Continual Service Improvement

During this phase, the CAI Quality Consultant works with the application support team to ensure that the team:

• Follows the approved policies and procedures
• Provides services as documented and agreed-to in the Statement of Work
• Meets the agreed service level goals
• Provides appropriate team performance and management reports that are generated from the Tracer® tool
• Identifies, tracks and resolves all team-related issues

The consultant meets with customers to ensure that services being provided are meeting their expectations.  The consultant and the team collaboratively examine the team’s work performance data and seek to identify and implement improvements which are documented in Improvement Plans.

The following four processes are used by the CAI Quality Consultant and the application support team during the Continual Service Improvement phase:

The ITIL 7-Step Improvement Process

The Quality Consultant determines how to improve the services being provided by the application support team.  This process consists of the following actions:

1. Answer the question “What else should be measured?”
2. Answer the question “What else can be measured?”
3. Gather work, performance, and resource data from the Tracer® tool
4. Process the data from the Tracer® tool into a format that the target audience can understand
5. Analyze the data for trends
6. Present the information to the appropriate audience
7. Implement actions in order to improve services

Service Measurement

The Quality Consultant and the application support team use this process to define what additional metrics, if any, should be collected and used during the improvement process.

Service Reporting

The Quality Consultant and the application support team review operational reports to ensure that the reports accurately reflect the services being provided and are meeting customer requirements.  These reports can be used to understand team activity, performance, resource, and schedule commitments.

Service Improvement

The Quality Consultant and the application support team maintain and improve the quality of the service by agreeing to, monitoring and reporting on IT service activities.  During this process the following actions are completed:

• A service improvement plan is created
• Improvement activities are assigned and scheduled
• The effectiveness of previously implemented improvements is evaluated