All posts in Tech & Startups

Project Onboarding Hacks for a Successful Project Launch

Project Onboarding Hacks for a Successful Project Launch

Project onboarding can significantly impact the success (or failure) of your project.

Let me show you how.

So your boss hands you a new project to run and mentions that some people are already lined up to help get it done. Great, you think. You call the first one on the list, but they don’t really know anything about the project beyond the fact they’ve been ‘volunteered’ by their team leader.

This is where you switch into onboarding mode.

As a project manager, one of the first things to do is get the project team together. You need to build a team that has a common goal and that knows how the work is going to get done. That doesn’t happen overnight but you can certainly influence the speed (and willingness) of people to get involved with your project if you introduce them to the work in a structured way.

In this article, I’ll share my top tips for onboarding new people to a project team. I’ll also draw on the experience of other practicing project managers who have shared their stories so you can quickly get your projects off the ground with a team that knows what to do. To jump to a specific section click the link below.

Alternatively, just keep scrolling.
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How Do You Reactivate Ghost Customers? 5 Tips for Successful Reactivation

What to Do About Ghost Customers 5 Tips For Successful Reactivation

How do you reactivate ghost customers?

Well, let me explain.

During the second world war, a young soldier from Lille attended a dance for servicemen about to be deployed. One woman caught his eye, and eventually, he worked up the nerve to ask her to dance.

Thinking that he would ask again – as most of the other young men would – she politely declined. The young soldier was shy, though, and took her refusal at face value. Not knowing her name or if he would even return, the young soldier went off to war.

Nearly a century later, their granddaughter – my very closest friend for all of three days – told me the story as we drove through the French countryside between Lille and Arras.

We love stories like that – the romance of chance encounters, unintended separations, and reunions that could only be an act of fate. Maybe it’s having an answer to the so-often unanswered question What might have been? that’s the thing that really resonates. Personally, I’m just really nosy and I like stories.

While most of us have some variation of “a friend of a friend’s second cousin’s grandmother was reunited with her first love by total accident,” the truth is, we rarely experience these reconnections without some sort of deliberate effort by one or both parties.

But we lose touch with people all the time. High school best friend. University mentor. Pick-up game buddy. Customer whose payment didn’t go through and involuntarily canceled their subscription to your service because they didn’t realize it.

Happens all the frickin time. But there is no missed connections column for lost customers. If you want them back, you’re going to have to be proactive. Fortunately, not only am I good with stories, but I’m pretty good at solving problems, too. (Or, at least, nagging our CS and Ops Team Manager, Blake Bailey, until he spills all his secrets.)

Either way, in this Process Street post, I’ll share the 5 things you need to know to put some life back into those ghost customers haunting your MRR.

Let’s reconnect!
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I Analyzed 40 Top Tech Blog Welcome Emails: Find Out Their Secret

Best-blog-subscription-emailsWelcome emails are the one email you should be sending.

Why?

Because they have a 91.43% open rate, can create an 86% lift in unique open rate, and have on average 5x the click-through rate of a standard email marketing campaign. I’ve uncovered heaps more stats that I’ll share with you later in the post.

For this article I took the time to subscribe to 40 top tech blogs and applied quantitative research to categorize and break down their welcome emails. Hopefully, this article will offer some kind of insight into how to write kick-ass welcome emails.

If you’re asking yourself whether your welcome emails should include power words, links, emojis, rich formatting, or plain text, or what’s the best way to sign off a welcome email – then this post is for you. Specifically, I’ll cover:

Let’s get to it.
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How to Write a Proposal and Get What You Want (Free Templates)

 

A proposal has a lot of different purposes, but there’s only one good way to write one: the way that pulls together all of the information in a concise and persuasive way and helps you get what you want … whether that’s a whole new software system, or just a tweak to your marketing strategy.

This Process Street article isn’t about a business proposal — also known as a quote — but instead about the document required when formally pitching an idea for action and execution by managers or department heads.

To explain how to write a proposal document and get what you want, we’ll go through the following:

Let’s get started.
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Go Lean and Go Green: Green Technology to Future Proof Your Business

Go Lean and Go Green Green Technology to Future Proof Your Business-12

In 2018 the green technology market was valued at $6.85 billion.

This figure is projected to increase to $44.61 billion, with a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 26%.

This change comes as a response to our present-day environmental crisis. In this sense, green technology provides a knife for our noose, to help us move forward, past plastic pollution, poisonous chemicals, and climate degradation.

“The concept of ecological modernism, which sees technology as key to solving big environmental problems, is getting a lot of buzz these days.” – The Guardian, Technology as Our Planet’s Last Best Hope

Like The Guardian, at Process Street we also believe technology plays a vital role in helping society move forward, to work with the environment and our planet… rather than against it.

In this article, you will learn what green technology is, why it is important, and 6 easily applicable ways you can utilize green technology in your business or line of work today.

In addition, Process Street as a green tech solution gives you free access to our leading business sustainability templates. Sign up to Process Street here for free and check out our ISO 14001 Environmental Management Self Audit Checklist below for a taster.

Click here for free access to our ISO 14001 Environmental Management Self Audit Checklist!.

Click on the relevant subheaders or scroll down to find out how to be both lean and green in business.

Right tech-perts, let’s get started!
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User Feedback: 3 Methods We Tested to Better Understand Our Users

I’ve written before about how we collect feedback on our marketing material and how that helps us write useful posts for our subscribers, but the other reason we gather user feedback focuses on expanding and improving the Process Street app.

With user feedback data, we can:

  • Choose which features to build based on the frequency they’re requested
  • Get data on bug reports which helps our engineering team build fixes
  • See the most common industries and use cases for our product, which guides our marketing in the right direction

Whether you’re in software or not, you still need to be gathering and processing feedback from everybody possible: leads, prospects, free users, and paying customers.

In this post, I’m going to outline the three methods you can use to gather feedback for your company. These are three methods we’ve used ourselves in the past as our business has evolved, so the complexity and usefulness of each method is higher than the last. Which method is right for you?

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Supercharging Operational Efficiency with Nick Sonnenberg (Leverage CEO)

improve operational efficiency

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:

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Remote Onboarding Process: Our Top Tricks and Tips to Get It Right

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.

Remote Onboarding Process Our Top Tricks and Tips to Get It Right

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.

Let’s get started!
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How to Build a SaaS Product 2x Faster Without Hiring a Tech Team

How to Build a SaaS Product 2x Faster Without Hiring a Tech TeamThis 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.

Let’s get started!
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The Best Checklist App Ever Created? 9 Tools to Try Today

checklist app

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:

Let’s get started.

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