3.4. The Continual Improvement Model: Making Improvement Happen in Your Work

💡 First Principle: Structured, cyclical improvement is achieved by aligning with a vision, assessing the present, defining a future state, planning and executing the journey, and then verifying the outcome to sustain momentum.

Scenario: A team wants to reduce the number of failed changes. Their vision is to improve deployment stability. They assess where they are now by analyzing the past three months of change records (5% failure rate). They decide where they want to be (less than 1% failure rate). They plan how to get there by introducing mandatory peer reviews for all changes. They take action by implementing the new process. After a month, they check did we get there? by reviewing the new failure rate. Finally, they decide how to keep the momentum going by making peer reviews a permanent part of their process and looking for the next improvement.

The Continual Improvement Model is a 7-step guide for implementing improvements. It's a cyclical model that should be applied to services, practices, or any element within the SVS. As an IT professional, you can use this model to guide your own improvement efforts or contribute to larger organizational initiatives.

The model consists of the following steps: