“Track. Set. Do. Repeat.” — A Simple yet Effective Framework for Continuous Improvement

In all areas of professional life, we constantly seek for “improvements”. Improvements can be related to business metrics, as well as teams or individuals.

When it comes to “what” to improve, it is very critical to start from the ground up and define actual real-life problems that impacts us before starting to suggest “how’s”. As human beings, our minds tend to create problems in order to solve them unless we have a solid system to follow.

Below framework has 4 simple steps to follow to bring success to this process:

Track

This step is very crucial to not skip. It’s the pre-requisite of setting goals, as we first need to have visibility on the current picture in order to define where to focus on.

In Al Tayer Digital Technology Team, we are tracking multiple metrics along with the business KPI’s. Here are a few examples:

· New Relic: It’s the platform where we measure the end to end performance of our applications. We can deep dive into different areas of the infrastructure and APIs.

· JIRA: It’s the platform where we plan and execute our development activities with the inclusion of several metrics such as estimations vs actuals, time spent in several stages of the development lifecycle, team velocity, etc.

· Testrail: It’s the platform where we execute our QA activities for developed initiatives and we measure the success rate of test cases in runs, how many runs are executed prior to the release, as well as reported defects (if any).

· Fun Retro: It’s the platform where we hold our retrospectives with the teams anonymously and as the outcome of the retrospective, we collectively convert feedbacks into action items for the future.

Set (Goals)

Once we have the visibility of the current metrics, we identify the most important areas where we see improvement opportunities for. We prioritize according to a couple of parameters:

· Criticality of the improvement point

· How much can realistically be improved with existing capabilities and resources

· Balancing short term vs long term actions for quick wins & ROI impact

The outcome of this step is to set measurable and achievable goals. OKRs or SMART are both effective frameworks for goal setting for anyone who wants to deep dive.

Do

Last but not least, now that we have solid goals, we start to do the actual work towards them and measure the improvements step by step along with learnings.

Repeat

For any business and any team, this is a never-ending cycle. The more problems we solve, the more interesting ones always come to our plate.

After all, wouldn’t it be boring if we didn’t have any challenges? :)