Continual Improvement is about never being satisfied with the status quo. It is a mindset and behaviour about always looking to improve yourself and your environment.

Continuous Improvement is critical to an organization because it ensures that insights gained from yesterday and today, give you the necessary foresight to be successful tomorrow.

For every person at every level of the organization, it means continuously looking at how we do our business and finding ways to increase revenue, maximize profits, and improve customer satisfaction. Developing the behaviours and mindsets of a continuously improving organization will enable you to leverage your entire employee base to drive improvement.

A Jñāna Optimized Unified Delivery Model utilizes the Continual Improvement Management System to ensure that appropriate focus is given to enablers such as leadership, communication, resources, organization architecture, people and processes to lead to better results in Revenue, Profits, and Customer Satisfaction. This system provides a reference framework of core base continual improvement projects and a template to document department-specific continual improvement projects that every organization should implement to establish an optimized Unified Delivery Model.

Modern business requires a focus on priorities, better management techniques, and effective structures for operational stability. Continual Improvement programs can help you to extract meaningful information from large amounts of raw data, see trends in the environment and help to communicate important concepts using statistical charts and graphs. Continual Improvement can help IT Departments continually improve their services to remain appealing to the Business.

Continual improvement should focus on enablers such as leadership, communication, resources, organization architecture, people and processes – in other words, everything in the organization, in all functions, at all levels.

Continual improvement should also lead to better results such as price, cost, productivity, time to market, delivery, responsiveness, profit and customer and employee satisfaction.

3 Critical Questions for Process Owners to Answer

• Do you understand how your service really works?–Is it completely documented?
• Do you know how your service is performing?–Do you have measurements in place that gauge the success of the process?
• Do you have a plan to make the service better?–Is a continual improvement plan in place?

The Continual Improvement Coordinator will own the overall continual improvement process for the team. The Coordinator will work closely with the other key roles such as, Reporting and Measurements Focal, Knowledge Management Focal, Quality Management Focal and Training Focal to review all relevant data and perform detailed analysis.

1. Identify reports required for analysis from reporting and measurements coordinator. Set the delivery frequency and delivery method.
2. Schedule Weekly Meetings to review observations and findings and ensure the Team and the key systems (KB, Processes, Procedures, etc.) are being updated.
3. Work with the team to conduct analysis on reports to identify improvement areas.
4. Work with Communications Coordinator to share information on new observations, etc. with the team.
5. Identify new improvement initiatives and manage the execution of the initiatives.
6. Meet with Team Leader and Manager regularly to provide updates.
7. Measure the cost of the initiatives vs. benefits to the team
8. Implement Right-to-Left Strategy
9. Develop Statistical Control Charts/Process Behaviour Charts for key metrics
10. Work with Communications Coordinator to Poll/Survey the Team for new innovation ideas monthly.
11. Work with Management to schedule Monthly Roundtable meetings with select members of the Team to review observations/findings and innovation ideas.
12. Review the Continual Improvement Management Roles & Responsibilities, Process, Meetings, & Reporting & Measurements sections and provide sign-off and acceptance of ownership.
13. Establish a periodic review cycle to ensure the currency of the documentation.
14. Identify approval process where local Management and Enterprise Manager contribute to review of the local team process.
15. Identify a Portal to store all Continual Improvement Management Documentation such as process documentation, analysis, reports, etc.
16. Create a Continual Improvement Management distribution list(e.g.ContinualImprovement@company.com), to have a central location where anyone can send questions, ask for help and provide information to the Continual Improvement Management Process.
17. Create a Continual Improvement Management e-newsletter to share with the team about Root Cause Analysis, Trends and any Improvement Areas.
18. Identify and connect with the Enterprise Incident Manager to establish a working partnership and identify Inputs and Outputs between the Enterprise process and the team process.
19. Identify and attend the Enterprise Continual Improvement Management Meeting.
20. Schedule department-level Continual Improvement Management Meeting, if needed.
21. Create Department Level Continual Improvement Management Executive Dashboard Report for the management team – linked to the Common ScoreCard Management System.
22. Work with Department Management and Enterprise team to establish Continual Improvement Management metrics (KPIs, SLOs, SLAs, etc.).
23. Work with Department Management and Enterprise team to establish Continual Improvement Management operational reports
    
24. Schedule 2-3 hours every Friday to conduct an analysis of the Continual Improvement Management System.
25. Contribute to updating the Common ScoreCard Management System by EOD every Friday. Provide volume and downtime history on all Sev 1s and 2s, the root cause of Sev 1s and 2s, any observable trends and actions being taken to resolve issues more quickly or minimize/avoid the issues.
26. Conduct overall trend analysis and present to management.

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