Build a Continual Improvement Program

Your Challenge

• Even high-quality services and products need to be aligned with rising stakeholder expectations to sustain operational excellence.
• Without the right leadership, commitment, and processes, improvements in service quality can be difficult to sustain.
• Continual improvement is not only a development plan but also an organizational culture shift, which makes stakeholder buy-in even challenging.

Common Obstacles

• IT managers must work hard to maintain and improve service quality or risk performance deterioration over time.
• Leadership feels lost about what to do next and which initiatives have higher priority for improvement.
• A backlog of improvement initiatives makes the work even harder. Managers should involve the right people in the process and build a team that is responsible for monitoring, measuring, prioritizing, implementing, and testing improvements.

Info-Tech’s Approach

• Set a strategic vision for the continual improvement program.
• Build a team to set regulations, processes, and audits for the program.
• Set measurable targets for the program.
• Identify and prioritize improvement initiatives.
• Measure and monitor progress to ensure initiatives achieve the desired outcome.
• Apply lessons learned to the next initiatives.

Purpose of continual improvement

There should be alignment between ongoing improvements of business products and services and management of these products and services. Continual improvement helps service providers adapt to changing environments. No matter how critical the service is to the business, failure to continually improve reduces the service value.

Continual improvement is one of the five elements of ITIL’s Service Value System (SVS).

Continual improvement should be documented in an improvement register to record and manage improvement initiatives.

Continual improvement is a proactive approach to service management. It involves measuring the effectiveness and efficiency of people, processes, and technology to:

• Identify areas for improvement.
• Adapt to changes in the business environment.
• Align the IT strategy to organizational goals.

A continual improvement process helps service management move away from a reactive approach that focuses only on fixing problems as they occur.

Info-Tech Insight

Make sure the basics are in place before you embark on a continual improvement initiative.

Provide an opportunity to stakeholders to define requirements and raise their concerns.

Embed continual improvement in all service delivery procedures.

Turn failures into improvement opportunities rather than contributing to a blame culture.

Improve practice effectiveness that enhances IT efficiency.

Improve end-user satisfaction that positively impacts brand reputation.

Improve operational costs while maintaining a high level of satisfaction.

Help the business become more proactive by identifying and improving services.

• Users
• Suppliers
• Service delivery team members
• Service owners
• Sponsors

Work closely with the service desk team to build communication channels to conduct surveys. Avoid formal bureaucratic communications and enforce openness in communicating the value of feedback the stakeholders can provide.

Understand the high-level business objectives to set the vision for continual improvement in a way that will align IT strategies with business strategies.

Obtaining a clear picture of your organization’s goals and overall corporate strategy is one of the crucial first steps to continual improvement and will set the stage for the metrics you select. Document your continual improvement program goals and objectives.

Knowing what your business is doing and understanding the impact of IT on the business will help you ensure that any metrics you collect will be business focused.

Understanding the long-term vision of the business and its appetite for commitment and sponsorship will also inform your IT strategy and continual improvement goals.

1. Quantity
   How many continual improvement initiatives are in progress
2. Quality
   How well you implemented improvements
3. Timeliness
   How long it took to get continual improvement initiatives done
4. Compliance
   How well processes and controls are being executed, such as system availability

CSF

KPI

• IT implications are derived from the business context and inform goals by aligning the IT goals with the business context.
• Business context encompasses an understanding of the factors impacting the business from various perspectives, how the business makes decisions, and what it is trying to achieve.
• IT goals are high-level, specific objectives that the IT organization needs to achieve to reach the target state. IT goals begin a process of framing what IT as an organization needs to be able to do in the target state.

IT goals will help identify the target state, IT capabilities, and the initiatives that will need to be implemented to enable those capabilities.

The vision statement is expressed in the present tense. It seeks to articulate the desired role of IT and how IT will be perceived.

Brainstorm what steps should be included in a continual improvement program:

• Who is responsible for identifying, logging, and prioritizing improvement opportunities?
• Who makes the business case for improvement initiatives?
• Who is the owner of the register, responsible for documenting initiatives and updating their status?
• Who executes implementation?
• Who evaluates implementation success?

