Critical success factors for implementation of quality improvement initiative

As time evolves, the demand of the markets becomes much more dynamic and for meeting client’s expectations and have the edge over others, changes in existent processes are compulsory. Thus, Improvement Initiative (IMI) provides guidelines in achieving organizational goals which is to optimize profit and enhance the productivity. However, several cases have been reported with low rate of success of the IMI’s practice in which they have failed to achieve the intended improvement result and one of the factors is lack of awareness of the IMI’s Critical Success Factors (CSF). The process to identify the CSFs of an IMI is significant as it allows organizations to focus their effort to make sure they are ready and qualified when implementing the respective IMI and prevent improvement failures in the future. In addition, lack of reference regarding the reference model of comprehensive CSFs for an IMI from existing literatures allow a new study to bridge this research gap. Therefore, this paper sets out the findings of reviewing and gathering latest critical success factors and thus developing a reference model that incorporate lists of CSFs for each IMI with their attributes. This study incorporated Positivism as the research perspective and adopted quantitative research method to meet the objectives. Via extensive systematic literature review (SLR) procedures, a total of 72 publications were used to extract information needed which later enable the conceptual model development for IMI selection of comprehensive critical success factors as a reference support for decision makers. To ensure generalization of the model, the quantitative research method was adopted with a total of 137 respondents’ feedback of survey were gathered from various organizations. The reflective-formative hierarchical model was then developed and analyzed using structural equation modelling (SEM) via Smart PLS software to test the model of CSFs for IMI. As the final result, six out of nine CSFs with 39 attributes were considered as critical factors when choosing the most suitable IMI to be adopted in an organization. As a conclusion, this research provides organizational readiness when starting to deploy IMI by providing comprehensive critical success factors as a reference point to aid and prepare practitioners that will lead to the failure of improvement in their business.