I still haven’t found what I’m looking for….

I’m sure, that U2 did not think about lean mananagement or google when they wrote their hit song. But they might as well have.

Go-Gulf – a Dubai based interned company made a study about how people spend their time in internet. That study showed that 21% of time was spend searching for information. A Google study from 2011 had similar results also in office enviroment. We use a lot of time searching for information, documents, emails etc. On an average workday we search something for 90 minutes. That is a lot.

The problem is, that searching is not visible in our reports. We do it, but we often take that as a given fact of life. But if you asked your customers if it’s ok that their price tags include 21% of search time, the might not be happy. They might ask you to get your tools and documents in order.

As with all waste, searching and moving things around can not be completly rooted, but as it usually does not add value to the end customer we shoud minimize the time used.

If you want search less and do more, you need three things.

1. a standard on how things are organized
2. a system that helps you to organize things based on that standard
3. an effective search engine to help you when you have a lot of documents

The first is usually the trickiest, but keep it as simple as possible. Even if it might feel entertaining to organize files and name projects with some cryptic acronyms, it usually does not end well. New people in your organization or collaborators from different teams have no idea what you try to achieve in VAHOSU or PARAS. Even if it might take a word or two more, try to tell what the project is about.

When the standard is created the phases two and three are easy. With Askelworks they are really easy. Our new search tool helps you to find your documents even if you did not nail the first step.

Imagine how much more you could get done, if you had one day more per week to focus on adding value to your customers? And how much more fun working could be if you don’t have to constantly ask the question ”where is the latest version of…”.

Tommi and the Akselworks team