• Knowledge of provided products and services.
• Good understanding of organization’s goals and objectives.
• Efficiency in collecting and measuring metrics, understanding company standards and policies, and presenting them to impacted stakeholders.
• Competency in strategic thinking and aligning the organization’s goals with improvement initiatives.

Depending on available staff and resources, you may be able to have full-time continual improvement roles, or you may include continual improvement activities in individuals’ job descriptions.

Each improvement action that you identify should have clear ownership and accountability to ensure that it is completed within the specified timeframe.

Roles and responsibilities can be reassigned throughout the continual improvement process.

Info-Tech Insight

Create cross-functional teams to improve perspective and not focus on only one small group when trying to problem solve. Having other teams hear and reframe the issue or talk about how they can help to solve issues as a team can create bigger solutions that will help the entire IT team, not just one group.

Gather stakeholder feedback to help you evaluate the maturity levels of IT practices

You need to understand the current state of service operations to understand how you can provide value through continual improvement. Give everyone an opportunity to provide feedback on IT services.

Use Info-Tech’s End User Satisfaction Survey to define the state of your core IT services.

Info-Tech Insight

Become proactive to improve satisfaction. Continual improvement is not only about identifying pain points and improving them. It enables you to proactively identify initiatives for further service improvement using both practice functionality and technology enablement.

Determine the maturity level of your IT areas to help you understand which processes need improvement. Involve the practice team in maturity assessment activities to get ideas and input from them. This will also help you get their buy-in and engagement for improvement.

Leverage performance metrics to analyze performance level. Metrics play a key role in understanding what needs improvement. After you implement metrics, have an impact report regularly generated to monitor them.

Use problem management to identify root causes for the identified gaps. Potential sources of problems can be:

• Recurring issues that may be an indicator of an underlying problem.
• Business processes or service issues that are not IT related, such as inefficient business process or service design issues.

A CIR is a document used for recording your action plan from the beginning to the end of the improvement project.

If you just sit and plan for improvements without acting on them, nothing will improve. CIR helps you create an action plan and allows you to manage, track, and prioritize improvement suggestions.

Populate your register with ideas that come from your first round of assessments and use this document to continually add and track new ideas as they emerge.

You can also consider using the register to track the outcomes and benefits of improvement initiatives after they have been completed.

1. Open the Continual Improvement Register template and navigate to tab 2, Setup.
2. Brainstorm your definitions for the following items to get a clear understanding of these items when completing the CIR. The more quantification you apply to the criteria, the more tangible evaluation you will do:
   • Business value impact categories
   • Effort/cost
   • Priority
   • Status
   • Timeline
3. Discuss the teams that the upcoming initiatives will belong to and update them under CI Functional Groups.

1. Analyze the assessment data collected throughout stakeholder feedback and your current-state evaluation.
2. Use this data to generate a list of initiatives that should be undertaken to improve the performance of the targeted processes.
3. Use sticky notes to record identified CI initiatives.
4. Record each initiative in tab 3, CI Register, along with associated information:
   • A unique ID number for the initiative
   • The individual who submitted the idea
   • The team the initiative belongs to
   • A description of the initiative

Input

• List of key stakeholders for continual improvement
• Current state of services and processes

Output

• Continual improvement register setup
• List of initiatives for continual improvement

Materials

• Continual improvement register
• Whiteboard/flip charts
• Markers
• Laptops

Participant

• CIO
• IT managers
• Project managers
• Continual improvement manager/coordinator

4. Prioritize initiatives

Prioritization should be transparent and available to stakeholders.

Some initiatives are more critical than others to achieve and should be prioritized accordingly. Some improvements require large investments and need an equally large effort, while some are relatively low-cost, low-effort improvements. Focus on low-hanging fruit and prioritize low-cost, low-effort improvements to help the organization with rapid growth. This will also help you get stakeholder buy-in for the rest of your continual improvement program.

