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Achieving Business Excellence - How do you rate?

About the Author:

Paul Wilton (editor)

CA with degrees in commerce, accounting and information technology. Paul worked overseas in the “Big 4” accounting firms and served as a director at Audit New Zealand before setting up his own consultancy. Author of A-Z of New Zealand Business Law, Paul has over 20 years of experience as a business owner and consultant. He joined FBA in 2004 and is totally committed to providing excellence in quality and value to our subscribers. 


Achieving excellence in your organisation may seem out of reach, especially if you are of modest size and disposition.  Actually, it may be a lot easier than you think to lift your game.  When you do a job, it makes sense to do it properly and this certainly applies to running your organisation.  This article will help you to assess how you rate but it will also help you to set your sites high and to move in the right direction.

Many excellence models have been developed over the years for businesses of all sizes.  They are used as the basis for excellence awards and help organisations to understand and achieve excellence in their fields.  In the US, the Baldrige model is accepted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). We’ll be looking at the European model, developed by the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM). This has gained international recognition and provides a framework for any business or organisation. It helps you to:

  • Assess how you are performing and understand your key strengths and potential performance gaps across 9 proven criteria.

  • Apply a common vocabulary and way of thinking that facilitates the effective communication of ideas, whether it be within your organisation or with others.

  • Integrate and align your initiatives to identify gaps and remove duplication and conflicts.

  • Establish and benchmark your progress against your past performance to ensure you are on a path of continuous improvement.

Last updated in 2010, the EFQM Model applies to all organisations regardless of size, sector, structure and development stage.  It can be adapted to suit your needs and can be used in whole or in part to understand some or all of your activities.

The EFQM Excellence Model

In brief, the model is based on the idea that results are achieved through a small number of enablers as follows:

Business Excellence 1.png

Together, the 5 enablers describing what the organisation does, and the 4 results areas describing what the organisation achieves, are referred to as the 9 criteria.

In a nutshell, the model is based on the premise that:

“Excellent results with respect to Performance, Customers, People and Society are achieved through Partnerships and Resources and Processes.”

Self Assessment: Once learnt, self-assessment against the Excellence Model can be completed very quickly – within days for a very basic assessment. This will highlight the improvement activities needed ultimately to achieve excellence in business results and stakeholder satisfaction.  The time needed to address the action points will vary depending on what the assessment uncovers.

Leadership: For the exercise to be successful, your active involvement as leader is critical in keeping with the ‘Leadership’ criterion. It is possible for the model to be facilitated by one person. Medium to large organisations will often form a small cross-functional leadership team of three or four people.

Purpose and Objectives: Be clear about the overall purpose of the exercise and set clear objectives.  For most, this will relate to assessing how well you are performing with a view to ongoing improvement.  This is summed up in the arrow at the bottom of the model “Innovation and Learning”.

Scope:  You may wish to see how you are performing as an organisation or you may be concerned about particular activities that could benefit from the evaluation.

Assess what you can and learn from what you can’t: As you design the exercise, you will soon see gaps in your performance that will help you to record areas for improvement and refine your scope.  For example, if you do not have a clear picture of your key result areas, you cannot design questions to evaluate them.  Simply note that this is an area for improvement to be taken to your action points and move onto what you can assess. In this way, you’ll focus on what you can assess and learn from what you can’t. The more advanced you are along the path of excellence, the easier it will be to conduct a full exercise.

The Approach: The starting point for most organisations in the self-assessment exercise is to gather evidence relevant to the nine criteria of the Model. This involves asking questions for each of the criteria that will tell you how good you are and how you can improve.

Strategic Focus:  Be sure to focus on the areas that will make a real difference to the organisation or activities that you are evaluating.  Look for symptoms that will lead to improvements in your leadership, strategies, policies, people, partnerships, systems and processes.

Build on what you have already: You will probably have quite a lot of information about your performance already.  This will include financial reporting, customer feedback, staff assessments and so on.  Take this into consideration and design the self-assessment around confirming key information as necessary and plugging the gaps.

Start at the results end and move backwards: Consider your results first.  This will lead you to ask the right questions that will uncover deficiencies in the enablers.  For example, if your customers are not satisfied, you will want to know why.  This can guide you to ask specific questions about your product and services strategies, your people, processes, partnerships and leadership.

Choose the right evaluation method: Evidence may take a variety of forms depending on your organisation and objectives.  Examples include questionnaires, surveys, interviews or workshops based on the model. These can be internal, external, online, phone-based or face-to-face or any combination.  Ensure that all participants clearly understand the objectives, process and their role in it.  Also, make sure they understand the importance that you place on the exercise as leader.

Don’t rush into it: The time spent getting the questions right is worth it.  Rather spend extra time up front to ensure that you collect the right information, than rush into the evaluation and then find that significant parts need to be re-done.  That having been said, do not hold back indefinitely through fear that you have not considered everything. It is a matter of striking the right balance.

Keep it simple: Make sure that the questions are clear, focused and easy to answer. Don’t ignore the obvious.  If you want to know how satisfied a customer is, ask them how satisfied they are.  Keep the length manageable so that you receive the cooperation and help you need from participants in the study.

Project Management: Run the exercise as a project with a project plan, allocation of responsibilities, regular meetings to assess progress and proper management of the scope, timeline, cost, quality, people, communication, risks and issues that may arise. Changes in scope, timing, approach and so on must be managed so all participants are  ‘on the same page’ at any point in the project.

Action Plans: Make sure that you have an efficient means of recording the results of your assessment so that you can translate your findings into actions that can be allocated, tracked and monitored.

Know when to call for help: No-one knows your business like you do.  You are therefore in the best position to understand the priorities and know what information to gather.  Along the way, you may find that you need help.  There are many tools available online as well as service providers who can assist with the process. This applies both to the assessment itself and to the improvement process.

This is just the start: Part of the logic behind the Excellence Model is regular assessment and review. Some organisations conduct annual assessments as part of their ‘business planning’ process. The road to excellent need not be as long or as steep as you may think, but even if it does take time, you will know that a good process is taking you in the right direction.

Remember, we are talking about excellence, so you want to do the job properly. This does not mean that it needs to be unnecessarily complicated, time-consuming or costly.  The better you do it, the more cost-effective the job will be and the greater the benefits you will reap for your organisation as you proceed along the path of excellence.

FBA Editor

Sources:

www.efqm.org

www.nist.gov


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