UC Tech News is excited to share the stories of the people and projects behind the winners of the 2026 UC Tech Awards.
Team Name: ITS Continuous Improvement Team
Award Category: Mojgan A. Amini Operational Excellence
Location: UC San Diego
Team Members:
- Prachi Raheja, Continuous Improvement Lead, UC San Diego
- Anna Nordeen, Senior Director – Business Office, UC San Diego
The ITS Continuous Improvement Team won the Gold Morgan A. Amini Operational Excellence Award at the 2026 UC Tech Awards for creating a data-driven operating model to measure, sustain, and recognize service excellence at UC San Diego IT Services.
Project Summary
UC San Diego IT Services (ITS) manages 95 services, and while process improvement efforts existed, they were fragmented, with inconsistent practices and disconnected data. This made it difficult to capture, measure, scale, and sustain improvements across the organization. Without a more unified approach, ITS faced risks of inefficiency, duplicated effort, missed opportunities to optimize resources, and limited ability to demonstrate the value of its services.
Action
The ITS Continuous Improvement Team designed a practical, scalable operating model that embeds continuous improvement into daily operations across UC San Diego ITS. The model includes several elements:
- Service Ownership Onboarding and Service Owner Playbook: A structured onboarding checklist that gives service owners consistent guidance on defining KPIs, driving roadmap improvements, and managing costs. It replaces inconsistent, personality-driven practices and high-level guidelines with a practical foundation for service management.
- Central Continuous Improvement Registry: A first-of-its-kind low-friction intake form that standardizes documentation and translates improvements into measurable impact. It feeds into dashboards for consistent, scalable reporting across ITS.
- Centralized Dashboards for Continuous Improvement Activity: Real-time dashboards that transform invisible effort into visible, measurable impact – revealing dollars saved, hours redeployed, and trends. It allows ITS to centrally manage services with greater decision-making, precision, accountability, and impact.
- Recognition Model: A structured model that ties recognition directly to measurable impact across efficiency, customer experience, risk impact, and Continuous Improvement Leadership. It ensures contributions are visible, valued, and sustained.
- Capability-Building and Enablement Program: An organization-wide capability-building program anchored in the Lean Six Sigma (LSS) training program, enabling staff to build foundational service management skills and advance through progressively higher certification levels.
Results and Impact
The ITS Continuous Improvement Team has transformed how improvement is measured, sustained, and recognized across UC San Diego ITS. What was once a fragmented, largely invisible, ad-hoc process is now a proactive, organization-wide capability that equips service owners with the tools, practices, and visibility to identify opportunities, demonstrate impact, and continuously improve performance.
The continuous improvement model is self-sustaining, scalable, and delivers ongoing efficiency gains without additional resources. It has generated measurable impact from everyday improvements at scale:
- $7.38M+ in total value realized
- 149,000+ hours saved or reinvested
- $500K+ in hard cost savings / avoidance
- 8+ staff reallocations enabled through efficiency gains
The impact extends beyond ITS internally. By standardizing service ownership practices and visibility into service performance, ITS can deliver more consistent, enhanced, and equitable service experiences for UC San Diego students, faculty, and staff.
Looking ahead, the ITS Continuous Improvement Team plans to build on this foundation by integrating service delivery and financial data for deeper cost-to-value insight, expanding AI-assisted process improvement, and scaling adoption across all of UC San Diego’s services.
