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.
Get Started: Best practices for implementation
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
Let's look at some steps to get you started using the application's most fundamental functionality.
1. Assign roles and responsibility
Use Continual Improvement Management roles to specify what different users and user groups can see and do
Distribute responsibility for CSI throughout the organization
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.
2. Start small and capture improvement initiative from all levels
Proactively identify improvement opportunities from any application or employee
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).
Other ideas to populate a CIM 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.
3. 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.
4. Manage Improvements initiative 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.
5. Services Level Improvement - Where to start
6. Process Level Improvement - Where to start
7. People Level Improvement - Where to start
Part2: Getting the Greatest Value from CIM
Benefits achieved from continual improvement can be put into two categories:
1. Direct ROI items that can be measured using a KPI and can be converted to a dollar value easily. Examples include cost saving, time saving, revenue generation, and productivity increase.
2. Indirect ROI items that are harder to quantify in dollars, but equally important to long-term growth and success. Examples include improved safety, reduced risk, and improved compliance.
So, to calculate the real value of improvement you should focus on capturing both direct ROI + indirect ROI.
Steps to capture ROI
1. Set Measure what matter to you, "the most important Metrics."
In the Continual Improvement world, we talk a lot about “current state” and “future state,” in which you take your current state, set a goal future state, and generate improvements to achieve that goal. Generally, the goals revolve around the following three KPI buckets:
Impact: Cost Saving, Time Saving, Revenue Growth, etc. The CIM Dashboard provides prebuilt reports to capture the KPI based impact measurement. You can attach one or more KPIs to an improvement initiative, and then use the trend chart progress to show the quantifiable impact outcomes.
Engagement: User engagement summary, participation by business service or process.
The ability to track how many people are participating in the continual improvement effort is key to showing engagement and enthusiasm. With more engagement , you can collect more ideas and make more improvements at all levels in the organization.
Activity Level: Types and frequency of improvement, Total Number of Improvements, Submitted vs Completed Rate, Visibility in Relation to Status of Improvement. The Overview tab on the CIM Dashboard provides an easy way to see the metrics related to activity level.
2. Set SMART goals by attaching Improvement KPIs
The CIM plan–do–check–act (PDCA) process allow you to set measurable and specific goals. We recommend using a Performance Analytics based KPI as an automated measurement method. Once the KPI is attached, you can see the current state and value. Set your goal for the future state and by when you think you can meet your goals in the target review date (see screenshot below)
3. Provide visibility and transparency to everyone involved
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.
4. Align improvement initiative with business goals
Your improvement initiative should provide alignment with your business strategy. This is really important so that the executive team can see what improvements have been done in the last three or six months to meet the strategic goals.
ServiceNow CIM provides a structured process to associate your improvement initiative with business strategies. Once the association is done, you can see the available report on the CIM Dashboard.
5. See list of Improved KPIs and the different impact areas
All improvement KPIs that you attach to your initiative can be seen in one place on the CIM Dashboard. This provides an easy way to share the list of KPIs that have improved with their trend chart progress.
Calculate the direct ROI of improvement
Cost savings occur any time you cut out a wasteful step or remove duplication from a process. Improved processes make your employees’ time more valuable to your business.
For Example, in the Incident Management Process:
* Assume agent’s salary amounts to $20 per hour.
* Current state: Agent has the capacity to process 2 incidents per hour, costing the organization $10 per incident.
* After Process Improvement: Agents are now able to process 5 incidents per hour, with an average cost of $4.
* If your organization processes 100,000 incidents per year, the cost improvement was $50,000.
ROI = 600,000 / 50,000 *100
* ROI = 1200%
Calculate the indirect ROI:
*Improved quality: The improvement in service quality and convenience will make customers happier, attributing to higher customer retention.
*Improved safety: customer, staff, patient, and vendor safety (for example, fewer accidents = lower costs).
*Improved compliance: Maintaining regulatory compliance protects your brand’s reputation in the eyes of stakeholders and customers.
*Reduced Risk: Improved processes typically offer better security and risk mitigation.
*Increased levels of employee/customer engagement.
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.
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.
Summary:
In Summary, measuring, tracking, and reporting on continuous improvement is the single most important thing you can do to ensure that your organization keeps a competitive edge above the competition. Measure both the direct ROI and indirect ROI items to show the total outcome achieved.
Additional Resources
Here are additional Resources to learn more:
- Webinar: Continual Service Improvement using Benchmarks
- Frequently Asked Questions to get you started with Continual Improvement Management (CIM)
- Top 5 reason why CSI initiative fails
- How do fit organization drive service excellence
- Continual Improvement Management (CIM) Demo, use cases, best practice and capture business value
- ServiceNow Coaching module Demo
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.
