Kaizen and the Web Department

“When you step into a turnaround situation, you can safely assume four things: morale is low, fear is high, the good people are halfway out the door, and the slackers are hiding.”
-Nina Disesa, as chairwoman of McCann-Erickson Worldwide

Kaizen – Making small improvements every day in order to see big changes down the road.

Growth and change can be both painful and rewarding. What follows are a few of the growing pains I have observed at the Journal, in our department, from June 2006 to May 2007.

Background

A short history of the Angus Journal’s web department goes something like this: Rich took over as the web department manager in June 2005. He walked into a mess: no system existed to handle the work orders, and the work orders had no checks and balances. The people who took in the work orders also did the work, also did the proofreading, also did the billing. Not a problem in general terms, unless you have coordinators, developers and a proofreader or two, as we do.

So two questions were asked: Why are we doing things the hard way? And why are these specific tasks not getting assigned to a particular person?

Rich then implemented the packet system. Packets consisted of a paper folder with individual work orders that tracks the time spent, who did the work, who requested the work, and any special instructions, among other things – every company I have worked for has something similar. Certain tasks were delegated to the appropriate people. Rich met a strong resistance from a few who didn’t care to change – the ones who couldn’t see the bigger picture in play.

I arrived as the packet system reached its first birthday, along with most of the tasks sorted out to their proper place. Although Tim and Rich had reveled in telling me stories of how much better things were, I did not understand. Sometimes you have to experience a situation to truly appreciate it. I became familiar with the packet system just in time to find busy season looming ahead. It was not until I started drowning in packets in the dead of winter that I finally understood. Things were hectic. A crazy sort of busy that was highly reminiscent of my fast food days. I realized that without the packet system in place, I would have lost my head…and I am fairly organized person.

Leaps and Bounds in a Single Year

I was told from the very beginning that if I found anything that could be done easier, faster, or in a better way, to be sure and speak up. The example I was given dealt with our e-lists. Tim had recently changed the way e-list archives were managed, creating a new Volume for each month of e-lists.

Some of the changes that have come about in this first year were monumental, others small. What seemed a small suggestion sometimes grew to enormous impact. A few of the accomplishments our team has seen this year include:

• Changing the e-list archives to a manageable format
• Setting up naming conventions and organizing our files
• Creating reusable pieces of code to build pages faster
• Using new methods to create easy-to-use member lists
• Following web standards to the best of our abilities
• Generating new ideas to build future online sale books
• Improving old web pages by using code that measures up to standards

E-Lists

E-Lists were one of those monsters that took on a life of its own, but only because it was one of the earliest successful projects from the web department. The e-lists had been around longer than our packet system or any form of organization. After Tim spent several hours sorting through the junk to glean the useful gems, it was easy to maintain e-lists from there.

Naming Conventions

Some of the things I took for granted in school were not yet used at work. Concerning website maintenance, small things like naming conventions for web pages, images, and folders were not in use; neither was deleting unused pages and images in a GoLive! site file. During a short meeting I suggested these two easy changes, thinking it would help keep everyone on the same page. There are between three and five people who open the same GoLive site file on any given day for a number of different reasons.

No more click here folders or image folders with lists a mile long. Subfolders sprouted like mushrooms and suddenly it was easier to find the information that needed changed.

Reuseable Code

We often build individual web pages for each cow, bull, or embryo. These pages generally consist of a picture of the particular cow or bull, a drop down menu listing others for sale, the animal’s pedigree, stats (called EPDs), and sometimes a footnote about their progeny. A single client may have as little as 30 animals listed, but I have seen as many as 230 animals with their own pages. Since creating animal pages are time consuming and we have to build so many of them each month, we started looking for small ways to cut down on the time it took to build a page. After adding a new snippet of reuseable code, we cut our production time in half!

Making the Most of New Methods

AJAX is a combination of existing web technology (like JavaScript, HTML, and XML) with a new way to use it. So, old technology + new spin = fresh face. I have seen an immediate impact with its use on our state association membership lists. The Florida Angus Association is one of my favorites.

If a thousand miles begins with the first step, we are well along in our journey towards improvement.