The Critical Commitment to Continuous Improvement
By Simona Rollinson, Chief Operating Officer, ISACA
We live in times when people expect immediate gratification. The digital age has created the standard of instant downloads, same-day shipping for nearly any item you can imagine, and skippable ads to get right to your next binge-watching session. This kind of surreal impatience is becoming common and expected; however, I am hopeful for the future. I recently heard my 17-year-old daughter saying her favorite quote was that all learning starts at the edge of one’s comfort zone, and I couldn’t agree more.
There is no growth without stepping out of one’s comfort zone. Not only that, but one must commit themselves to improvement. You cannot expect to become better without understanding areas for improvement and working toward established goals. The same applies to organizations as a whole—with individuals working toward bettering their work, the enterprise will experience the benefits.
Growing Through Discomfort
Discomfort is rarely celebrated. Yet a young person like my daughter has internalized the importance of learning, improving and reskilling with effort. Despite being surrounded by immediacy, the art of training, rehearsing and practice cannot be forgotten. It should be encouraged.
I am grateful I had early experiences that created this appetite for learning, self-improvement and change. As someone who spent their early career as an application developer, I have learned a lot from the early days of XP Programming. Later on, I established a continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD) pipeline morphed into DevOps. Once I ventured into large code repositories, the old ways of testing became a non-starter. None of this was easy as I was learning on the job, not in a university auditorium.
In actuality, continuous improvement is not that hard, but it is a matter of mindset—whether you follow a holistic framework like CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration), with depth of practices and insights across thousands of companies and industries or a simple gap analysis or a mapping of current to future state, there are several ways organizations can commit to this mindset. On an organizational level—tried and true frameworks like CMMI and goal standards like SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound); OKR (objectives/key results); and FAST (frequent discussions, ambitious scope, specific milestones and transparency) goals are a safe bet to make significant progress.
Organizational Commitment
Consistent innovation is essential for the long-term growth, health and success of an organization. Processes, tools, products, services and employee knowledge and skills must be continually refined in small and/or large ways. Every small improvement paves the way for larger enhancements and a culture of transformation in the long run. Employee engagement is key in creating the desire to make progress and encourages exploration of improvement ideas, customer relationships and adapting to the ever-changing tech landscape. I am a big proponent of something called “boundary spanning.” I’m not sure where I heard the term and in what context many years ago, but for me, any goal that enhances the user/customer/employee experience or makes our interactions a little less frictionless is an ingredient for success in the long run.
Two of the “oldies but goodies” approaches are what the Japanese called Gemba Walks, which aim to identify where work occurs by observing employees, inquiring about their tasks and finding gains in productivity. At ISACA, we create ongoing opportunities to observe our customer experience colleagues at their place of work during an interaction. In addition, we have perfected the art of surveys and customer input via a dedicated team that understands how to structure questions to gather meaningful insights. Analyzing this feedback and implementing necessary changes allows organizations to enhance their products, services and customer experience, resulting in higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.
In this era of digital transformation, hyper-automation and an appetite for ever-increasing speed, there are constantly both disruptions and advancements in organizational capability and productivity. So, the pressure to tackle multiple priorities is a common complaint I hear. My response has not changed in the last 20 years—the old adage that if everything is a priority, nothing is a priority applies to continuous improvement as well. Success only comes when there is a focus on key goals and key changes. Continuous improvement is just that—continuous. Ongoing efforts to develop organizational capability and performance must remain consistent in order to achieve desired outcomes. Keeping in mind that data is the new currency, the lifeblood of modern business and living, and everything is being analyzed to the Nth degree, anchoring ourselves into a consistent approach to iterative improvement and hyper selectiveness on what matters will allow us to become comfortable with discomfort.