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Chapter 8 ■ Continual Service Improvement
8.2.1.1 Plan
Any activity you need to undertake requires some planning. The first step in the cycle
is to prepare a plan that will consider all the possible combinations of outcomes, risks,
necessary resource requirements, among others.
The plan gets initiated based on various triggers that you have set forth for triggering
the CSI cycle. For example, you could get feedback from a customer, the service provider
organization could get penalized for breaching the SLA, or the service design may not
fully meet all the customer’s requirements.
Deming’s cycle recommends that the improvements be made small and repetitively.
So it is important that planning be based on improvements that are quick to realize and
easy to adapt if necessary. Agile project management methodology works the best with
the PDCA cycle.
A typical plan will have the deliverables that will be delivered by the end of the
improvement project. The plan would also incorporate the timeline, cost, and scope the
improvement covers. It’s like any other project management plan, nothing fancy, nor is it
any different.
Let’s say you have identified a resolver group that is struggling to meet their target
SLAs. To initiate a PDCA cycle for improving the SLA, you have analyzed and audited
the incident tickets and, based on your analysis, you will come up with a plan. The plans
could be as follows:
1. Develop a process for monitoring the queue
2. Provide technical trainings to the team members
3. Create hierarchical structure with team leads to share
accountability
8.2.1.2 Do
The plans have to be executed during the Do phase of the PDCA cycle. This phase
generally stretches for the longest duration as the planned activities are carried out in this
step. Care must be taken to ensure that the project management’s triple constraints (time,
cost, and scope) are controlled to ensure success of the improvements being initiated.
By adopting the Agile project management methodology, the Do or the execution
phase becomes less sluggish and easier to control and deliver.
In the example stated above, you will start developing a process to monitor their
work queue, start providing technical training, and, with the help of the human resources
department, create some team structure.
8.2.1.3 Check
The PDCA cycle mandates checking or vetting the applied improvement against its set
objectives. For example, if you have stated initiatives to improve the SLA of a particular
resolver group, the Check phase of the PDCA cycle checks, after a certain measurable
period of time, whether the improvement has had any effect and whether the SLAs have
improved since the last count.
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