The Seven-Step Improvement Process

In this section, you will learn about the seven-step improvement process, a crucial part of the success of continual service improvement, as shown in Figure 13.3.

FIGURE 13.3 The seven-step improvement process

Based on Cabinet Office ITIL® material. Reproduced under license from the Cabinet Office.

The purpose of the seven-step improvement process is to define and manage the steps needed to successfully implement improvements. This includes identifying and defining the measures and metrics; the actions required for gathering, processing, and analyzing data; how the results will be presented; and finally the management of the implementation of the improvement.

The objectives are to do the following:

• Identify improvement opportunities for services, processes, tools, and so on.
• Deliver cost reductions in providing services, while maintaining the levels of service and outcomes the business requires. It will be important to ensure that any cost reduction does not have a negative impact on the quality of service.
• Identify what needs to be measured, analyzed, and reported to establish improvement opportunities.
• Continually align and realign IT service provision with the required business outcomes, and monitor the service to ensure that your service achievements meet the current business requirements.
• Understand what to measure and why it is being measured; define the success outcome.

One of the important considerations for improvement is that it should be cost effective. If the cost of implementing the improvement is not significantly outweighed by the benefit that will be achieved, it must be carefully assessed to ensure that it is actually worth the financial outlay. This means that each improvement opportunity will require justification; in the case of a small-scale improvement, this will be a simple report, but in the instance of a more significant activity, a full business case will be needed.

The seven-step improvement process is not designed to be utilized in isolation and will be fully effective only if it is applied across all aspects of IT service provision, including technology, services, processes, organization, and partners.

The scope should include an analysis of the performance and capabilities of all of these aspects, including an assessment of the maturity of the processes enabling each service. It will also include making the best use of the technology available and exploiting the benefits of any new technology, where it is cost justifiable and provides a measurable business benefit. Also within the scope are the organizational structures and capabilities of personnel, ensuring that the roles and responsibilities are appropriately allocated with the necessary skills.

Each step of the improvement process is designed to assist in the activity of CSI. The process makes it reasonably simple to see what takes place; the challenge is to realize this in the live environment. The seven-step process spans the entire service lifecycle and is the driving force behind continual service improvement.

Step 1: Identify the Strategy for Improvement

Let’s consider the steps in turn, beginning with step 1. In this step, you identify the strategy for improvement. The questions you ask here are concerned with establishing the overall vision for the business. What are you attempting to achieve for the business? How can you support the overall business vision, objectives, and plans? What are the future plans for the business—short, medium, and long term? How do your IT services support these goals? This analysis will enable you see where the business can best be aided by your efforts.

It will be necessary to review this step on a regular basis to ensure that you are continuing to align with the overall business objective. Meeting the requirements of the organization should be done according the best possible use of technology, delivering a cost-effective solution that enables the business processes at an appropriate level of cost and complexity.

Any initiative that is considered must be logged in the CSI register. If, after review of the business case or justification (through the change management process), it is rejected, the information can be archived so that you have a complete record of initiatives that have not been successful for later comparison.

Triggers and inputs for the improvement process include the following:

• Business plans and strategy
• Service review meetings
• Vision and mission statements
• Corporate objectives
• Legislative requirements
• Governance controls
• Customer satisfaction surveys
• CSI register

Step 2: Define What You Will Measure

This step is directly related to the goals that have been defined for measuring the services and service management processes to support the measurement and CSI activities.

In this step, it is necessary to define what you should measure, define and agree on what can actually be measured, and then carry out a gap analysis to finalize the actual improvement measurement plan.

To be effective, this step should focus on a few vital, meaningful measures that support qualitative and quantitative assessment of success. These should be usable and provide value to the improvement. IT is usually very capable of producing measures, but often the measures may deliver little value; too many measures will provide a confusing picture and will require rationalization.

Defining exactly what will be measured and the value that it will bring is an important early step. You need to ensure that you have the capability to capture the data and use the measurement. It should also be verified against the needs of the customer; it is not up to the IT department to decide what is of value.

