How to Get Full Benefits of Your Continual Service Improvement Strategy?

[Manjeet Singh]

What is ServiceNow Continual Improvement Management (CIM)?

Building an improvement culture in any organization is hard. The old approach to service or process level improvement is reactive, expensive, and unstructured.

ServiceNow focuses on the use of automation and information to speed the path to proactively find new improvement opportunities, root cause identification, and business value tracking. Continual Improvement Management (CIM) makes it easy to find improvement opportunities and build momentum to continuously drive improvement strategy within your organization. 

Why CIM?

• To proactively drive continuous optimization and improvements across services, processes, people, and technology to increase business efficiency, innovation, and competitive advantage.
• Easily identify new improvement opportunities across IT services and processes. Bring all improvement into one place under the improvement register where it can be reviewed and prioritized in a structured way.
• Engage more people for greater impact. Enable everyone in the organization to submit their improvement ideas via innovation management or directly to the CIM register while providing full transparency and visibility to make employees feel that their contribution is making an impact.
• Improve integration with other apps and products to capture improvement opportunities with one click.
• Align improvement initiatives to strategic goals and set SMART targets using KPIs for continuous improvement tracking.
• Measure progress and capture the business value in alignment with strategic priority. ​

Playbook to get full benefits from the CIM

1. Proactively identify new improvement opportunities

There are many ways to identify new improvement opportunities at the service level, process level, and people level.  

• • Directly in CIM - A Service Desk Agent, IT Manager, Analyst, or another user with the improvement requestor role can create an improvement initiative directly when they identify a process bottleneck or inefficiency that needs improving.
  • Additionally, employees can use the Idea Portal application to submit their idea via the Service Portal. The Idea Portal is where employees can create and vote on the product, feature, change, or enhancement ideas. The Idea Manager can then convert an idea record into a CIM initiative record instead of using demand or projects.
  • Directly from a task – Anyone with the improvement requestor role can create an improvement initiative from a Major Incident, Problem, Services under SPM, Survey result, Idea, Demand, Project, CMDB health, GRC audit review, Performance Analytics, or benchmark by clicking the “create improvement initiative” button available in the form or on a dashboard. This creates action can be added to other task or non-task table easily to provide integration with other places on the ServiceNow platform.
  • Automatically via Integrations - Improvement initiatives can be automatically generated via external systems such as a vendor system integration.

2. Align the improvement initiative with business goals

Align with business goals by connecting improvements to overall business strategy. Identify high-level business objectives/strategic drivers that must be considered when configuring Continual Improvement Management. Common examples:

• Simplification of operational processes
• Adherence to company control measures
• Increase customer/employee experience
• Reduce Operationally cost

This is how you can align your hierarchical strategic goals in an OKR (Objective Key Results) type framework-

3. Use embedded integrations with many applications

Start using following integration to amplify the ease of use and value tracking

• Performance Analytics for finding new improvement and tracking improvement on initiatives
• The Coaching module to provide in-process coaching to support agents and employees to increase their performance and productivity
• The Innovation Portal to allow everyone in the company to submit their improvement ideas via Service Portal
• The Benchmarks peer comparison to set meaningful goals

4. Make it easily accessible

As part of Continual Improvement Management’s integration with other applications, an improvement request can be created from within other applications and, conversely, records for other applications can be created from within an improvement initiative (or CIM task).

An improvement initiative can be created from these applications:

• Benchmarks
• Demand Management
• Incident Management
• Problem Management
• Survey Management
• Process Optimization

As part of an improvement initiative, these records can be created:

• Demand
• Project

As part of a CIM task, these records can be created:

• Change request
• Knowledge Base article
• Agile Development record (Story)

These interactions list can be expanded easily to any table/task in ServiceNow.

5. Use Embedded Analytics and Value Realization Dashboard

CIM app comes with a prebuilt value realization dashboard that automatically captures the benefits achieved using KPIs attached to your improvement initiative. 

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) evaluate the success of a particular activity toward meeting the critical success factors. Successfully managing KPIs can be either through repeatedly meeting an objective (maintain) or by making progress toward an objective (increase/decrease). The Benchmarks feature gives you instant visibility into your key performance indicators (KPIs) and trends, as well as comparative insight relative to industry averages of your peers. You can contrast the performance of your organization with recognized industry standards and view a side-by-side comparison of performance with global benchmarks.

6. Use Coaching application to make people-related improvements

ServiceNow Coaching app is automatically enabled with the CIM App. The Coaching application lets you facilitate the coaching of employees using coaching opportunities that you can configure for a critical moment in a process.

Set up coaching opportunities under the Coaching module to provide real-time improvement feedback and make context-based recommendations on employee performance and processes. Coaching opportunities automatically generate assessments for trainees which get assigned to coaches. The trainees can get trained by the coaches or using automated virtual content.

Continual Improvement Management helps bring process improvement opportunities and ideas from any application or employee into one place.

With a context-rich dashboard and workbench, your process improvement ideas and initiatives are prioritized to highlight the outcomes and milestones for your business goals. 

CIM solution is available with ITSM Pro and CSM Pro subscriptions. You can check out the full functionality by installing the CIM app on your non-prod instance.

Additional reading:

Continual Improvement Management Articles & Blogs - Blogs - ServiceNow Community