How many times in your CI career have you sat there in December thinking you’ve had a great year? The projects landed, the savings were signed off and the team delivered everything that was asked of it. You sign off for your Christmas break feeling relieved and then January comes round, and the first question in the room is: “Right, what are you going to do this year?”
Allison McLean, who leads global transition, transformation and delivery leadership teams at Computacenter, remembered exactly that moment. As a member of the panel at the LCS Conference 2026 she said the words we can imagine so many CI leaders feel: “I’m exhausted.”
Anyone who works in continuous improvement will know the feeling. The value of continuous improvement is never proved once and banked. It has to be shown again and again, to people juggling a hundred other priorities.
And right now, the stakes are higher than ever. Opening the conference, Catrin Archer, who leads the Lean Competency System, described a huge drive for CI teams “to prove their worth… to prove they deserve a place.” For many CI leaders, proving value is no longer a reporting exercise. It’s survival.
When CI teams are asked to justify themselves, the instinct is to count. You report on the projects run, the people trained, workshops that have been delivered and ideas logged. It all shows effort, but none of it answers the question a senior leader is really asking: what difference has this made?
Allison, who describes herself as “the queen of simplicity”, was blunt about it:
“If you can’t demonstrate the value, people just won’t buy into it. It has to have tangible proof points.” Allison McLean, Computacenter
With nearly 500 people in her own function and customers demanding more every year, she was clear about how leaders weigh up where their attention goes. In the corporate world, she said, “you’re either adding value or you’re not.”
The shift is from reporting what the CI team did to reporting what changed because of it.
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Activity: what we did |
Impact: what changed |
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We ran five improvement projects this year |
We cut recruitment lead time from 186 days to 97 |
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We trained 40 people in problem solving |
On-time helpdesk closure rose from 70% to 93% |
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We mapped the claims process |
Pension cash claims now take 5 to 10 days, not 8 to 12 weeks |
The impact examples above come from two 2026 LCS award winners, OMRAN Group and Zoe Davies at L&G. More on both below.
One of the post-it notes delegates left on the LCS board summed up the panel’s advice in nine words: “Demonstrate the value from the lens of the leader.”
Senior leaders have objectives, targets and people above them watching the numbers. Allison’s advice was simple: if you can get time with them, “just ask them what their objectives are.” Then work out how improvement can help them get there.
That means connecting CI to the things already on a leader’s agenda: customer outcomes, cost, capacity, quality, risk and growth. You need to make the line from improvement to outcome impossible to miss.
OMRAN Group, which develops tourism destinations and infrastructure in Oman, won the Impact Excellence award at the LCS Awards 2026. Its award entry explains that rather than pursuing improvement for its own sake, OMRAN chose high-priority problems affecting service, governance, employee experience and efficiency.
Each of its five flagship projects in 2025 started with a business case, a baseline, a clear goal and an executive sponsor. The results were concrete: recruitment lead time cut from 186 to 97 days, on-time helpdesk closure up from 70% to 93%, inventory discrepancies of around 20% a month replaced by full compliance in two audits, and an internal engagement index up from 48 to 73.
Because the projects spanned HR, ICT, internal audit, procurement and communications, they did something else too. In OMRAN’s words, they increased confidence across the Group “that Continuous Improvement is relevant everywhere, not only in operations.”
If there was one message the panel agreed on, it was that value can’t be proved once a year in a report and then forgotten.
Allison’s teams meet customers every month, and every month they bring evidence. “This is what we did. And it can be small things. It can be big things.” Last year’s success buys very little this year. As she put it: “you might have had a great year last year, but you have got to have another great year this year.”
Leon Hardwick, Head of OpX, made the same point about leadership support during the panel. Many people think getting buy-in is “a one and done,” he said. In reality, “it’s an ongoing lobbying job.” Echoing a line he’d heard elsewhere, he added that the more senior you get, the more every job becomes a sales job.
It takes a lot of consistent evidence to change what a leader believes about CI, and very little to undo it. So build the evidence into your routine: a regular rhythm of results, shared in terms leaders recognise, rather than a big annual push to justify the budget.
Proof doesn’t just protect a CI team because when used well, it grows one.
Sharing that evidence, however, takes some courage. Allison described launching a campaign to get her teams sharing good news stories. There were, she said, “a thousand of them,” but people didn’t want to put their heads above the parapet for fear of being knocked down. Her message to them was that the naysayers were the problem, not the people celebrating success.
CI teams can fall into the same trap. If you don’t share what improvement has achieved, nobody else will do it for you.
Zoe Davies, winner of the Practitioner Excellence award, founded L&G’s Business Improvement Team in 2018. She grew it from four people to more than 20 “through consistently showing how valuable the work is.”
Her results show what impact looks like when it’s tracked properly: pension cash claims cut from 8 to 12 weeks to 5 to 10 days, now serving 300 to 400 customers a day; more than £300k in cost savings every year; and a 15-point rise in NPS and customer ease scores for more than 1,000 customers on the Transfers Out journey.
Just as important, her data is baselined and tracked throughout each improvement and beyond, so the benefits can be shown long after a project closes.
A strong value story doesn’t have to be purely financial. Some of the most powerful evidence is about people.
Zoe’s nomination highlights her work on L&G’s most sensitive journeys, death and serious ill-health payments, removing waste and effort for customers “whose time is really precious.” OMRAN counted a rise in employee engagement alongside lead times and compliance rates.
Customer experience, colleague wellbeing and safety are outcomes leaders care about too. The best value stories put the numbers and the human impact side by side.
The CI teams that thrive aren’t the ones with the best internal marketing, but instead the ones that can show, again and again, what changed because they exist.
That means moving from activity to impact, speaking in the terms leaders already use, and building proof into the rhythm of the work rather than saving it for the annual review. Do that consistently, and the question about your team changes. It stops being “why do we need this?” and becomes “what would we lose without it?”
This article is part of our series on the big themes from the LCS Conference 2026. Read the first: Scaling Continuous Improvement: What Happens When Your CI Team Disappears?
Recognised accreditation is one of the clearest ways to show that your improvement capability is credible, consistent and built to last.
Watch this video from Laura Barlow, Continuous Improvement Practitioner, UHNM, to understand how LCS accreditation has helped to embed their improvement methodology and add real credibility to their programme.