I spent most of last week in a 6S (some will say there are only 5S’s) “Lean-Sigma” event. Our organization is in the process of adopting these philosophies and I’m on the steering committee to make that happen. In the last few months, I’ve attended several events, training classes, meetings, etc. on the topic - and it’s all pretty good stuff.

Which got me thinking: can these concepts, which are most easily applied to manufacturing, be applied to IT?

The answer: yes!

We held a 6S (sort, straighten, shine, standardize, sustain, safety) event on our network shared drives. The goal was to clean it up and reduce all files and folders by a factor of 25% (keeping in mind that they had NEVER been cleaned in mass like this for about 12 years). In the end, we had a first-pass clean up of 34% and marked much more for “red tag” (kind of a soft-delete concept) which will automatically be deleted in 30 days.

This really is a great event for an IT department to sponsor. We gathered people from each department and spent a day talking about what type of information should be stored (and where) on our network drives. We talked about how to organize, assign an owner and define retention periods for different types of data. In the end, we reduced the top-level number of folders from over 230 down to just under 20, making it MUCH easier to find information. And reduced the company-wide network share by 68%! We’ve now scheduled events to attack other department-based network shares as well.

For more information about how we went about doing this, including how to setup a similar event in your organization, please click here to download a PDF of the initial presentation used in our event. Or you can access it on-line via SlideShare.

If you do one in your organization, please stop back and post the results, feedback, etc. I’d love to hear how it went!