The Improvement Backlog Graveyard
A shared-services IT team has a continual improvement register with 40 ideas. Over six months the team has completed 22 of them, mostly low-effort fixes such as rewriting knowledge articles and adding dashboard filters. The register shows no baseline, no expected benefit, and no owner beyond “IT.” The business has seen no measurable change in the two outcomes it cares about: first-contact resolution and average handling time. The executive sponsor now demands a return on the improvement effort and threatens to cut the programme.
1. Why has completing 22 improvements produced no measurable business benefit? Diagnose the improvement approach.
Read the worked answer
The programme optimized for activity, not outcomes. The evidence is structural:
- No baselines for first-contact resolution or average handling time, so no one can show movement.
- No expected benefit per idea, so “done” means “deployed,” not “improved.”
- No business owner, so the register is an IT wish list rather than a value conversation.
- Selection by ease, which favours low-effort fixes that may have no causal link to the two outcomes.
Without a theory of change - which lever moves which metric - effort cannot accumulate into benefit. This is a project list dressed up as continual improvement. The sponsor is right to ask for a return, but the answer is to fix the approach, not to abandon improvement.
2. How should the team reprioritize the remaining 18 ideas? Describe a practical method and the criteria you would use.
Read the worked answer
Reprioritize in four steps:
- Establish baselines for first-contact resolution, average handling time, and a customer experience measure before doing more work.
- Screen every idea for a causal link to those outcomes. Record expected effect, confidence, effort, risk, and a named business owner. Reject ideas that only produce activity.
- Group ideas into a few themes - for example, knowledge quality, triage, or self-service - and run one theme at a time with a hypothesis and a review date.
- Use the continual improvement model to structure each theme: what is the vision, where are we now, where do we want to be, how do we get there, take action, did we get there, keep momentum.
Criteria: expected value, strength of causal link, effort, risk, reversibility, and whether the business owner will sponsor the change. Keep one quick win in flight for credibility, but do not let it displace outcome work.
3. How should the team measure and communicate the value of continual improvement going forward?
Read the worked answer
Measure at three levels:
- Outcome: first-contact resolution, average handling time, and customer satisfaction, with baselines and trend lines.
- Adoption or leading: knowledge article usage, self-service completion, and reduction in repeat contacts.
- Delivery: improvements completed against plan and benefits realized against expected benefit.
Report a small dashboard, not a count of completed ideas. Communicate in business terms: hours saved, contacts avoided, satisfaction change. Review quarterly with the sponsor, and stop or change themes that show no movement. That review discipline is what turns continual improvement into a return on effort rather than a backlog graveyard.