The stages of the service lifecycle that support this step in the CSI process are service strategy and service design; here you should have established the requirements for measurement. It is complementary to the continual service management improvement approach, identifying how you will ascertain both “where you are now” and “where you want to be.” By using the gap analysis performed as part of this step, you can identify the requirements of the stage “how you get there” in the improvement approach.

Inputs to this step include the following:

• SLRs and targets
• Service review meeting
• Service portfolio and the service catalog
• Budget cycle
• Measurement results and reports (for example, balanced scorecard)
• Customer satisfaction surveys
• Benchmark data
• Baseline data
• Risk assessments and risk mitigation plans

Step 3: Gather the Data

Gathering the data requires having monitoring in place. It is important to remember that for CSI data capture you are less concerned with real-time monitoring and more interested in the exceptions, resolutions, and trends associated with the data produced. There are a number of ways in which you can carry out monitoring of your services, processes, and technology.

For your technology monitoring, you can employ tools to automate the activity, and these will be part of the component- and application-based metrics that measure performance and availability.

Process measurement is a part of every service management process, and the data captured will assist in identifying improvement opportunities. The tasks associated with this step are as follows:

You need to ensure that as part of this step you define the following:

• Who is responsible for monitoring and gathering the data?
• How will the data be gathered?
• When and how often is the data gathered?
• What is the criteria to evaluate the integrity of the data?

It will be necessary to look at the data collected and verify it makes sense in the context of the overall service provision. It is this step that enables you to answer the question “Did we get there?” from the continual service improvement approach.

Inputs to this step of the process include the following:

• New business requirements
• Existing SLAs
• Existing tools and monitoring capability
• Plans from service management processes (for example, availability and capacity)
• Trend analysis reports
• CSI register
• Gap analysis reports (what you should/can measure)
• Customer satisfaction survey

Step 4: Process the Data

This step allows you to convert the data into the required format for the audience. It follows the trail (Figure 13.4) from metric to KPI to CSF, right the way back to the vision, if desired.

FIGURE 13.4 From vision to measurements

Based on Cabinet Office ITIl. Reproduced with license from the Cabinet Office.

During this activity, it is common to use report-generating technology to assist with the transfer of data into information so that it can be analyzed. Processing the data into information allows more successful analytical techniques and will encourage the use of an overall perspective on the measurement, by associating data groups to an overall service.

When processing data, it is important to consider the following:

• The frequency of processing the data. This may be driven by the analysis requirements and the ability to capture trends.
• The format required for the output, which will also be affected by how the analysis is carried out and how the information will be used.
• The tools and systems that are used for data processing.
• The evaluation techniques you will use to verify the accuracy of the data.

Nearly all of the data captured for CSI is likely to be collected by automation, but there will be some elements that require manual capture. When processing the data, it is important to remember that data collected from a manual input may need greater effort in verification. Stressing the importance of accuracy in data entry to support teams and service management staff will help with the ability to process the data.

Inputs to processing data include the following:

• Data collected through monitoring
• Reporting requirements
• SLAs/OLAs
• Service catalog
• List of metrics, KPI, CSF, objectives, and goals
• Report frequency/template

Step 5: Analyze the Information and Data

Analyzing the information and data you have produced so far from the process is crucial to enabling its proper use. Without analysis and understanding the context of the information, you are unable to make informed decisions. It is necessary to establish what the information actually means to the organization. For example, you may have information that demonstrates a downward trend in the volume of service desk calls. But is this a good thing or a bad? It may be that the volume of calls have reduced because of better service quality and availability, or it could be that the service desk is being perceived as ineffective, and users are bypassing the service desk and attempting to seek support elsewhere.

Analyzing the data requires a greater level of skill than capturing or processing the data. It is necessary to understand the context of the information and compare this to the agreed-upon targets identified in the service lifecycle.

It is important to ensure that the analysis answers questions such as the following:

• Are operations running to plan? This could be a project plan or service management plans for availability, capacity, or continuity.
• Are the targets agreed on in SLAs being met?
• Does the analysis show any structural problems?
• Are improvements required?
• Are there any identifiable trends? Positive or negative?
• Is there an identifiable cause for the trends?

