Best practices to adopt Continual Service Improvement

[Manjeet Singh]

Why you need Continual Service Improvement (CSI)?

CSI is one of the most important concepts in Service Management. When you design a new service, or a new process, or some new infrastructure, it’s never 100% perfect and there is always room for improvement. If you have CSI in place then this won’t matter, because you can start monitoring and improving things, so that they gradually approach the perfection that you’d like to offer to your customers.

On the other hand, if you are not continually improving your services, your processes, your technology, and your people, then you will stagnate, while your competition gradually leaves you further and further behind. Staying still is not an option when everyone else is improving; it’s just a sure shot way to gradually decline into irrelevance.

Continual Improvement Management App available in London release makes it very easy to get started with CSI and it can make a huge difference to the value you create for your customers. In this post, I’ll give you some best practice suggestions for things you can do to make CSI work for you.

Best practice #1: Start small, show value achieved and build improvement culture

It’s better to make a few improvements than to take on too much and not make any progress. CIM App provides you with a workbench UI that allow you to plan and manage improvement in an agile way using a tile-based view and drag and drop interface.

CIM App brings people, data and process together using workflows, alert, Dashboard to provide a platform for structured and efficient continual Improvement.

Best practice #2: Distribute responsibility for CSI throughout the organization

CSI is not just the CSI Manager responsibility. It should be part of everyone’s job who are involved with Service or process in some way. CIM App provides different roles to make it easy. It is a good idea for CSI manager to assign improvement coordinators roles to other process owners or improvement teams. If your people believe in CSI then it will happen, and it will create value. If CSI is seen as yet another layer of bureaucracy then it will have no value at all.

Best practice #3: Proactively identify improvement opportunities

The best way for people to submit their improvement idea is to make it obvious and easy. CIM App provides out of the box two-way integration with ITSM, ITBM, PA, Surveys and Assessment, coaching to make it easy for people working in these process areas to submit improvement by one click.

For example, as an IT Manager, I am looking into ServiceNow Benchmarks comparison in my industry and I can submit an improvement idea using dynamic best practice recommendation by one click (see below). 

See this another post I did on how to populate your CSI register.

Best practice #4: Log and track improvement opportunities in CSI registers

CIM App provides Improvement register as a single place to log, prioritize, implement and track improvement in a structured process. The CSI register must be an active tool, not just a record of an ITSM review you carried out once. It allows you to do improvement in a structured and efficient manager by keeping all opportunities, their tasks and other artefacts in one place.

Best practice #5: Align your improvement with strategy:

Some companies continue to make the mistake of doing improvement in silos without doing a proper alignment with business objective and goals. CIM App helps break silos and make alignment to business objective using a central table on ServiceNow Platform. The alignment of improvement initiative to the strategic objective is done before an initiative is moved to implement state.

Best practice #6: Measure the impact and share improvement achieved with the team

Many CSI initiative fails and getting approval from the management is hard if you cannot set measurable goals and show the outcome achieved. In CIM, we took a value-driven approach and allow to attach a performance analytics KPIs, set improvement target and achievable target date. This approach provides full transparency to everyone of what is being improved and how the progress is happening throughout the improvement cycle.

Best practice #7: Go beyond just improving Services or Processes

CIM structured improvement framework can be used to improve your people and team's performance. Review and improve the skills and competence of your people, to ensure that IT personnel have the right skills and competence to manage the technology, execute the processes, and deliver the services. Create initiatives to provide the required coaching/training to fill skills gaps and make your team profoundly better.

In summary, companies that successfully implement and maintain continuous improvement are rewarded with reduced costs, increased efficiency and quality, accelerated product innovation, better customer satisfaction scores and less employee turnover.

For more information 

Here are additional Resources to learn more:

• Webinar: Continual Service Improvement using Benchmarks (ServiceNow Community)
• Top 5 reason why CSI initiative fails
• How do fit organization drive service excellence

--

Behind the scenes here at ServiceNow, the Knowledge Management and Multimedia teams work closely with subject matter experts to disseminate critical information to our customers. We've found that certain topics come up frequently, in the form of best practices that can help you keep your ServiceNow instances running smoothly. This series targets those topics so that you and your organization can benefit from our collective expertise. If you have a best practices topic you'd like us to cover in this series, please let us know in the comments below.

To access all of the blog posts in this series, see our NOWSupport best practices series list.