Continual Improvement Manager

Koniag IT Systems, LLC a Koniag Government Services company, is seeking a Continual Improvement Manager to support KITS and our government customer Washington, DC. The position is hybrid, 3 days required onsite. This position requires the candidate to be able to obtain a Public Trust.

We offer competitive compensation and an extraordinary benefits package including health, dental and vision insurance, 401K with company matching, flexible spending accounts, paid holidays, three weeks paid time off, and more.

Koniag IT Systems, a Koniag Government Services company, is seeking an experienced Continual Improvement Manager to support a comprehensive enterprise IT operations and support engagement for a federal government client. This role serves as the primary owner of the enterprise continual service improvement (CSI) program, responsible for driving measurable, sustained operational improvement across all functional areas of the engagement through data-driven analysis, automation, process optimization, retrospective-driven action planning, and a culture of continuous learning and innovation.

The Continual Improvement Manager operates within a mature ITIL 4-aligned IT Service Management (ITSM) practice, working in close coordination with the Program Manager, Service Level & Capacity Manager, Incident Manager, NOC and Service Desk teams, engineering leads, and Government stakeholders to identify, prioritize, execute, and measure improvement initiatives that enhance service quality, operational efficiency, platform reliability, and end-user experience across a geographically distributed hybrid on-premises and cloud environment.

The ideal candidate is a strategically minded and analytically driven ITSM professional with a strong background in continual service improvement, process engineering, Agile delivery, and federal IT operations environments. This individual must possess the ability to synthesize complex operational data from multiple sources into a coherent improvement roadmap, build organizational buy-in for change, and demonstrate measurable outcomes that advance the Government's objectives for availability, user support, engineering excellence, and service management maturity.

This position requires the ability to obtain and maintain a government background investigation, HSPD-12 PIV credentials, and applicable IT access authorizations prior to performing work. This position may be performed primarily at the client's facility and approved remote/telework locations.

The Continual Improvement Manager is responsible for establishing, leading, and sustaining the enterprise continual service improvement program across all functional areas of the engagement. This individual identifies improvement opportunities through rigorous analysis of service level performance data, incident and problem trends, capacity metrics, customer satisfaction results, Sprint Retrospective outputs, and operational observations, and translates these findings into a prioritized, actionable improvement backlog that drives measurable progress against the Government's performance objectives throughout the period of performance.

Principal responsibilities will include but are not limited to:

Continual Improvement Program Leadership:

• Establish, own, and lead the enterprise continual service improvement (CSI) program, developing and maintaining a comprehensive CSI framework aligned to ITIL 4 principles and integrated with the program's Agile Sprint delivery model.
• Develop, maintain, and govern the program-wide CSI register, ensuring all identified improvement opportunities-regardless of source-are accurately documented, categorized, prioritized, assigned, tracked, and reported to program leadership and Government stakeholders on a recurring basis.
• Define and communicate a clear improvement roadmap aligned to the Government's desired outcomes for availability, user support, engineering excellence, service management maturity, Agile delivery, and operational efficiency, ensuring improvement priorities reflect both program data and Government strategic objectives.
• Lead the execution of high-priority improvement initiatives from identification through implementation and outcome validation, coordinating resources, managing dependencies, and tracking progress against defined success criteria and measurable targets.
• Champion a culture of continuous learning, operational excellence, and data-driven decision-making across all functional teams, ensuring improvement is treated as an ongoing organizational discipline rather than a reactive response to performance gaps.
• Present CSI program status, improvement outcomes, and forward-looking improvement priorities at Sprint Reviews, Monthly Status Reviews, and other Government-facing forums, demonstrating measurable service improvement over time.

Data Analysis & Improvement Identification:

• Serve as the program's primary analyst for improvement identification, synthesizing data from multiple operational sources to identify trends, patterns, performance gaps, and systemic inefficiencies across all functional areas.
• Conduct regular analysis of service level performance data, incident and problem management trends, capacity utilization metrics, change success rates, customer satisfaction survey results, first-contact resolution rates, Sprint velocity data, and level-of-effort delivery metrics to identify improvement opportunities.
• Perform process maturity assessments across functional areas-including NOC operations, Service Desk, network engineering, infrastructure operations, Microsoft infrastructure, enterprise applications, A/V systems, and AI/emerging technology integration-identifying gaps against ITIL 4 best practices, industry standards, and Government objectives.
• Conduct root cause analysis and contributing factor analysis for recurring performance gaps, SLA breaches, high-volume incident categories, and low customer satisfaction areas, developing targeted improvement recommendations based on findings.
• Leverage Sprint Retrospective outputs, post-incident review (PIR) findings, problem management outputs, customer feedback, and staff observations as structured improvement inputs, ensuring all retrospective action items are captured in the CSI register and tracked to completion.
• Analyze automation and tooling opportunities across operational workflows, ITSM platform capabilities, and reporting processes, identifying candidates for automation that reduce manual effort, improve accuracy, and accelerate service delivery.

