As a follow up to our 5 S Lean of the Intranet following the Toyota Production System’s lean philosophy, I finished cleaning up and redesigning our Intranet here at Setpoint.  We replaced the old Intranet with the new design a few weeks ago and so far it’s running smoothly.  After sorting through the more than 500 items we ended up with only 75 that we actually needed to keep.  Of those 30 are sales training audio files.  We found that in all there were 10 documents that were used the most and decided that we wanted to group them all together.

Figuring out the right headings took a few iterations.  For those 10 documents we started with Commonly Used but then when testing it no one thought it was a link to the documents they wanted, they thought it was some type of header above the other categories.  So I changed it to Frequently Used and still it was seen as a header when I presented it to everyone.  During that meeting they said why don’t you call it Stuff You Actually Care About, so we did.  Now all documents are only 2 clicks away, a far cry from the previous version.

Now comes the sustaining.  Every time we add a document we are going to verify if we really need it on the Intranet or if another location is the right place for it.