Today is the first post in a new series – a guide to help consultants and their clients work with Process Street to boost efficiency and be more productive.

Whether you’re documenting your clients’ business processes, updating their toolkit, or generally improving company tools and practices, Process Street is the easiest way to document and manage both your personal and clients’ workflows.

Over the next seven weeks we’ll go through:

• An introduction to Process Street for consultants – why you should care, and the core features
• Advanced features such as process automation and custom share links
• Common use cases and how best to use Process Street in different forms of consulting
• The benefits of Process Street as part of your (and your clients’) toolkit
• How to easily set up and hand off processes to your clients
• How our partner program works
• Extra resources to become a true master of efficiency

I’ll even be writing this guide to let you give it to your clients to teach them how to use Process Street. After all, efficiency is the name of the game.

So, join me today as we kick off this mega guide for consultants by explaining what Process Street is, what the core features are, and why the hell you should care about it.
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Most companies turn to Gmail or Outlook to manage their workplace email. 13% of public companies use Office 365 or G-Suite (formerly Google Apps). The remaining 87% use a combination of the two, or a private email setup.

Some companies choose Google or Microsoft because they prefer one’s cloud office suite—which includes calendars, and collaboration on spreadsheets and documents—over the other. (We compared Office 365 with G-Suite in another post.)

But if you use other productivity tools and are deciding between Gmail or Outlook solely for email, you want to choose one that helps you speed up your workflow. Gmail set its initial bar high, and Microsoft clearly took notice. Given Outlook’s 2016 update, it is now more equipped to compete than ever.

Here are five game-changing differences between Gmail vs. Outlook.

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Aside from the raw product you’re selling, company culture is everything.

It’s made up of your work environment, ethics, mission, expectations, and goals. You can have a great product, but without a solid culture to back it up, its development can fall apart.

Buffer, for example, has a notable culture of transparency. All employee salaries are published for co-workers and the public to see. They emphasize working out loud and being receptive to one another.

On the other hand, Amazon is noted for its toxic culture that exhausts employees and holds “unreasonably high” expectations.

Which side of the spectrum are you on?

In software companies, it’s important to promote a culture of communication and transparency. What would an issue tracking system look like for a company with poor culture? Pretty desolate.

In this article, I’m going to give examples of how different software companies bolster their QA efforts with a strong culture, and why that’s so important.

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There’s a big difference between successful software companies and those shoddy unverified apps you get off the app store:

Quality assurance.

While small-time apps aren’t heavily used, and the creator won’t receive many complaints or bad press if anything breaks, Google and Facebook are used by billions of people worldwide.

If a bug affects 0.01% of the user base in a small app, it’s not worth the energy. If it affects 0.01% for Google and Facebook, that’s thousands of complaints, and possible media scandal to deal with. And we all know what the price of that can be.

So, when it comes to studying quality assurance there’s no better examples than two of the biggest Internet companies in the world.

I’ve deliberately not chosen to give Microsoft the time of day in this post, because I’d say their QA is pretty damn weak for their size.

…However, read on to pick up tips from Facebook and Google on how to make software that doesn’t break down, cost you more money, and cause frustration for your customers.

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Thinking the terms ‘quality control’ and ‘quality assurance’ can be used interchangeably is a common mistake.

Whoever coined those terms did nothing to clarify their differences, but in fact:

• Quality control (QC) makes sure that your product isn’t riddled with bugs.
• Quality assurance (QA) makes sure engineers are following processes to reduce future bugs, and write code more efficiently.

Quality control is something development teams do every day. They squash bugs in the code they wrote, and run tests to catch future errors.

Quality assurance is the overall management of development processes that make sure less testing and QC needs to be done.

At Process Street, we’ve already looked at the wider implications of QC and how to run tests on your software. We’ve even provided you with a bunch of pre-made software development processes you can adjust to your own team.

In this article, I’ll go into an explanation of quality assurance in software teams, and how you can use this information for your own developers.

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If you’ve been reading our content about the importance of processes, you know the kinds of things that happen when standard procedure isn’t followed. Satellites crash, nuclear reactors melt down, and information security disasters ruin huge corporations.

For software companies, failure doesn’t always have such wide implications but it can mean carelessly shipping a product that creates catastrophic problems for your customers and destroys their trust in you. And of course, it’s a pain in the arse for your development team to fix.

In this article, I’m going to go over some famous software disasters where Quality Control dropped the ball, and look over some common quality control methods.

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In this episode of the Business Systems Explored podcast we talk to Tom Cagely, the host of SPaMcast and Agile expert, about Agile software development. 

When it comes to agile software development, it can be hard to get a comprehensive place to start. Thankfully, this week we speak to Agile veteran and host of SPaMcast, Tom Cagley. Tom goes through the whole Agile process, from tools to best practices. He explains it simply enough for anyone to understand, but also lets us in on a few advanced techniques that surprised us.

Whether you’re actually managing a software team, or just looking to work more efficiently, Agile is well worth adopting in your business. It was born out of the same movement as the lean startup, so you may be already familiar with it, but there’s always room for improvement. Listen to this podcast to learn more.

Links to listen

• Listen on iTunes (iOS)
• Stitcher (Android)
• Listen on Business Systems Explored website

And remember, if you like the show, please leave us a review and rating.

Click below to subscribe on iTunes:

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Productivity is great. The more productive you are, the quicker you work. The quicker you work, the more you get done. The more you get done, the better you’ll feel about the time you’ve spent and the more important you’ll become to your team or company.

Unfortunately, humans can’t work like machines, and so you’ll need a bit of help from technology to work at your most effective pace. From experience, testing, and research, we here at Process Street have collected the 30 best productivity apps ever created for you to cut through your workload.

Now, I’m not saying that you should use all of them; that would defeat the point of streamlining your workflow and optimizing your day. Instead, these productivity apps are best used by picking one or two from each category.
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If images are the snacks of the internet, and articles are the main course, then infographics are somewhere in between. A light brunch, if you will. Packed with sustenance, but digestible enough to get down in a short period of time.

I’m not going to waste time talking about how important infographics are because that’s been done to death over the period of several years. Instead, I’m going to go through some common mistakes, basic design principles and processes that teach you how to make infographics that don’t look terrible.

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In this episode of the Business Systems Explored podcast, we talk to Zapier’s Alison Groves about growing a tech startup to 1,000,000 users.

Want to grow your software company to 1,000,000 users? In this episode the Business Systems Explored podcast, we speak to Alison Groves, the Partner Marketing Manager at Zapier, and find out exactly how she did it.

Zapier is an intuitive automation platform that connects your SaaS apps together. In the beginning, Zapier was doing cold outreach to software giants like Salesforce, asking them if they could build integrations for their platform. Now, there are over 500 Zapier partners — Process Street included — and that’s because of the partner marketing work Alison has been a part of.

For a business that survives on the cooperation of other businesses, Zapier has quickly shot up the ranks and become the go-to platform for connecting apps that don’t have native integrations.

How did they forge such great relations with so many big companies? Listen to the episode to get the growth strategy they used.

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