Improvement Execution & Tracking:

• Develop detailed improvement initiative charters or project plans for significant improvement efforts, defining objectives, scope, success criteria, resource requirements, timelines, dependencies, risks, and measurable outcomes.
• Coordinate improvement initiative execution across functional teams, ensuring assigned owners have the clarity, resources, and organizational support needed to implement improvements within committed timelines.
• Monitor and track all active improvement initiatives in the CSI register, providing regular status updates to program leadership and escalating risks or delays that threaten initiative timelines or expected outcomes.
• Validate improvement outcomes through before-and-after performance data comparison, ensuring that implemented changes produce the intended measurable improvements and that gains are sustained over time.
• Manage the improvement backlog in the Government's Agile/ITSM tooling, ensuring improvement items are accurately estimated, prioritized in collaboration with the COR or Government Product Owner, and integrated into Sprint planning and commitment processes each Sprint.
• Coordinate with the automation and analytics team to implement automated monitoring, alerting, and reporting capabilities that support ongoing measurement of improvement initiative outcomes.

Agile Delivery Integration:

• Serve as the primary facilitator of Sprint Retrospective ceremonies, ensuring each retrospective produces specific, actionable, and assigned improvement outcomes that are captured in the CSI register and prioritized for inclusion in subsequent Sprints.
• Collaborate with the Program Manager and Agile delivery leadership to ensure the improvement backlog is integrated with the overall program backlog, and that improvement work items receive appropriate Sprint prioritization alongside operational and project work.
• Participate in Sprint Planning, backlog refinement, Sprint Review, and daily coordination activities, contributing improvement program perspective to Sprint commitment decisions and workload prioritization.
• Develop and maintain Sprint-level improvement metrics, including improvement backlog velocity, initiative completion rates, and outcome achievement rates, ensuring data is available for Sprint Review Reports and Monthly Status and Performance Reports.
• Ensure the program's Agile operating model itself is subject to continual improvement, regularly assessing Sprint ceremony effectiveness, backlog health, Sprint commitment accuracy, and level-of-effort delivery consistency, and proposing adjustments to improve Agile delivery maturity over time.

Process Engineering & Standardization:

• Lead the development, documentation, and standardization of operational processes, procedures, runbooks, and standard operating procedures across functional areas, ensuring processes are clearly defined, consistently followed, regularly reviewed, and updated to reflect operational changes and improvement outcomes.
• Conduct process mapping and workflow analysis for key operational processes-including incident management, change management, service request fulfillment, knowledge management, shift handoff, and escalation procedures-identifying inefficiencies, redundancies, and automation opportunities.
• Develop and maintain a process improvement methodology tailored to the program's Agile and ITIL 4 operating model, providing functional teams with a consistent, repeatable framework for identifying, proposing, testing, and validating process changes.
• Ensure that process changes arising from improvement initiatives are formally documented, communicated to affected teams, incorporated into training and onboarding materials, and reflected in updated runbooks and standard operating procedures.

Knowledge Management Support:

• Collaborate with the Incident Manager and Service Management Lead to ensure the program's knowledge management practice is continuously improved, with a focus on increasing knowledge base coverage, accuracy, currency, and utilization rates across Tier 1 and Tier 2 Service Desk operations.
• Identify knowledge gaps contributing to first-contact resolution misses, escalation rates, or recurring incident patterns, developing targeted knowledge article creation and review campaigns to address identified gaps.
• Promote knowledge capture as a standard operational practice, ensuring resolution documentation, lessons learned, and process guidance are consistently recorded at ticket closure and following significant operational events.

Customer Satisfaction Management:

• Own and manage the program's customer satisfaction measurement program, including post-ticket survey administration, survey data analysis, trend reporting, and follow-up on low-satisfaction responses.
• Analyze customer satisfaction data to identify service delivery gaps, user experience issues, and communication improvement opportunities, translating findings into targeted improvement initiatives and tracking outcomes against established customer satisfaction targets.
• Develop and maintain customer feedback mechanisms beyond post-ticket surveys, including periodic stakeholder engagement sessions, focus groups, and service review meetings, to gather qualitative improvement input from end users and Government leadership.
• Report customer satisfaction trends and improvement outcomes to program leadership and the Government on a recurring basis, ensuring customer experience metrics are prominently featured in Monthly Status and Performance Reports.

