Lou Holtz, the famous linebacker and coach, once said: “In this world, you are either growing or you are dying. So, get in motion and grow.” This rings true in every aspect of life, work, and entertainment—more so in products and services. Name one product or a service that has remained the same without improvements or new features, and yet has ruled the market for decades. None. Maintaining status quo in ownership of products and services will get us nowhere but out of the market and out of users’ minds. It is therefore an imposed necessity on product manufacturers and service providers to keep enhancing their offerings and to keep the boat moving toward newer shores. Think of products such as mobile phones, where a new phone is churned out every few months. This is not because the earlier ones have become obsolete, but to keep consumers interested and keep the ball rolling. In services, look at Internet service providers. Their services do not remain constant. They endeavor to increase speeds, make their networks more reliable, and offer several add-ons. Once again this is not because of a paucity of their services or products, but to ensure their survival, which hinges on improvements. In the ITIL world, continual improvement exists to keep the ball in motion, to ensure that all that is offered is being constantly bettered.
Continual Improvement in SVS
Continual improvement in service value system
Continual Improvement in SVC
SVC Activity | Involvement | Details |
|---|---|---|
Plan | High | Planning activity leverages on continual improvement in plan formations and provides feedback to the practice on the improvement’s relevance to the organization’s direction. |
Design and Transition | High | The ideas identified and ratified by the continual improvement practice are inputs to the Design and Transition activity for developing and transitioning the ideas into delivery. |
Obtain/Build | High | The improvement ideas are designed, and in the Obtain/Build activity, they’re developed and fed back to Design and Transition for transitioning into the product/service. |
Engage | Medium | Continual improvement practice’s scope involves third parties including suppliers and other involved stakeholders. |
Deliver and Support | High | The improvements that are transitioned are delivered to end users and the product/service is supported through its life cycle. |
Improve | High | The Improve activity in the SVC provides governance to improvement ideas in prioritizing and allocating resources to the identified improvements. |
In the SVS, continual improvement is one of the critical elements that helps generate value. Together with the guiding principles, continual improvement ensures that the service value chain has the right focus toward enhancing products and services. The improvements don’t just happen directly to a product at an operational level, but are far ranging into tactical and strategic areas as well.
- 1.
The continual improvement model, which consists of seven steps that provide guidance on how improvements are to be initiated and managed throughout the life cycle
- 2.
In the SVC we have talked about the Improve activity, which is tasked with the business of ensuring improvements to services.
- 3.
Continual improvement is a practice as well under general practices. The practice provides guidance around its operational nature and gives wheels to the seven-step model.
Continual improvement is an important topic from the ITIL Foundation exam perspective. It is one of the few topics where the depth of information understood matters for securing marks. You can expect anywhere from three to five questions to appear from this chapter.
Seven-Step Model
Seven-step model of continual improvement
In ITIL V3, the seven-step model had only six steps (it was known as the continual improvement model). The missing step was step 5, take action, which was clubbed with how do we get there (step 4).
Each step means different contexts and hence different views and actions. The actions themselves will be defined based on the industry and type of improvement: strategic, tactical, or operational. However, what is consistent is the flow; the steps to be followed must follow one another, as illustrated in the model.
The model is all the more significant because it aligns to organizational vision and mission and plugs seamlessly into its business process flows. The results therefore are also in line with what the organization expects.
Every improvement action follows the seven-step model, and at any given time each of the improvements could be anywhere in the flow. For example, improvement for processes could be at step 2, an improvement for performance could be in step 5, and then another improvement for GUI could be starting out at step 1. In Agile terminology, the seven-step model for continual improvement is iterative in nature and fits like a hand in a glove with Agile methodology.
What Is the Vision?
Vision in the business context comprises the long-term goals and objectives for the organizations. Every business will therefore start with a vision, such as being a leader in mobile cell service with over 50 percent of the market share (and maybe spreading peace across the globe through spirituality and thoughtfulness).
Here’s a real-life story about vision. McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc was in a bar with a bunch of MBA students. He asked one of them: “What business do you think we are in?” The student duly replied: “You are in the business of selling hamburgers.” Ray retorted: “I am selling hamburgers but that is not my business. My real business is real estate.”
As a service provider organization, you must make sure that you understand your customer’s vision. Unless you are in sync with it, you will start working toward, for example, selling hamburgers rather than the core business objectives.
