How to populate and manage a Continual Service Improvement Register

[Manjeet Singh]

Once you have identified improvements opportunities that you want to make, where do you capture them today? Are you using Problem/Demand/Project records or tracking them outside of ServiceNow in Excel/PPT?

It is always a good idea to capture all the Improvement suggestions that people come up into a continual improvement register (a.k.a CSI register) so that you can centralize all improvements initiatives at one place, and compare the costs and benefits and pick the improvements that offer the best ROI.

The good news is that in upcoming ServiceNow London release, the Improvement register is available as part of Continual Improvement Management (CIM) App. In this blog, I’m going to share ideas about how to populate, prioritize and manage your continual service improvement register in an efficient manner.

How to populate a CSI register?

Once you have Installed the Continual Improvement Management App, there are lots of things you can do to help identify new improvement opportunities:

• Carry out regular assessments of your services, processes and technology. This is a great way to identify things to go on the CSI register. It is also a good idea to compare your assessment output with Benchmarks and best practices that you can use to help identify improvement opportunities.
• Review customer feedback and complaints. Do Surveys and ask customers to suggest improvement opportunities.
• Look at process KPIs and any internal process assessments in Performance Analytics and platform reports.
• Compare with Benchmarks baseline and use the system suggested proven best practice based recommendations.
• Ask your process managers. Process Manager/Owner usually have great insight into what is not working well.
• Review problem/change management reports for trends and issues that need to be addressed
• Review Risk registers/GRC Audit test failures to see if there are any improvement opportunities there
• Ask IT staff, development and project management staff for improvement suggestions. Provide CI requestor roles so that they can submit the improvement request into CI register with one click.
• Regular IT service management reviews, to identify what’s going well and what’s not.

How to prioritize opportunities in Improvement register?

Start by looking for improvement opportunities with High benefit, High urgency and Low cost. CIM App uses Performance Analytics's Spotlight feature to automatically rank the improvement backlog that enables you to pick the most worthwhile item from the top of the list.

Opportunities with Low benefit and High cost can usually be deferred without further consideration. The remaining opportunities can be ranked by benefit, cost and urgency to enable you to select the most worthwhile

If you are familiar with the use of Agile then the 'Workbench Dashboard' in CIM App allows you to manage and monitor improvement register as a sprint and backlog. This combination of Agile and IT Service Management is usually very effective at helping you to realize continual and incremental improvements in the services you deliver to your users.

Don’t try to start too many improvements at once, it’s better to start a few improvements and invest the resources needed to complete them fairly quickly than to take on too much and see things stall and fail to make progress.

How should you manage the improvements?

When you plan an Improvement, it is important to make sure that every improvement that you initiate does deliver the value that you expect. One the feature in ServiceNow Continual Improvement Management App will allow adding KPI based measurable and trackable goals with the improvement form. In other words, you can make your improvement goal SMART.

If you are familiar with agile then I strongly recommend using an agile approach to managing CSI. The combination works very well to deliver real improvements in the regular internals.

Whatever approach you use it is important to hold a review at the end of each improvement activity. The review is important and it will often identify further improvements that you can add to the CSI register. The review should not just confirm that you implemented the planned improvement, but it should try to quantify the actual business value that the improvement has delivered. ServiceNow CIM App brings an improvement value realization dashboard that makes it easy visualize all achieved outcomes together and share it with the management team.

A process is how we are supposed to work. If a process is not delivering value – improve it, don’t ignore it.

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Here are some other related blog posts you might find interesting:

Continual Improvement: How do fit organizations drive service excellence?

The Top 5 Reasons Why Continual Service Improvement (CSI) Initiatives Fail

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