Lean is All Around Us

Think you don’t use Lean practices in your daily life, in your work, in your business?  Think again.  Lean is all around us, permeating both our personal and work lives.

I was recently reading Steve Krum’s Don’t Make Me Think, a book published in 2000 that gives an in-depth analysis into website usability.  Nowhere in the book does Steve mention the words Lean or continuous improvement – but it seems impossible that Steve had never heard of these terms, or considered applying them to his work.  If I were to swap out a few choice words and hand you the book, you’d swear you were reading something written by a Lean guru.

There are three key principles that Steve says are required for a good website:

1. The focus is on the customer

2. Use standard conventions wherever possible

3. Test frequently with actual users

Worded a little differently, these become:

• Identify customers and specify value

Only a small part of the work you do will benefit your customers.  Identify what value your efforts add for the end customer, and remove non-value added or wasted steps.  

• Standardize whenever possible

Standardizing your workflow will eliminate errors and increase the quality of your product or service to improve the customer experience.  Keep in mind, though, that you don’t want to take standardization too far; rather than blindly following standards, continually think about how you can improve upon them.  Standardize good processes, and improve them to create great processes

• Continually improve

Have you experienced Lean in unexpected places? Leave a comment and tell us about it!