The IT strategy must be based on the business vision, mission, goals, and objectives. This is the only way the service provider can understand and create value (through improvements) to the customer organization.
The first step of continual improvement primarily considers the vision/goals of the organization from the perspective of the business unit where the improvement is set to take place. For example, an oil and gas business unit will have its own vision. Any improvements planned under this unit will adhere to its vision rather than a generic one, because every business unit’s goals and objectives are very specific (apart from increasing revenues and making profits). Second, the improvement itself will set out with its own objectives. Both the visions and objectives are considered in step 1.
Understand the high-level context and objectives to be met
Proposed improvement is well defined and agreed by all involved stakeholders.
Define all the roles that are involved in the improvement engagement and their role expectations
Define the understanding of value that is generated through the proposed improvement
Where Are We Now?
Unless the present situation is known, it is impossible to measure the level of improvements applied at the end of the cycle. The key to success in meeting the end goal is to know the starting point. Think of it as a journey that you are undertaking. If my end goal is to reach central London, it is important to understand where I am right now. Only by knowing your current location will you be able to reach your destination.
To understand the current position, the starting point, the best tool to employ is an assessment. It needs to be performed to gather the current establishment, setup, and performances. Perform a dipstick check to obtain a snapshot view, which will be used as a baseline for future comparison.
The assessment must be based on all aspects of a service, such as culture, people, technology, processes, and so forth. Only when all aspects of a service are obtained will it be possible to perform an unbiased assessment of the current baseline, not based on conjecture.
We carry out assessments with the aid of objective measurements, meaning we measure parameters that can be measured and that provide a basis for future comparison. Measurements are not done based on subjective parameters like feel-good factors. The measurements undertaken act as a baseline. Although, I must admit, finding a baseline and measuring it is easier said than done. In reality, identifying parameters for future comparison is an arduous task that requires foresight into the improvements that are being put in.
A baseline serves as a starting point and as a comparison value for the progress made through improvements.
Suppose you missed this step; you can still carry on with your improvement exercises, but you will not be able to measure improvements that you have undertaken. Take, for example, you want to improve the performance of a website. If you have not collected data before moving your website to a faster server, how do you know the extent or if the performance has improved at all? Maybe you could do it based on perception, but it’s not objective and not as accurate.
Where Do We Want to Be
At this stage, we know what the organization is seeking, and we have figured out where we are standing. Now the challenge is to set a goal for the improvement exercise to take us from point A (where are we now) to point B (where do we want to be). But remember that in this step we are not concerned about how we are going to get there but merely identifying and firming up on the endpoint we intend to reach.
You might think that step 1 (what is the vision) and this step are one and the same. Not really. Step 1 is aspirational. Vision is set at a high level and is fairly ambiguous in nature—like being the number 1 burrito joint in the UK. How do you measure being number 1? Is it based on profits, revenue, or the number of burritos you sell? In what length of time would you aspire to be number 1? There are several other questions that can come out of a vision. However, with step 3 (where do we want to be) we define the goal in specific terms, with no ambiguity and with precise targets. For example, I want to be the number 1 burrito joint based on the number of burritos outlets across the United Kingdom in the next 2 years.
One way of finding the destination is to perform a gap analysis between steps 1 and 2. Based on the vision, which gives a general direction and the current position, the enormity of the gap is known. Based on that, the goal may be drawn not to reach the vision straightaway but in multiple iterations. For example, I may be starting out a burrito restaurant, and my vision is still being number 1 in 2 years. But I would rather walk before I run, so I set an intermediate goal of reaching the top 5 in a year’s time.
In this step, the critical success factors (CSFs) and key performance indicators (KPIs) are also set. The set goals, CSFs, and KPIs must follow the SMART principle, which stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timebound.
Any improvement action that is identified must come armed with the end goal. It must not be perpetual like “improve the turnaround time for incident resolution.” Fine, this is a good initiative, but how does the team know that they have achieved the improvement objective. A better goal would be improving turnaround time by 15 percent faster than the current turnaround time. So in other words, this is a step that cannot be missed; if missed, the improvement action will never succeed because nobody would be in a position to declare the improvement action as having achieved its goals.
