If there was a more efficient way to accomplish your job would you use it?  

If you, like most people, answered YES, you would be surprised to learn that according to a PwC study, on average, workers spend around 40% of their time managing non-business critical documents. Similarly, the IDC estimates that employees spend about 20% of their day looking for paper-based documents, and half of the time, their search ends in failure. (source)

Simply documenting your company’s standard operating procedures, also known as workflow, will help you and your staff become more efficient.

What is Workflow:

Workflow is the process used by a company to complete the recurring activities unique to their business.  These activities are usually divided into steps which are comprised of:

• Tasks
• Events
• Interactions
• Approvals
• Deliverable

When conducted in a sequential workflow, a repeatable process is designed to ensure the consistency of the product or service to be delivered. Benefits gained from a proper workflow include:

• Improved efficiency
• Better responsiveness
• Work process transparency
• Increased profitability

For the past couple of years, we have been playing with an application called Process Street to document the different procedures we utilize during our monthly service offering.  Recently, Process Street introduced a new feature, Conditional Logic, which allow the creator to generate checklists that “branch” off to multiple pathways based on an answer to a previous answer provided.

Imagine you go to the movies and you ask the person at the ticket window what was a good movie to watch?  They would most likely ask you what type of movies you like and depending on your answer (comedy vs horror) they would tailor their response to match. Conditional logic provides the same capability when added to a workflow process.

Check out the video we created (using Loom, a free video recording extension for Chrome)that demonstrates the power of Process Street.  In the video we demonstrate how we use the new conditional logic function on our New Client File Review Checklist.

Workflow Design has quickly become the our most popular service offering.  Utilizing tools like Process Street along with Zapier, our team has been able to automate the creation and signing of Service Agreements with WebMerge and SignNow.

Now thanks to Process Street and their new conditional logic function, we have been able to create a repeatable process to ensure that every company file is evaluated the same way.  Additionally, we reduce the amount of time required to provide the client feedback by mapping out the answers to our checklist in the format of a client writeup report without the need to translate our notes after the fact.

Now it’s your turn, what tasks have you been able to streamline for your business, OR what time intensive task do you wish that you could? 

If Parkway has a suggested solution, we will be sure to share it with you!