Reporting & Communication:

• Develop and maintain a comprehensive CSI program report, delivered monthly alongside the Monthly Status and Performance Report, providing Government stakeholders with a clear view of active improvement initiatives, completed improvements, measured outcomes, and the forward improvement roadmap.
• Contribute continual improvement data and narrative to Sprint Review Reports, Monthly Status and Performance Reports, and the service-level/ITSM metrics dashboard, ensuring improvement program visibility is maintained throughout the period of performance.
• Develop executive-level briefing materials summarizing CSI program outcomes, improvement return on investment, and strategic improvement priorities for presentation to Government leadership as requested.

Security & Compliance:

• Ensure all continual improvement activities comply with applicable Federal security, privacy, and compliance requirements, including FISMA, NIST SP 800-53, Zero Trust Architecture principles, Section 508 accessibility standards, and applicable Government IT and cybersecurity policies.
• Ensure that process changes and automation implementations arising from improvement initiatives are reviewed for security impact and comply with applicable change management and security authorization requirements prior to implementation in production environments.
• Support audit readiness activities by maintaining accurate, complete, and readily accessible CSI program records, reports, and documentation throughout the period of performance.

Education and Experience:

Required:

• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Information Systems, Business Administration, Organizational Management, or a related field from an accredited college or university. Equivalent work experience may be considered in lieu of a degree.
• Minimum of 5 years of experience in IT service management, process improvement, or operations management, with at least 3 years of dedicated experience leading continual service improvement, process engineering, or quality management programs in an enterprise federal IT environment.
• Demonstrated experience developing and managing a formal continual service improvement program, including CSI register management, improvement initiative execution, and outcome measurement in a complex IT operations environment.
• Demonstrated experience facilitating Agile retrospectives and integrating retrospective outputs into actionable improvement backlogs within a Sprint-based delivery model.
• Hands-on experience with enterprise ITSM platforms, preferably ServiceNow, including backlog management, dashboard development, and performance reporting.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a government background investigation, HSPD-12 PIV credentials, and all required IT access authorizations prior to performing work requiring such access.

Preferred:

• Prior experience supporting federal civilian agency IT operations programs.
• Experience leading continual improvement programs within hybrid on-premises and cloud environments, including AWS and Microsoft Azure/365.
• Experience integrating ITIL 4 continual improvement practices with Agile delivery methodologies in an enterprise IT operations context.

Required Skills and Competencies:

• Exceptional communication skills in English-both written and oral-with the demonstrated ability to communicate improvement findings, initiative status, and program outcomes clearly and persuasively to both technical teams and senior Government stakeholders.
• Deep knowledge of ITIL 4 continual improvement principles and practices, including the ITIL continual improvement model, CSI register management, improvement initiative lifecycle management, and measurement of improvement outcomes.
• Strong Agile delivery knowledge, including experience facilitating Sprint Retrospectives, managing improvement backlogs, and integrating continual improvement with Sprint-based planning and prioritization processes.
• Advanced analytical skills with the demonstrated ability to synthesize complex operational data from multiple sources-including ITSM metrics, service level performance data, incident trends, capacity utilization, customer satisfaction, and Sprint velocity-into coherent improvement findings and prioritized recommendations.
• Demonstrated experience developing and managing a CSI register, ensuring improvement items are accurately documented, prioritized, assigned, tracked, and reported throughout their lifecycle.
• Strong process engineering skills, including process mapping, workflow analysis, gap assessment, and standard operating procedure development across enterprise IT operations functional areas.
• Demonstrated ability to build organizational buy-in for improvement initiatives, effectively influencing and motivating cross-functional teams to adopt process changes and new ways of working without direct authority.
• Experience managing customer satisfaction measurement programs, including survey administration, data analysis, trend reporting, and improvement response planning.
• Familiarity with automation and tooling opportunities within enterprise IT operations environments, including ITSM platform automation, reporting automation, and operational workflow optimization.
• Familiarity with federal IT security and compliance requirements, including FISMA, NIST SP 800-53, Zero Trust Architecture principles, and CUI safeguarding requirements.
• Strong organizational skills with the ability to simultaneously manage multiple improvement initiatives, reporting obligations, and stakeholder engagements with a high degree of accuracy and attention to detail.
• Proficiency with Microsoft Office Suite, Microsoft Teams, Power BI or equivalent data visualization tools, and enterprise collaboration platforms.

Desired Skills and Competencies:

• ITIL 4 Foundation certification or higher (e.g., ITIL 4 Specialist: Drive Stakeholder Value, ITIL 4 Specialist: High Velocity IT, ITIL 4 Managing Professional, ITIL 4 Strategic Leader).
• Certified Scrum Master (CSM), SAFe Agilist, PMI-ACP, or equivalent Agile certification demonstrating formal Agile delivery and retrospective facilitation credentials.
• Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, Black Belt, or equivalent process improvement certification demonstrating formal process engineering and quality management methodology expertise.
• ServiceNow Certified System Administrator (CSA) or equivalent ITSM platform certification.
• Experience with Lean IT, DevOps, or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) improvement practices as applied to enterprise I