😮 Why The Blogsmith Team Doesn’t Use a Project Management Tool (Anymore) 😮 | The Blogsmith #123

Hey Listies,

Hope you’re all holding up ok.

Every day seems like a slight variation on a theme but I’m trying to keep myself busy by trying new things in the kitchen and chipping away at my goal of transitioning my business to an agency model.

Amidst all the chaos that has made up the news lately, I wanted to share something positive: a huge win I’ve achieved in my business thanks to process management.

I’ve been nerding out over a new tool that’s helping me to better collaborate with my team in terms of automating the sharing of relevant information and making expectations incredibly clear.

It’s called Process Street.

Process Street is a process management tool.

But what is process management exactly?

According to my dear friend Wikipedia:

They go on to add:

To me, process management is about sharing all relevant information necessary to complete a task that a qualified assignee then executes.

Past the sharing of knowledge, great process management also effectively communicates expectations — when something is due, who’s assigned, and so on.

Note the distinction of a qualified assignee because even the best direction doesn’t make up for a lack of previous education and experience in a given field.

At any rate, I’m so intrigued by process management that I bought some new books to really dig in:

I use Process Street to define repeatable processes within my business — like every step my team takes to produce a blog post.

You start by creating a template that includes tasks and direction, which you can flesh out with text, images, video, subtasks, file uploads, and more.

Then, every time you want to use that template, you create a checklist — a usable instance of that template focused on a specific project or task.

To give an example, I have a new blog post template and use it by running individual checklists for each new blog post we create.

I’ve been using some type of project management tool with my team for some time but never seemed to find the perfect fit.

Despite the existence of tools that allowed for custom fields and other flexible use cases, I couldn’t address all of my needs with one solution.

That was - until I realized that Process Street contained all the features I needed to use it for sharing SOPs (standard operating procedures documentation) and task management.

In addition to all the aforementioned template creation features included with Process Street, there are a number of additional features that I take advantage of for process management:

And since the team’s new blog post template was starting to look a little daunting at 60+ tasks, I also made use of Permissions.

This allows me to take unnecessary stuff (my editor doesn’t need to see all of what the person doing keyword research sees) out of individual contributors’ views so that they can just focus on their own tasks without getting overwhelmed.

I also used this same feature to build a simple dashboard where clients can sign in to see the current status of a draft — without seeing any other tasks in progress!

What I love about Process Street is that it allows me to be agile.

Specifically, if I make an update on the template of a given process, then all active checklists receive an update automatically (you can also do this manually, if you prefer).

In other words, if I need to add a new mission-critical step, I can be sure that my team can see these updates without having to confirm elsewhere, off of Process Street (like Slack). I can also require certain steps to be completed before a task is checked off to ensure that they aren’t missed.

Additionally, Process Street provides lots of flexibility to create processes however you want. This is important because, as I’ve alluded to, I’ve found it hard to fit within the box of traditional project management teams and cookie cutter features.

Sometimes, custom fields don’t make up for a lack of specific functionality you’re looking for.

Process Street has almost everything I could imagine that I need, with regular functionality updates as they find opportunities for further efficiencies.

Since this newsletter is getting a bit long, I’ll leave you with that for now.

Pro tip: check out their free template library to get inspiration for incorporating process management into your business or organization.

But if you’d like me to dig more into how I’m using process management within my company, I’d love to tell you about all the other cool things I’m doing on Process Street, like:

Does any of that sound interesting to you?

Let me know.

Until next time,

Maddy Osman, The Blogsmith