Harness the Power of Continuous Improvement with Real-Time Run Updates!

There’s no such thing as a perfect process.

The best process builders consistently tweak and improve their workflows over time. These principles — more formally called continuous improvement — were the inspiration for the newest Process Street feature: real-time run updates.

Real-time run updates make it easier than ever to save changes to your workflows, and push those changes to in-progress workflow runs.

This means no need to wait for your process to be “perfect” before getting it live in your business. You can launch and validate your workflow with a minimum viable process, and add updates to evolve your workflow over time. All without stopping, slowing down, or waiting on work that’s already happening.

How it works

From any saved workflow in your library, hit the “Edit” button to make changes to your workflow (you may also notice the edit button is now more visible across the top of the screen).

Any changes you make in your workflow are auto-saved every few seconds. You never have to worry about saving as you build. You can leave and come back later to continue working on any unsaved changes.

Once you’re ready to make the changes official, hit “Publish” and the changes will save to your workflow.

Here’s where it gets really cool: if you have any live workflow runs using this workflow, you’ll be asked if you want to update those in real-time. This means no need to wait until someone starts the process over again to see the benefit of those improvements. You also have the ability to decide not to push changes to active workflow runs, or to select which specific ones to apply them to.

What kind of workflow changes to make? A few ideas…

Every team and workflow is unique. We can’t tell you what specific updates to make, but we can offer a few general suggestions:

• Adding more steps to a process to cover more work within one workflow;
• Adding automations and integrations to make work move faster with fewer human steps;
• Adding more context and instructional content within each step to minimize mistakes and confusion;
• Adding form fields to capture data and trigger dynamic content throughout the workflow;
• Adding conditional logic to make workflows more flexible and dynamic;
• Embedding video and other media to make your process documentation easier to explain and a better end user experience.

Why continuous improvement?

Japan’s industries struggled to rebuild after World War II.

That is until they pioneered a principle that proved so powerful, it catapulted Japanese companies like Toyota to worldwide success; and revolutionized the way work happens across the world, and across industries.

This technique is continuous improvement (also known by the Japanese term “kaizen”), and it can help you cement your success in the same way.

Continuous improvement is a way to make sure your processes are as efficient, accurate, and effective as possible. This is done by consistently examining and improving your processes to smash bottlenecks and take advantage of the most efficient methods.

Whether you’re onboarding an employee or running a weekly meeting, every repeatable process can be constantly improved, helping you get more done by working smarter, not harder.

We’ve seen first-hand the way teams struggle with process management, particularly through the trap of thinking a process needs to be “perfect” before it can be put to use. Existing software and tools don’t help the matter, by making it difficult (or even impossible) to push changes in real-time.

That’s why we’ve built real-time run updates to let you launch your processes sooner and grow them over time using the principles of continuous improvement.

This feature is available for all customers starting today. Learn more and start building with real-time run updates.

If you’re not yet using Process Street, sign up for free or schedule a demo.

Have any questions about our new real-time run updates feature? Let us know in the comments!