Continuous Improvement Plans: Overview

Continuous Improvement Leadership Teams create and manage Continuous Improvement Plans to resolve impediments and support a group of teams, such as a program, line of business, portfolio or Agile Release Train. Continuous Improvement planning happens quarterly and begins with the Continuous Improvement Readout and Planning Session for Leaders, where an Agile Coach works with leaders to review the Multi-Team Roll-up data and develop a concrete plan for removing organizational obstacles in the next quarter/Program Increment (PI).

For more information on Multi-Teams, see Understanding Teams, Multi-Teams and Enterprise Teams and Set Up a Multi-Team.

Continuous Improvement Plans

The Continuous Improvement Plan is captured in the Growth Plan section of the Multi-Team Rollup. To view the Rollup radar, from the Team Dashboard, simply click on the icon for the Multi-Team. If the teams have completed more than one type of radar, you can click on the radar you want to view. If they have only completed the TeamHealth® radar, you will immediately be taken to the Radar Tab to view the Rollup. Scroll down to the Growth Plan section or click on the Growth Plan icon on the upper right-hand section of the screen.

Each of the organizational growth items (OGIs) created by the teams during their AgilityInsights® retrospectives are listed here. These are the issues and impediments that the teams are asking their leaders to help them resolve.

During the Continuous Improvement Readout and Planning Session, you will work as a leadership team to decide what to work on in the upcoming quarter. The table below provides a recommended process for how to prepare, review, prioritize and manage OGIs through the quarter.

ACTIVITY	TIMEFRAME
1. Review the Organizational Growth Items (OGIs) and look for common themes If any OGI descriptions are unclear, meet with a representative of the team to understand what is needed Identify common issues, how frequently they have been raised and determine how many teams are affected	In preparation for the Continuous Improvement Readout and Planning Session
2. Group common items Consolidate the OGIs and rewrite the descriptions, if needed, so that the backlog is clean and provides clarity
3. Discuss the common themes along with the insights from Analyzing the Multi-Team Data	During the Continuous Improvement Readout and Planning Session
4. Prioritize and rank the OGIs in the Growth Backlog
5. For the top 1-3 Growth Items you will work on during the quarter/PI: Write clear acceptance criteria Define measurable results Assign an owner/paired owners for each Growth Item
6. For the items that you will work on first, determine whether you need to break them down into smaller stories that can be completed within 1-2 weeks Add Growth Items for the stories so that you can track them to completion in the Kanban View Assign an owner for each item	During Iteration Planning, and throughout the quarter
7. Update the Growth Items with notes and a solution description and move them to Done in the Kanban Board as you complete them	During Iteration Planning, and throughout the quarter

Creating and Managing Continuous Improvement Plans

When creating and managing Continuous Improvement Plans, there are a number of actions you may want to take. We've broken each action down for you, into shorter articles.

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