Critical success factors for continuous improvement projects: Maturity of the field

Many organizations use continuous improvement projects (CIPs) such as Kaizen Events, Six Sigma or Lean Six Sigma to improve their processes. However, various works in the literature have identified the lack of capacity in organizations to sustain the initial results achieved by CIPs. The purpose of this paper is to describe available knowledge relating to critical success factors (CSFs) for CIPs. Two research activities were used in this study: systematic literature review and maturity assessment. First, a systematic literature review is a research methodology used to search and analyze different publications based on a defined procedure, giving transparency to the research literature review. Second, the maturity of a given research field represents the quality, or nature, of the knowledge available, identifying whether a given research field has potential future research possibilities. This paper identifies six new lines of research related to CSFs for CIPs.