Weak Link in Continual Service Improvement

It’s difficult to make a case than any of the ITIL books are more important than any of the others. There are convincing arguments that can be made in support of any one of the five core books being the most important. While there are both things I like and things I don’t like about the current Continual Service Improvement (CSI) book, organizations that fail to properly attend to this aspect of service management are at a severe disadvantage.

This is the weakest link in CSI. Organizations often do not attend to CSI until it’s too late, or they treat it as an ad hoc activity that is performed randomly and haphazardly. While generally everyone says that things like quality and continual improvement are important, very few organizations truly embrace these concepts and build them into their overall service management program.

Properly tending to CSI requires a deep understanding of several specific techniques and topics, some of which are described by ITIL, some of which ITIL would refer to as complementary guidance. One of the simplest things that an organization can do to attend to CSI is the creation of a CSI Register.

A CSI Register, in its most basic form, is simply a way of tracking improvement opportunities. It could be a list of things that the organization has identified as potential improvement opportunities. In more advanced forms, a CSI Register could be a tool that allows the organization to compare improvement opportunities based on predicted ROI.

When I work with organizations on adoption of service management. One of the things that I will often recommend that they do at the very beginning is to create a CSI Register and begin adding improvement opportunities that have been identified to that register. The CSI Register helps an organization to not lose track of improvement opportunities that have been identified. It’s also important to establish clear ownership and responsibility for the CSI Register, having a list of improvement opportunities is good, but it’s not very useful if no one clearly owns it or the organization does nothing with the improvements listed.

I’m going to focus many of my upcoming posts on aspects of CSI.

Related Courses:
ITIL Foundation
ITIL Service Lifecycle: Continual Service Improvement