Critical Success Factors
CSFs are something that must happen for the activity to succeed. For example, “safeguard ATM machines” is a CSF in the banking industry, more specifically in the money disbursal services that the bank offers its customers. So, for the money disbursal to happen successfully, it is critical that the ATM machines are safeguarded from thieves, skimmers, and hackers. It is a common occurrence in countries such as India, where ATM machines are wheeled away in the middle of the night. In African and American countries there have been countless cases of ATMs being rigged to capture the debit card information. To counteract this, the CSF mentioned in this example sets the direction.
Key Performance Indicators
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the key components used to measure success. Simply put, they define the measure and the trends that make or break the output of a process or a project. As the name states, they are performance indicators, and they indicate whether the performance is on the expected lines or going downhill. In the IT service management industry, we use KPIs to measure the outcome of an IT service or a process.
Defining a KPI is an art driven by the maturity of an individual or the organization. It is of prime importance to identify individuals who can make a particular activity a stunning success or a lame duck. Identifying KPIs is not as easy as differentiating white from black, but rather it’s like picking out iron filings from a heap of sand. You need to use a magnetic wand, which in this case is the diligence of a mature professional.
How Do We Get There?
When I get to step 4, I know where I am and where I want to be. The overall vision too is available for guidance. The how do we get there step focuses on the process of getting from point A to point B. Reaching point B can be done in a number of ways, so this step is responsible for identifying the best possible option under the given circumstances.
For example, a startup company with no product portfolio wishes to develop a video camera application. Based on their current position, they need to start from scratch and get to a fully working competitive application. Their vision gives them guidance on how the design should be done. The vision reads: “by all means, we use open source applications to build customized solutions.” So, how the application will be developed has the basic boundaries drawn and objectives clearly set forth. In this step, the design of the aforesaid activity takes place.
If you fail to carry out this step, you will fail to meet your objective. In other words, the improvement activity fails to realize its intention.
Take Action
At this stage, step 5, the designs are available for the development to happen. The development can happen in any framework, be it waterfall or any of the Agile flavors. What matters to step 5 is that the improvement delivery takes shape based on the design coming in from step 4. As we are familiar in Agile, the requirements change all the time, and we need to swing from one post to the next in a quick manner. Similarly, improvement development too may have to change directions and pivot as needed, to realize the needs of the business and the organization.
Typical project management aspects of managing risks, measuring progress, stakeholder management, and other activities come into play. This is a critical step in the improvement journey.
Did We Get There?
While the busy bodies are focused on completing the work on hand in step 5, it is possible to lose sight of the target and become internally focused. That is when the iterative nature of Agile comes into good use by keeping a tight tab and verifying the end product against the requirements. Step 6, did we get there, is an activity that verifies if the improvement that has been delivered is fit for use and fit for purpose.
One cannot afford to miss this step, as the step keeps the improvement delivery project on track, focused on customer’s requirements and acting as a guide throughout the journey.
This step-in principle declares an improvement either a success or a failure.
How Do We Keep the Momentum Going?
An improvement is like a train. It does not stop at one; there are several trains that come and go to a station. Likewise, improvements too cannot be done in isolation. There are always improvements to be done. There is no such thing as a perfect product or a perfect service. To keep the improvements going one after another, like trains arriving at a station, is a challenging task.
The process of collecting improvement ideas must keep kindling new fires in the eyes of the users and other stakeholders. The teams involved in the improvement activities must be inspired, focused, and motivated enough to define new improvements and make them possible. All this is possible only if the organization plays its cards right through able leadership, organizational change management, and knowledge management practices.
The worst that could happen is for the improvements to reverse and the service to go from average to bad. Well, it is quite possible that a service in status quo without improvements can go stale while it sits stagnant.
The other side of the coin is that carrying out improvements may not always be successful. There will be failures along the way. How does the leadership treat failure, how does the team handle it, and what will be the market implications? Various organizational practices must come together to address situations, especially when they go into a reverse gear. It is said that we learn more from our failures than our successes. So, able knowledge management practices must be in place to capture the learnings coming out of failures and to use this as ammunition to come out on the other side as a roaring success.
This is a step that should not be missed. If missed, then the future of the product or the service will be in doubt, as improvements alone can keep them alive.
Continual Improvement Practice
Continual improvement’s second role in ITIL 4 is that of a practice. It comes under general management practices.
Continual improvement practice is an important practice from an examination perspective. You are expected to understand the practice in depth (and not just the concepts).
ITIL Definition of Continual Improvement Practice
The purpose of the continual improvement practice is to align the organization’s practices and services with changing business needs through the ongoing improvement of products, services, and practices, or any element involved in the management of products and services.
