended aims, with depth of features and ease of use affecting their scores from that base. I’m going to try not to consider price while calculating a score, but I will mention pricing where relevant.

You can check out the quick overview of scores below and the full breakdowns app by app through the rest of the article.

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