You’ve probably heard of “lean management” or “lean manufacturing.” It feels like “lean” is ubiquitous in many industries, but I haven’t encountered the buzz word up here in the cloud. We have a self-improvement book club at my employer, Optimum Energy, and last week we discussed 2 Second Lean by Paul Akers.
“Lean” is the involvement of the entire company in continuous small improvements to remove waste and improve efficiency, as practiced by fanatic Paul Akers.
Good Salesforce administration is one of the most “lean” things you could do for your company.
Every day each of Paul Akers’ employees comes up with one process improvement that cuts out two seconds. 2 Second Lean claims you can revolutionize your company in these tiny increments. And I believe it, because that’s exactly what I do all day in SFDC.
At Optimum Energy, for every energy optimization project, a series of emails used to go back and forth between members of three teams until pricing was agreed upon. Now a user clicks a button, launching a flow which asks them a series of questions and starts an approval process. No information is misplaced in an email folder. All the right people are looped in. That’s efficiency!
The key is to keep each “improved” process very simple. One of my coworkers once snarked (yes, that’s a word) at me, “It’s not my job to click through all these screens.”
In my head, I retorted, “It’s not my job to make your life easier.” But…oh wait… yeah, it is actually…that’s the whole point of my job.
It’s easy to get wrapped up in creating cool processes or trying new tricks as an admin, but if the two milliseconds it takes for each mouse click aren’t wisely spent, I’m just wasting more of my user’s time. Waste bad. Lean good.
AH. This is probably the most interesting, heartfelt explanation of custom report types out there. ^_^
Dee, it seems like your comment somehow got onto the wrong post.
Weird, thought I was in the reports one! But since I’m here, I like the idea of being lean as an admin – which I’ve found also means deciding which user requests work for both efficiency and data quality (because not evrtything can, or even should, be automated)!
Thanks, Dee! I totally agree! That’s something I’ve had to work at – not immediately building something just because someone wants it.
Weird, thought I was in the reports one! But since I’m here, I like the idea of being lean as an admin – which I’ve found also means deciding which user requests get implemented (because not evrtything can, or should, be automated)!