Archer announces acquisition of ProjectStory.

Business continuity means providing your remote workers with secure, online access to procedure documentation that is easy to use, clear and up-to-date.

For over 20 years, ProjectStory (acquired by Archer NSG in February, 2020) has provided organizations with documentation, training, and tutorials to help in-office and remote staff.

What online resources do your workers have?

WHAT WE DO.

We help you capture, diagram, organize, define, document and understand how your organization performs its essential functions.

(So you can spend your time solving new problems. Not old ones.)

Interview

We start by talking to the people who do the work every day. What do they do? How do they do it? What systems do they use? What is their process?

Collect

Next (or at the same time, actually), we collect any procedures, checklists, quick reference guides, cheat sheets, and anything else your team has written down over the years to help them do their jobs.

Organize

Then we carefully read everything we’ve collected, analyze it, organize it, and identify the gaps. Usually there is good (if outdated) information, but it’s informal and not designed within the context of overall departmental function and goals.

Document

Next, we structure everything we’ve learned into an OpsNotes site, our secure, powerful, flexible Content Management System based on WordPress. And then we identify and fill in the gaps. Critical considerations include how your content will be used, how it should be organized, how it will be maintained, who the intended audience is, and what’s the best way to present it to that audience.

Map

We use detailed process maps to illustrate, annotate and cross-link your functional workflows at whatever level of detail is appropriate (and often down to the task). These process maps end up not only validating your workflows but also provide a series of rich and useful on-boarding, training and ongoing performance support tools that show and remind new and existing employees how your work gets done.

Maintain

Our OpsNotes sites, which contain procedures, process maps, and training & performance support materials, are designed to be used, so keeping it up to date is critical. We can do that for you or show you how to maintain it yourself.

Remember, this is about helping your business run better. And keeping it that way. (Using PSCertify can help.)

TECHNOLOGY.

COOL TOOLS.

We’re more process than technology geeks, but that doesn’t mean we don’t use some pretty cool tools.

OpsNotes provides a secure way to organize and consolidate all of your workflows, procedures and training materials, and make them easily accessible for their intended audience.  Contact us for a demo.

PSCertify is a web-based testing and certification tool we developed to nudge responsibility for demonstrating mastery over all of that material to your users.   Contact us for a demo.

EXPERIENCE.

Experience?  Lots.  We’ve worked in industries as varied as Financial Services, Insurance, Supply Chain, and Technology. We’ve worked with small businesses and billion dollar multi-nationals.   To us, it’s not about the vertical.  It’s about the process. (Or, to put a finer point on, the processes.)

Because our job is to help you identify the problems that you’re trying to solve, and to then create corresponding procedures to make sure that work is done in a way that minimizes your operational risk.

ProjectStory gets in the weeds.  If you’re looking to spend 500K on a beautifully bound strategy document of no particular practical value, we’re probably not the right fit.

FAQ.

Start small.  ProjectStory projects are most effective at the departmental level.  Silos (i.e., poor or non-existent inter-departmental communication) are a common organizational problem but we recommend an initial focus on solving specific tactical issues.

Trick question.  There are no “typical projects.”  But most of our projects generally last 3-6 months.

Decide upfront whether you can handle this yourself or whether you’d like us to handle it for you.  We will share with you in detail our strategic and tactical recommendations.

So, what’s your ProjectStory?