Continual Improvement Strategies Can Help Businesses Enhance Productivity and Competitive Edge in Current Economic Climate, Says Info-Tech Research Group

The firm recommends fostering a culture of cross-organizational continual improvement to help create a collaborative and innovative work environment that benefits both employees and the business.

TORONTO, April 26, 2023 /PRNewswire/ - With the ongoing shifts to the economic climate, many companies are reconsidering their priorities and staffing strategies. As a result, optimizing productivity has become an increasingly crucial exercise for businesses of every scale. To accomplish this daunting task, IT managers must make it a top priority while navigating various obstacles, including increasing stakeholder expectations. Achieving the goal of continuous improvement requires strong leadership, commitment, and robust processes to sustain improvements. Moreover, continual improvement necessitates a cultural shift within the organization, making securing stakeholder buy-in even more challenging. To help businesses overcome these challenges in 2023 and improve their various IT services, global IT research and advisory firm Info-Tech Research Group has released a new advisory deck titled Build a Continual Improvement Program.

According to the firm's latest research-backed advisory deck, several obstacles can hinder the development of a continual improvement program, including the constant effort required by IT managers to maintain and enhance service quality. Failure to overcome this significant challenge can lead to a decline in performance over time. Additionally, a backlog of improvement initiatives can further worsen the situation, making it more challenging for managers to succeed. To address these issues, managers must involve the right people in the process and establish a dedicated team responsible for monitoring, measuring, prioritizing, implementing, and testing improvements.

"IT managers often learn how to standardize IT services. Where they usually fail is in keeping these improvements sustainable," says Mahmoud Ramin, senior research analyst at Info-Tech Research Group. "Without a continual improvement plan, managers may find themselves lost and unsure of next steps, leading to a misalignment between ongoing, increasingly high stakeholder expectations and ability to fulfill these requirements."

Info-Tech's research emphasizes the importance of aligning ongoing product and service improvements with effective management practices. Continual improvement plays a vital role in enabling service providers to adapt to dynamic and ever-changing environments. The firm recommends that organizations adopt a proactive approach to service management and regularly evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of people, processes, and technology in order to identify areas that require improvement.

To foster a culture of continual improvement within an organization, Info-Tech suggests the following six-step process. This process will enable the implementation of an iterative continual improvement model, where each subsequent step uses the output of the previous step as its input:

• Determine the Goals: Ensuring alignment between IT and organizational goals is essential, as IT goals are high-level objectives that the IT organization needs to achieve to reach a target state.
  
  
• Define the Process Team: Confirm that ongoing improvement tasks are assigned to the existing resources, and assess whether it is necessary to bring in others to fulfill all tasks.
  
  
• Determine Improvement Initiatives: Instead of solely improving current procedures, concentrate on identifying gaps in practices.
  
  
• Prioritize Initiatives: Prioritization should be transparent and available to stakeholders.
  
  
• Execute Improvement: Establish a strategy for achieving the improvement goals by outlining methods for enhancing processes.
  
  
• Establish and Apply a Learning Culture to Other Practices: Reflect on lessons learned to drive change forward.

Info-Tech recommends that organizations adopt a cross-organizational continual improvement approach to enhance end-user satisfaction, positively impact brand reputation, and promote a culture of growth and development. This mindset enables organizations to identify improvement opportunities and implement effective strategies, ultimately strengthening their competitive edge.

To learn more, download the complete Build a Continual Improvement Program blueprint.

For more information about Info-Tech Research Group or to access the latest research, visit infotech.com and connect via LinkedIn and Twitter.

Info-Tech Research Group is one of the world's leading information technology research and advisory firms, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals. The company produces unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. For 25 years, Info-Tech has partnered closely with IT teams to provide them with everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

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SOURCE Info-Tech Research Group