Why Continuous Improvement is Critical to Digital Success

First, let me explain what my definition of continuous improvement is. Continuous improvement is the process of consistently and frequently improving your website or web application through minor or major updates on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis. This is opposed to doing major refactors every 3 to 5 years, but instead making many incremental changes that may result in a completely different end result through many incremental changes.
Major companies like Facebook, Walmart, Target, Google, and much more have built incredible technical infrastructure in which they can quickly improve and enhance websites and web applications on a continuous basis, launching new features every week or month.
Smaller companies do not have the luxury of a multi-thousand person development team, however, that does not mean they should give up on the concept of continuous improvement.
Continuous improvement allows you to improve and reap the benefits of small changes and new features quickly. It is critical for digital success because:

1. It allows you to test small changes quickly
2. You can reap the benefits of development quickly
3. Your bigger competitors are doing it
4. You can make big changes incrementally over time with less risk
5. You will run up less technical debt as you improve consistently

So as a small company how do you go about creating an infrastructure for continuous improvement? Here are some of the factors that are critical to continuous improvement:

1. Scalable Hosting (Amazon Web Services)
2. Scalable Platform (Framework, programming languages, CMS)
3. Scalable Backend Development Architecture
4. Responsive Framework / Frontend Architecture
5. Development operations

The challenge that I think most small businesses face is that it is not always cheap to put this infrastructure in place. However once in place, this should save tremendous money in the long run when it comes to maintaining and improving your digital infrastructure.
For help creating a digital strategy to implement a continuous improvement plan does hesitate to reach out to us at hello@trellis.co!