Imagine if Google broke. That one day, it just stopped working.

I know it’s a scary thought…

In 2013, Google actually did break, although, only momentarily (for a whole 5 minutes to be exact). The outage affected all of its services, meaning Youtube, Gmail, Google search, Google Maps … everything stopped working.

The outcome?

Global web traffic plummeted by a whole 40% and the blip is estimated to have cost Google around $500,000.

If your product or service suddenly stops working as intended, then it’ll cost your organization a hefty sum, too.

That’s why, in this quick but informative Process Street post, you’ll learn all about test plan templates and how to use one yourself to ensure your product or service runs like a well-oiled machine. All-day, every day.

Alternatively, to jump to a specific section, click appropriate the link below:

• What is a test plan?
• What is a test plan template?
• Where the software test plan began
• Best practices for creating a test plan template
• Software test plans today
• How to write a test plan template

Let’s get started!
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This article is based on a segment from Process Street‘s Highway 2021 virtual event, where Leverage CEO Nick Sonnenberg shares with us how his team kicked their operational efficiency into overdrive from start to finish.

Supercharging Operational Efficiency with Leverage CEO Nick Sonnenberg was the fourth segment of Highway.

You can check out our playlist of the full Highway event here, and don’t forget to create a Free Account with Process Street!

Here’s the Supercharging Operational Efficiency with Nick Sonnenberg segment in full:

• The scavenger hunt problem
• How fast should you scale your business?
• Complexity scales exponentially with team size
• CPR: Communicate, Plan, Resource
• Static knowledge vs. dynamic knowledge
• Pro-tips for optimizing company processes

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“Without IT process management, there is no way to assure [cost-effective IT services]” – Casper van der Kolk

Whether you’ve been in the IT business for years or are just starting to make your mark, there’s no question that managing your processes is vital.

With processes, you can you do more with your current resources by standardizing and optimizing your work. And, when your team knows exactly what to do for each recurring task, they can greatly improve their productivity and motivation.

However, the benefits don’t just stop at a happier and more efficient team.

Integrating these recurring workflows into your IT management resource basket can reduce incident response times, increase customer satisfaction, ensure security compliance, manage department stock and – perhaps best of all – enforce consistency, to give you peace of mind that everything is running as expected.

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This is a guest post by Adela Belin, a content marketer, and blogger at Writers Per Hour. She is passionate about sharing stories with the hope to make a difference in people’s lives and contribute to their personal and professional growth.

After hundreds of applications, weeding out the good from the bad, and a series of interviews, you’ve finally found the right candidate for the role – you extend the offer, initiate the paperwork and that’s it, your work here is done.

But is it?

If your company’s recruitment process is as simple as the above, then you’re missing out on an important step – onboarding.

Neglecting your employee onboarding processes is something you cannot afford to do, especially in a remote set up.

“Employee onboarding, also known as new-employee orientation or assimilation, is the process by which an organization assimilates its new employees.” – SHRM, Managing the Employee Onboarding and Assimilation Process

In this Process Street article, we take a deep dive into a specific type of onboarding process. We will explain how you can perfect your remote onboarding process, wherein a new hire undergoes a set of formal meetings, briefings, socialization, training, and a series of other coordinated activities to get familiar with the remote job role, responsibilities, and overall company culture.

Having an effective employee onboarding process builds loyalty and engagement, improves productivity, and delivers a positive work experience. With that said, you can see how taking the time to perfect your onboarding processes is vital to nurture talent within your remote team.

If you’d rather skip ahead, just click on the relevant subheaders below. Alternatively, scroll down to read all we have to say regarding remote onboarding processes.

• Remote onboarding process: An employee onboarding checklist
• The importance of onboarding for a remote team
• Why you should use a process for remote employee onboarding
• How to onboard your remote employees
• Workflow automation: Use Process Street to automation your remote employee onboarding processes

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This is a guest post from Margo Ovsiienko, you can find her website at margoleads.com. Margo is a tech enthusiast and a growth marketing strategist. She is passionate about topics related to SaaS growth, startup strategy, and IT development.

To outsource or not to outsource? The eternal tech question, and a persistent hot topic in tech communities. How do you manage your expectations against your budget and be sure you’re finding the right team for the job? This can be especially challenging for anyone lacking experience with hiring (which is not a task to take lightly).

Building an in-house team vs outsourcing those efforts can depend heavily on the kind of product you’re trying to build; how complex is the feature set? What does your roadmap look like for the next 12 months? These kinds of questions will help you to figure out whether or not your best bet would be in-house or outsourced.

For long-term, committed projects, building a trusty in-house team is almost certainly your best bet. But working with an outsourced, remote team has its place and also comes with many advantages, such as reduced set-up or training time (in the case of outsourced design and development teams) and ability to rapidly develop and tweak early stage concepts (often for a cheaper rate) when searching for the ideal product-market fit.

So, how can you build a SaaS product that gains traction fast before you run out of limited funds?

In this Process Street article, we’ll consider how to build a SaaS product that gains traction fast on a constrained budget, and kick-start your growth.