Prioritize improvement initiatives in your CIR to increase visibility and ensure larger improvement initiatives are done the next cycle. As one improvement cycle ends, the next cycle begins, which allows the continual improvement team to keep pace with changing business requirements.

01

• If you have identified pain points, addressing these will demonstrate the value of the project to the business to gain their support.
• Choose the services or processes that continue to disrupt or threaten service – focus on where pain points are evident and where there is a need for improvement.
• Critical services to improve should emerge from the current-state assessments.

02

03

The continual improvement process must:

• Define activities to be completed.
• Create roles and assign ownership to complete activities.
• Provide training and awareness about the initiative.
• Define inputs and outputs.
• Include reporting.

For each action, identify:

• The problem.
• Who will be responsible and accountable.
• Metric(s) for assessment.
• Baseline and target metrics.
• Action to be taken to achieve improvement (training, new templates, etc.).

Choose timelines:

• Firm timelines are important to keep the project on track.
• One to two months for an initiative is an ideal length of time to maintain interest and enthusiasm for the specific project and achieve a result.

	When improvements happen and only a small group of people are involved in the results and action plan, misconceptions will arise.
	If communication is lacking, end users will provide less feedback on the practice improvements.
	For end users to feel their concerns are being considered, you must communicate the findings in a way that conveys the impact of their contribution.

Info-Tech Insight

To be effective, continual improvement requires open and honest feedback from IT staff. Debriefings work well for capturing information about lessons learned. Break down the debriefings into smaller, individual activities completed within each phase of the project to better capture the large amount of data and lessons learned within that phase.

1. How did we make improvements with our partners and suppliers? –› Look into your contracts and measure the SLAs and commitments.
2. How could improvement initiatives impact the organization? –› Involve everybody to provide feedback. Rerun the end-user satisfaction survey and compare with the baseline that you obtained before improvement implementation.
3. How does the improvement team feel about the whole process? –› What were the lessons learned, and can the team apply the lessons in the next improvement initiatives?
4. How did the leaders manage and lead improvements? –› Were they able to provide proper vision to guide the improvement team through the process?

Part of the measurement should include a review of CSFs and KPIs determined in step 1 (assess the future state). Some may need to be replaced.

• After an improvement has been implemented, it is important to regularly monitor and evaluate the CSFs and KPIs you chose and run reports to evaluate whether the implemented improvement has actually resolved the service/process issues or helped you achieve your objectives.
• Establish a schedule for regularly reviewing key metrics that were identified in Step 1 and assessing change in those metrics and progress toward reaching objectives.
• In addition to reviewing CSFs, KPIs, and metrics, check in with the IT organization and end users to measure their perceptions of the change once an appropriate amount of time has passed.
• Ensure that metrics are telling the whole story and that reporting is honest in order to be informative.

• Improved efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of processes and services.
• Processes and services more aligned with the business needs and strategy.
• Maturity of processes and services.

For a guideline to determine a list of metrics, refer to Info-Tech’s blueprints:

• Develop Meaningful Service Metrics
• Take Control of Infrastructure and Operations Metrics

Info-Tech Insight

Make sure you’re measuring the right things and considering all sources of information. Don’t rely on a single or very few metrics. Instead, consider a group of metrics to help you get a better holistic view of improvement initiatives and their impact on IT operations.

Info-Tech Insight

Regardless of the cause, large differences between the EC and the AC provide great learning opportunities about how to approach change in the future.

Think long-term to sustain changes

The goal of any framework is steady and continual improvement over time that resets the baseline to the current (and hopefully improved) level at the end of each cycle.

	Ensure that there is a continual commitment from management.
	Regularly monitor metrics as well as stakeholder feedback after the initial improvement period has ended. Use this information to plan the next improvement.
	Continual improvement is a combination of attitudes, behavior, and culture.

Success depends on IT initiatives clearly aligned to business goals, IT excellence, and driving technology innovation.

Reinforce service orientation in your IT organization by ensuring your IT metrics generate value-driven resource behavior.

Rise above firefighter mode with structured incident management to enable effective problem management.