5.12 Implement Continuous Improvement Procedures

The organization has policies and practices in place to embrace experimentation, foster a growth mindset, support organizational agility, and provide continuous improvement. Product creators should iterate, regularly, though never at the cost of getting things done (such as working on larger, long-term features).

Criteria

Continuous Improvement: The organization has created policies and practices to enable continuous improvement and has resourced the organization appropriately to support these efforts over time.
Agile Reviews: Agile sprints and update frequency have gone through a review process to ensure project teams have enough time to conduct user-research, identify technical debt, and produce quality output.
Iterative Consideration: A track record of continuous improvement (iteration) usage to analyze your website or application while also addressing the by-products and potential consequences of ongoing experimentation, such as technical debt, product performance, emissions, and related issues is clearly visible. Analytics are limited to only necessary features to aid with decision-making, encouraging visitor feedback, and comparing performance against business goals and visitor needs.
Functionality Decisions: The retention of existing features, the creation of new functionality, and the decommission or elimination of unused functionality, and unvisited pages through the product’s life cycle have been justified and prioritized on a case by case basis.
Security Updates: Corrective security and policy updates during the product or service lifecycle are provided, while such improvements are distinguished from more extensive evolutionary updates.
Skills And Maintenance: Sustainable product and data strategies have been developed with appropriate training techniques. These should help your team (managers, colleagues, etc) build capacity and learn new skills to manage and maintain products and services over time.

Impact

High

Effort

High

Benefits

Environmental:
Focusing on continuous improvement reduces waste and energy use by iteratively identifying opportunities to improve the product or service.
Operations:
A culture of experimentation fosters more innovation. This supports team-building and improves overall organizational resilience and efficiency.
Security:
Products or services that are maintained and updated over time reduce risk and improve security.
Privacy:
Having a high-quality, regularly kept up-to-date product or service will reduce the chances of a data breach, which will in turn increase the privacy potential of the website or application.
Accessibility:
Iteration is important for inclusive design as different visitors will have different needs, and no two individuals are alike. As such, being agile and adaptable will benefit authors in expanding their accessibility.
Performance:
Technical debt is reduced if review processes exist. Focusing on continuous improvement rather than large single-scale releases, bottlenecks in a website or application’s speed can be resolved quickly as they become apparent. This is especially useful as new releases of Web browsers can alter the performance of products and services.
Economic:
Agility and continuous improvement help an organization be more resilient in the face of disruption and a changing climate. Long-term, these practices save the organization time, money, and resources. They also provide security benefits that decrease risk and can potentially reduce emissions.
Conversion:
If a website or application renders correctly, it will naturally encourage more trust with its visitors, and thereby have the potential for repeat custom.

GRI

materials: High
energy: High
water: High
emissions: High

Example

A showcase of how a website layers content, structure, and style. The Sustainable Web Design toolkit provides you with information relating to optimizing your product or service for the environment. The continuous improvement toolkit also has numerous business templates to work from.

Resources

View the Guideline