• What you need to know before you build a SaaS product
• How to validate your product idea
• Key steps of product development
• To outsource or not to outsource?
• How to build a SaaS product: Key takeaways

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Finding the best checklist app isn’t easy. I’ve written about my pains with productivity before, and I’m not the only one who has trouble sorting themselves out — you probably don’t know which productivity solution is best for you, either.

Part of the problem is that there are so many different apps for slightly different purposes, it’s hard to know which to choose…

Which is why, for this post, I’ve gone in search of the best checklist app ever created, and found some pretty under-the-radar stuff as well as apps most people already know!

Read through these sections to get completely clued-up:

• Structured checklist apps vs todo list checklist apps
• Which checklist app should you choose?
• Take control with Process Street’s checklists!

Let’s get started.

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This is a guest post from Nikola Banicek, an internet marketing specialist at Point Visible, a marketing agency providing custom outreach and link building services. He’s a laid-back guy with experience in PPC, copywriting, and project planning. When he’s not working, he’s either gaming, watching football or anime.

Link building is essential if you want to rank higher and position yourself as an authority in your niche.

The problem is, of course, that link building isn’t easy. It takes time, effort, patience, and skill. The rewards are big – but only if you get the process right.

This is where tools come in.

Tools are designed to solve problems and make your life more efficient. And in the link-building game, there are lots of problems to solve! From finding better link building opportunities to managing your whole projects, tools have got you covered.

But which ones should you be using and for what purpose?

In this Process Street article, we take a look at all the tools you need to set-up an effective link building campaign.

Link building campaign tools: The quicklinks!

• Ahrefs
• Guest Post Tracker
• BuzzStream
• Moz Link Explorer
• Ninja Outreach
• BuzzSumo
• PitchBox
• Majestic
• Broken Link Builder
• Breeze
• Slack
• Google Sheets
• Process Street

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What would happen if you were hit by a bus while walking to work?

Well, other than the morbidly obvious, and the time and money spent hiring and onboarding their replacement…

This is the line of thinking behind the infamous “bus factor” – the minimum number of people who, if out of action, would cause your operations to collapse.

“46% of UK businesses would be forced to cease trading immediately if a key person died or was unable to continue working through illness or injury” – Online Money Advisor, Key Man Insurance: A Definitive Guide to Key Person Insurance

It might not be ideal, but it’s a harsh reality that every team has to face; whether temporarily or permanently, your colleagues aren’t always able to make it into work.

We, here at Process Street, have had more than our share of project delays (and even failures) due to a low bus factor, which is why this post has been written. Today, you’ll learn how to identify risky projects by using the bus factor, and how to mitigate those issues as quickly (and cheaply) as possible.

We’ll be covering:

• What is the bus factor?
• How to calculate the bus factor
• Bus factor elements
• How to increase your bus factor
• The limits of boosting bus factor

Let’s get started.
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Gabe Nelson is a content specialist of over 7 years of experience, currently working with bonus.ly. He has a passion and keen understanding when it comes to HR, employee management, and employee rewards. He has written hundreds of content pieces in numerous niches. Currently, he lives in Missouri with his wife and kids.

Your employees are the lifeblood of your business. They provide the support and manpower you need to function and grow. The level of success and the results you achieve will directly reflect the performance of your employees.

Satisfied employees are also more productive and efficient. However, a study showed that as much as 85% of employees are happy with their jobs and only 15% of employees are engaged in the workplace. Happy and engaged workers are more likely to feel personally invested in your business, leading them to work harder and smarter; this results in better products and more satisfied customers.

It’s also vital that employees know where they stand. Not receiving a promotion or a much-anticipated raise because of performance shouldn’t be a surprise to them. Conversely, they should also receive positive feedback for a job well done to keep them moving on the right track; this means that evaluating employees’ performance is an essential role of leadership.

So how do you guarantee an employee’s role is as fulfilling as possible? And how do you communicate how well they are doing in their roles?

In his Process Street article, we’ll be covering:

• Evaluating employee performance
• Creating a recognition system that perfectly fits your employees
• Managing and motivating your employees for success

Let’s jump right in!
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This is a guest post from Adam Enfroy. He writes about how to blog like a startup to 450,000 monthly readers at www.adamenfroy.com, & teaches his audience of New School Bloggers the tactics he used to scale his blog to $80k/month MRR.

As a product marketer, increasing your landing page conversion rates through optimization has a significant impact on your bottom line.

You spend most of your time running A/B tests and tracking your conversion rates because you’re trying to optimize conversions and prove the ROI of your PPC campaigns.

Nonetheless, you still can’t seem to grasp why your visitors behave the way they do.

So, what’s your solution?

Using qualitative research to understand the reasons behind your visitors’ behavior so that you optimize your landing page and skyrocket your conversion rates.

In this article, I’ll explain the ROI of qualitative research, different methods to conduct it, and how to analyze your research data within your database. I’ll also demonstrate how Process Street’s superpowered checklists can help you perform optimized qualitative user research.

To jump to a specific section of the post click the appropriate link below. Alternatively, just keep scrolling.

• The value of qualitative user research for landing page optimization
• How to analyze your qualitative user research
• Landing page optimization in action using qualitative user research
• Use qualitative user research and boost your conversion

Ready? Let’s get started.

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