18. Improvement planning

Abstract

Improvement planning is the strategic management process of determining a set of short and long-term actions to improve the performance of an organization on ethical, social and environmental topics. It often starts with a gap analysis, by which the organization compares their current and their desired performance; that is, they compare the results of an impact measurement process with either their strategic goal targets, industry benchmarks or certification rules. Then a team of organizational stakeholders brainstorms and prioritizes a set of improvement actions, sometimes with the support of external advisors. The result is an improvement plan that sometimes is included in sustainability reports. We not only review the state of the art in improvement planning for ethical, social and environmental topics, but we also present a reference method model and discuss how software tools can aid the process. We place the focus on openImprove and openBest, two open-source tools that support the improvement planning process and provide a repository of good practices for organizational improvement, respectively.