An Easter egg hunt isn't about wandering aimlessly hoping to find candy. It’s about purposeful searching. Organizers map out where the eggs are hidden, hunters develop strategies, and over time the participants get better at finding hidden treasures faster.
Similarly, in ITSM:
Eggs = Opportunities (for efficiency, cost savings, better user experiences)
Baskets = Your ITSM Processes (the frameworks you use to collect and organize these opportunities)
The Hunt = Your Continual Improvement Cycle (an intentional, repeatable process for seeking and realizing value)
When you formalize your continual improvement efforts, you make sure you're always on the hunt — identifying issues, bottlenecks, and missed opportunities that otherwise would remain hidden.
Why a Formalized Continual Improvement Cycle Matters
Without a structured continual improvement practice, ITSM teams fall into reactive patterns:
- Only fixing what breaks.
- Only changing when pushed by major incidents.
- Missing trends that could dramatically improve service delivery.
But when you build continual improvement into your regular operations, you shift from reacting to proactively discovering value.
You don't just find one or two eggs by accident—you systematically uncover dozens.
A formalized Continual Improvement practice typically includes:
- Defining Objectives: What business or service value are you targeting?
- Regular Reviews: Scheduled time to inspect processes, metrics, and feedback.
- Opportunity Identification: Looking for inefficiencies, gaps, or enhancement areas.
- Prioritization: Deciding which opportunities align best with business goals.
- Action and Measurement: Implementing improvements and tracking results.
Real-World Examples of Continual Improvement "Easter Eggs"
Here’s how real organizations have leveraged continual improvement to uncover hidden value:
Incident Management: Reducing Repeat Tickets
A financial services organization implemented a continual improvement review of their top incident categories every month. They found that a significant number of tickets were caused by the same minor VPN client bug.
The Value Uncovered:
By fixing the underlying issue, they reduced VPN-related incidents, freeing up service desk staff and improving customer satisfaction.
Request Management: Shortening Fulfillment Times
An IT department noticed through regular reporting that standard hardware requests had an inconsistent fulfillment time—ranging from 2 days to 9 days.
The Value Uncovered:
They mapped the request process and found delays when approvals were routed to the wrong managers. A simple automation of the approval path reduced average fulfillment time, creating a smoother onboarding experience for employees.
Problem Management: Finding Hidden Trends
A healthcare organization held quarterly problem reviews. One review revealed an uptick in system slowness reports on the same days each month. Root cause analysis tied it to monthly financial reconciliation processes overloading a legacy database server.
The Value Uncovered:
By adjusting the job scheduling and upgrading database resources, they eliminated recurring slowness issues, dramatically improving clinician satisfaction and reducing the risk to patient services.
Change Enablement: Reducing Failed Changes
An ITSM team tracked failed changes as part of their continual improvement cycle. They noticed that changes without peer review had a 30% higher failure rate.
The Value Uncovered:
By instituting mandatory peer reviews for high-risk changes, they reduced change failures by 15% in just one quarter, stabilizing production environments and improving business confidence in IT.
The Key to a Successful "Hunt"
If your team isn’t formalizing continual improvement today, you're relying on luck to find value, and luck isn’t a strategy.
The best continual improvement cycles are:
- Structured: Clear roles, responsibilities, and rhythms.
- Data-Informed: Metrics, trends, and real-world feedback drive focus areas.
- Business-Aligned: Improvements tie back to business outcomes, not just IT metrics.
- Celebrated: Recognize the wins - no matter how small - to keep momentum.
Continual improvement isn’t a one-time event. It’s a mindset, a system, and a discipline, just like a really good Easter egg hunt.
When you consistently look under the right rocks, you realize that valuable improvements are everywhere. But you have to be intentional, organized, and relentless in your search.
Don’t wait for value to stumble into your processes - go hunting for it.