Reviewing the trends over a period of time is important for understanding the context and any potential improvement opportunities.

The analysis should be shared with the IT managers and discussed in order to formulate plans for improvement opportunities. This output can then be part of the presentation, which is the next step in the improvement process.

Inputs include the following:

• Results of the monitored data
• Existing KPIs and targets
• Information and perceptions from customer satisfaction surveys

Step 6: Present and Use the Information

In this step, you present the answer to the question “Did we get there?” from the continual service improvement approach. You present the knowledge, represented in the reports, monitors, action plans, reviews, evaluations, and opportunities, to the target audience.

Understanding the audience for the presentation is important so that you deliver the correct format. This needs to be understandable at the right level, provide value, note exceptions to services, identify benefits, and allow the recipient to make an informed decision. This could be at any stage of the service lifecycle—strategic, tactical, or operational.

The created reports should provide emphasis and highlight areas for action to be taken to implement improvements. It is too easy for IT departments to provide too much information to their target audience, without sufficient analysis. CSI should be providing useful and informative reports so that beneficial improvement initiatives can be introduced.

There are four common audience types:

It is extremely important that you ensure the knowledge is presented in a meaningful way to the audience. For example, using percentage figures for availability may not be useful for the customer, because it is hard to relate a percentage to an actual outage event and understand the business impact.

Inputs to this step of the process include the following:

• Collated information
• Format details—report templates, and so on
• Stakeholder contact information

Step 7: Implement Improvement

In this step, you use the knowledge presented in the previous step and combine it with previous experience to make an informed decision about an improvement initiative.

This stage may include a number of actions, from implementing improvement activities to submitting a business case to justify an improvement. It will involve integration with other service management processes and other lifecycle stages and will include checking whether the improvement achieved its objective.

The decision-making process, applying wisdom to the knowledge provided, should be communicated across the organization, enabling the eventual improvement to be successfully implemented and understood by all stakeholders and practitioners.

After a decision to improve a service and/or service management process is made, then the service lifecycle continues. CSI activities take place throughout the service lifecycle. A new baseline can be established, and the cycle will begin again.

Inputs to this step include the following:

• Knowledge gained from presenting and using the information
• Agreed-upon implementation plans
• CSI register

The seven steps appear to be a circular set of activities, but in fact the seven-step improvement process is actually part of a knowledge spiral. In Figure 13.5 you can see the connection from the presentation of data from operational improvements into the capture of data for tactical improvements, which in turn will feed its presentation of data into strategic improvement activity.

FIGURE 13.5 Knowledge spiral, a gathering activity

Based on Cabinet Office ITIL® material. Reproduced under license from the Cabinet Office.

DIKW and the Seven-Step Improvement Process

The definition of Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom (DIKW) is covered under the process of knowledge management in Chapter 9. You can see the association with DIKW throughout each of the seven steps of the improvement process.

• Data
  2. Define what you will measure.

  3. Gather the data.
• Information
  4. Process the data.
• Knowledge
  5. Analyze the information and data.

  6. Present and use the information.
• Wisdom
  7. Implement improvement.

  1. Identify strategy for improvement.

Data is quantitative, defined as numbers, characters, images, or other outputs. It is a collection of facts, whereas information is the result of processing and organizing raw data. Knowledge can be defined as information, combined with experience, context, and interpretation. Wisdom is defined as the ability to make correct judgments and decisions.

The association between the processes of knowledge management and the seven-step improvement process ensures that the activities are captured as part of the overall management of knowledge in the service knowledge management system.

PDCA and the Seven-Step Improvement Process

In the diagram of the seven-step improvement process, you can see the integration with the Deming cycle. The steps work together:

• Plan
  1. Identify the strategy for improvement.

  2. Define what you will measure.
• Do
  3. Gather the data.

  4. Process the data.
• Check
  5. Analyze the information and data.

  6. Present and use the information.
• Act
  7. Implement improvement.

We covered the Deming cycle (PDCA) cycle earlier in this chapter. This quality improvement approach is complementary to the continual service improvement process.