The practice does not just exist to identify and deliver improvements. Identifying improvements is not an activity that can happen in a conference room with a room of stakeholders. The spark needs to be ignited in people who are part of the organization, and for the people to come up with improvement opportunities, am appropriate culture needs to be inculcated. The continual improvement practice deals with the entire spectrum of people, process, and technology in coming up with improvements for products and services.
Key Activities of the Continual Improvement Practice
- 1.
Building a culture of keeping an eye out for identifying improvement opportunities. You cannot just have a continual improvement team (like some companies do) who do nothing but identify improvements. Coming up with improvements is not done in a vacuum, and it requires the staff to express freely and experiment without fearing repercussions. In short, everybody in an organization must work toward continual improvement. The top leadership in organizations must promote such a culture, which is coincidentally the backbone of DevOps culture as well.
- 2.
Various ideas and suggestions are shared and discussed. This generally happens successfully at an informal level. To formalize it, there must be identified ways in which the people who have a spark get to register it before it escapes their brain cells. I used to work for Atos (formerly Atos Origin), and they had built a portal called FISH (fresh ideas start here) to capture and manage ideas. Every idea that was registered was read, promoted, and voted by employees of the organization. After securing a number of votes, the idea was reviewed and prioritized by a high-level committee and implemented if it met certain guidelines. The activity that every organization must look toward is a process for registering continual improvement ideas, and duly assessing and prioritizing them.
- 3.
Identifying ideas and assessing them do not cost money. Prioritization is done because the money in the bank is usually limited and a certain budget is often set aside for improvements. Between thousands of improvement ideas, a select few should be chosen and a budget secured for their implementation. Next up, getting the time of resources who can realize the identified improvement.
- 4.
After getting the money for improvement projects, a plan needs to be developed and the project delivered. How a project gets delivered depends on several factors, but the key activity is that the implementation gets done.
- 5.
What determines if an implementation was indeed successful? Key performance indicators step in. They provide measurements and evaluation processes to understand if the parameters that were supposed to be addressed with the improvement have bettered or not, and if the end user is realizing more value than before. It’s generally not straightforward, but if it is thought through well enough before the implementation, then monitoring, measuring, and evaluating should be easy enough.
- 6.
The biggest and most challenging activity is to play the coordinator’s role. Any improvement requires multiple parts of an organization coming together. Securing their time and parleying between varying ideas and getting things done is tough and requires special skillsets.
Continual Improvement Tools
Achieving constant improvements is arduous. Think of your own house, wherein you are expected to keep making improvements every day. Forget about living there peacefully; the task is to make some aspect of your house better. For better or worse, doing things is the easier part. Coming up with ideas on day 1 is easy, day 10 is OK, but day 100 will be a tough nut to crack. I talked earlier about how the entire organization must become a stakeholder in identifying improvements. Likewise, in the example of coming up with home improvement ideas, your family (including the extended ones along with friends and neighbors) must be encouraged to participate. However, your house will survive without improvements for several years. But a product or a service that needs to sell—that has a market—cannot. Consumers get bored. They want better. They are hungry for change. You need to feed them new characteristics and features to keep them happy. That is exactly what the phone manufacturers and software publishers do on a periodic basis. In some cases you might find the upgraded phone features seem superficial, or worse, inferior to the previous version. Remember that all this, the ideas and the improvement opportunities that are getting presented, is coming from the power of the ranks.
To be at the top, you cannot rely on magic. You need practical tools that you can use in various situations, something that aids in the outcome of the continual improvement process. In this section, we look at several tools that help in the process of identifying and delivering improvements.
Continual Improvement Register
Improvement ideas are generated during discussions, while working over a task individually or with a team or even during service reviews. Of paramount importance when ideas are generated is to record them in a reliable repository. We do not have to go so far as to say that it needs to be a single source of truth, but there must be a commonly accessible repository where idea generators can log it seamlessly.
This is perhaps the most critical tool; in ITIL it is referred to as the continual improvement register (CIR). The objective of this register is flexible; it needs to be a repository where ideas are logged, reviewed, prioritized, and delivered/rejected based on the quality of the idea and the circumstances.
