Lean Mindset Example: A Tool Should Serve The Work!

The lean mindset lives! The question is how to practice a lean mindset. An example might help! Website optimizing may be used as a vehicle to demonstrate lean mindset thinking. What is necessary to provide such a website optimizing service? And why makes a lean mindset a difference here? How to make lean?

In order to provide a service you must organize 3 streams:

1. Approach.
2. Tools.
3. Peoples competences.

These 3 streams are separate, but strongly related issues. To answer what requirements we have for these 3 aspects, we must define first: What is an optimized website?

Lean mindset thinking

In an optimized website 3 aspects are balanced implemented:

1. The website functions as a business channel.
   Example: The website should generate sales leads. Another example could be that it provides self-service options for customers.
2. The website attracts new customers.
   An example is that the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of the website publishes adequately the products and services of the organization.
3. The website conforms to the ISO standards for a website.
   An example is that the website is adequately readable for humans and search bots.

Once we have defined our website optimization service we can organize our service and look into the approach, tools, and competence streams.

To limit the size we will discuss only tools here. Not the lean techniques. We could say that we are looking for a tool that meets all our requirements: Discuss with the business the role of the website, administrate the SEO aspects, and also check the website conformance rules.

As these 3 aspects are not related, this tool will be a very complicated tool: Difficult to use and difficult to maintain. The lean mindset approach is, lent from Peter Drucker:

A tool should serve the work

Therefore it is much more feasible to use 3 different tools, one for each aspect. We can use paper and pencil for the business role, a Firefox add-on like SEO Quake for SEO aspects, and OpenValidator for website conformance checks.

We do the integration and interrelation of the tools ourselves. There is another benefit: The 3 tools mentioned already exist for some time, and we can start using them today! There is no need to develop them first.

So what is the lean mindset? What is lean? The answer to the question: What is the smallest step to optimize this website or process. That is just what we demonstrated through this example.

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