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.
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.