An organization can have any number of CIRs: say, for example, a CIR for infrastructure related improvements, a CIR for the SAP team, and so on. As long as the CIR exists, and the staff and other stakeholders know about it (and have access too), it serves the purpose. Care should be taken though to compare the logged ideas to ensure that improvement ideas do not get delivered in isolation, which leads to reinventing the wheel.
In a typical organization, a CIR plays a similar role to that of a product backlog. The user stories in a product backlog are reviewed and prioritized regularly. Only the highest ranking priority items are identified for development and taken into the development cycle. Likewise, improvements go through the cycle of prioritization and reprioritization. An improvement idea remains actively in the CIR until the improvement is delivered .
Improvement Reviews
Once the improvements are logged, they need to be regularly reviewed to ensure that the ones that deliver most value are prioritized and realized at the earliest possible cycle.
An organization can choose any number of ways to review an improvement; it could be as simple as reviewing the business justification and making a decision based on gut feeling. Or it could be detailed and granular by attempting a strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat (SWOT) analysis. A balanced scorecard view also delivers a granular assessment on the improvement affecting various areas of the business. It is not uncommon to hand over the improvements to third parties for an unbiased assessment as well.
Development Methodology
The flavor of the decade is Agile, but that does not necessarily mean that all improvements get delivered in an Agile fashion. Horses for courses is the norm! Depending on the improvement that is being put through the grinder, an apt development methodology needs to be identified. Take, for example, delivering an infrastructure based on a new architecture. Doing this in Agile may take more effort and does not generate value, as the architecture is highly unlikely to change during development. In such cases, it is better to opt for a waterfall methodology.
The importance of this tool is to choose the right methodology for the improvement that is laid on the table. This essentially translates to the development team jumping back and forth between methodologies and adjusting their mindsets accordingly.
Deployment Approach
The final tool in the continual improvement armory is to decide on how the improvements are handed out to the users and other consumers of the service/product.
Experience tells us, similar to the development methodology, that deployments can be done either in a big bang approach or in a phase-wise manner. Not only this, there are several deployment approaches that can be employed, such as a canary release, blue/green, or A/B testing.
What is necessary is, to find the right approach for the right scenario. If you are dealing with a simple improvement, deploying it in a big bang approach makes sense because the impact if things going south is perhaps negligible. But if you are onboarding new online banking software, a cautious canary release would serve well.
Engagement with Service Value Chain
Knowledge Check
- 10-1.Which of the following steps are not present in the seven-step model?
- A.
Take action
- B.
Where are we now?
- C.
What should be done?
- D.
Where do we want to be?
- A.
- 10-2.What is the importance of finding out where the organization is currently before embarking on identifying improvements?
- A.
A baseline serves as a starting point and as a comparison value for the progress made through improvements.
- B.
Understanding where we are currently helps us understand the mistakes that were made earlier.
- C.
It provides a balance in terms of the improvements that are taken before and after an improvement is delivered.
- D.
The ground realities provide an excellent value to assess the relevance of improvement ideas.
- A.
- 10-3.How does culture play a role in identifying improvements?
- A.
The culture of an organization enables collaboration and coordination that is decisive in coming up with improvement ideas.
- B.
Identifying improvements must come from all quarters. This is not possible if the organization does not give its staff the freedom to express and experiment.
- C.
A culture needs to be inculcated in an organization through the formation of a continual improvement team that is responsible for delivery of improvement ideas.
- D.
Culture provides the basis for services and products to improve and create value for customers.
- A.
- 10-4.Which is the ideal methodology for developing improvements?
- A.
Agile methodology provides the flexibility and the expressive freedom for improvements to be delivered as and when new improvement requirements are identified and ratified.
- B.
The waterfall methodology is employed for improvement, as the nature of improvements does not change the inherent requirements.
- C.
A hybrid model involving both Agile and waterfall methodology is to be employed, to ensure that the changing requirements are considered and the delivery timelines are adhered to.
- D.
A methodology for the delivery of improvement must be identified based on the improvement that needs to be developed.
- A.
- 10-5.What is the basis for maintaining a continual improvement register (CIR)?
- A.
It provides a comparison point for measuring the quality of improvements identified by the staff in an organization.
- B.
CIR is the repository for managing the artifacts pertaining to improvement ideas, related codes, and other documentation.
- C.
It is a repository that manages improvement ideas throughout its life cycle.
- D.
CIR is the product backlog for improvements. The only difference is that the identified improvements are stored in the CIR and the ideas are moved into the product backlog after reviews.
- A.