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The maintenance of process improvement programs within organizations is not an easy task. Some processes do not maintain the results achieved with the improvement project and again present low performance shortly after completion of the project. This paper aims to identify the socio-technical causes responsible for the loss of process performance after applying improvement projects, in order to support the mitigation of the problem.

A systematic review of the literature was carried out, which allowed the selection of 28 articles. The empirical stage used the benchmarking technique, along a large Brazilian mining company with an international standard of production and quality. This organization has been using improvement projects for more than ten years.

The research complements the literature regarding the prioritization of the 26 identified failures and the identification of seven new failure factors and two resources. Findings in this study can be an inspiration for other organizations, considering the similarity of methodological aspects of improvement projects since internationally standardized methodologies such as Six Sigma, Lean, Kaizen and 5S are used.

The research presented a proposal of guidelines that corroborate to the mitigation of loss of process performance after improvement project.