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This guide gives you a collection of best practices for a successful implementation of Continual Improvement Management (CIM) app. Continuous Improvement is becoming a focal point for more organizations, as well as the main roadmap item in the digital transformation journey. Organizations that strive for continually improvement, stay ahead of the competition, regardless of their size or industry.
CIM provides an easy way to find new improvement opportunities across Process, People and Services and implement them in a structured way to capture the measurable business value.
CIM helps drive service excellence across the organization by tracking all improvements in a single improvement register. It allows you to align individual improvement initiative with business goals to overall business strategy and provide transparency for everyone involved.
CIM provides enable smart decision-making by setting measurable KPI based goals with a visual dashboard to measure the business value.
CIM extend improvements to service desk agents with the Coaching plugin that delivers real‑time coaching at critical moments in their tasks.
Here are some recommended plugins that should be installed for quick on-boarding:
1. Enable “Performance Analytics - Content Pack - ITSM Dashboards” plugin
- This will provide you ~300 PA indicators
2. Persona specific dashboard: IT Agent, IT Manager, IT Executive
- Use PA reports trend to find improvement opportunities and submit to CIM with one click from scorecard.
3. Opt-in to Benchmarks
- Search for Benchmarks in application navigator, opt-in from production instance
- Use Benchmarks insights and best practice recommendations as input to find new improvement opportunities.
4. Enable Coaching Module (available starting from Madrid release)
- Use Coaching to find improvement opportunities related to people and process
- Provide immediate coaching to improve people performance
5. Enable SPM/VLM Workspace (Starting from New York release)
- Monitor service/vendor health and performance
- Submit Improvement opportunity from a service record
Use Continual Improvement Management roles to specify what different users and user groups can see and do
CIM is not just the Improvement 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 improvement manager to assign improvement coordinators roles to other process owners or improvement teams. If your people believe in CIM then it will happen, and it will create value.
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).
Once you have Installed the Continual Improvement Management App, there are lots of things you can do to help identify new improvement opportunities:
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.
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 CIM. 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 CIM 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.
Provide visibility into when an initiative was started and ended. When people know that you’re tracking data around their improvement work, there’s an increased sense of accountability that drives higher user engagement.
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.
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.
Here are additional Resources to learn more:
When you are ready to dive in and get technical, refer to our product documentation.
To get additional support and insights on how other customers use CIM, check out our Community.
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