Clear overall themes emerged that in many cases challenged the senior managers' perceptions of where their relative strengths and issues lay.
Priorities
Our client was a diverse business serving a number of significant public sector organisations. Common across all sectors was a growing demand from their clients to raise service levels and performance based on the concepts of business excellence. Our client was driving to achieve top three supplier positions in each of its sectors with an overall strategy to exploit business excellence as a driver for change.
A number of Sector Divisions had started to work with business excellence driven by their own particular market forces. However, the maturity of implementation differed markedly across the organisation and there was as yet no overall strategic approach to integrate the effort.
TRIMENTIS were invited to lead an assessment of all Divisions in order to help establish a business wide picture of the organisation against business excellence. Results from the assessments would be fed into Divisional and Group level strategic plans. A priority for the organisation was to develop a high level of shared understanding about business excellence amongst the senior management teams as the basis for a commitment to a consistent leadership effort.
Results
Thirteen one-day assessments were completed for all Sector Divisions each receiving a comprehensive report on their standing against the EFQM Excellence Model, together with insightful recommendations on their strengths and opportunities for improvement, and indicative scores for each Division and the Group.
Clear overall themes emerged that in many cases challenged the senior managers’ perceptions of where their relative strengths and issues lay, enabling a better informed approach to strategic and operational planning to take place.
Senior managers were assisted in developing their understanding of the fundamental concepts of business excellence, together with a developing appreciation of how to implement the concepts in practical yet rigorous ways.
The organisation was able to develop an integrated approach to the overall implementation of business excellence, enabling them to convey their improvement efforts to clients through various channels including tenders and proposals, programme meetings and client led supplier assessments.
Approach
TRIMENTIS delivered an approach using our QUALIFIER assessment methodology. This workshop approach is recommended for organisations in the early stages of working with business excellence. Our Assessors and Senior Assessors have considerable experience having worked all over Europe in assessing a wide range of public and private sector organisations.
A series of workshops were each attended by the Sector Director, their senior management teams and functional support managers. The option to include a cross section of staff from throughout each Directorate was thought to be inappropriate given the early stage in their excellence development. Workshops were designed to help senior managers learn about the fundamental concepts and practical application of business excellence.
Workshops were whole day events and attendees were supplied with a workbook prior to the day, helping to ensure they arrived prepared. The workshop agenda included an overview of business excellence followed by a step-by-step enquiry into the nine sections of the EFQM Excellence Model. Identification and evaluation of evidence of the organisation’s effectiveness against the model was then developed and scored through facilitator lead conversations. Our pc based QUALIFIER workshop tool enabled teams to maintain a shared visibility of the evidence cited, its evaluation and scoring in real time.
As an outcome of each workshop, a report was developed by our Assessor for each group highlighting their organisation’s strengths and areas for improvement together with an overall score with a breakdown for each of the sections of the model. A consolidated report was developed as input to the overall Business Excellence planning exercise and the group level Strategic Plan.
Testimonial
We were impressed that they managed to get nearly 100% attendance at the review meetings although certain findings have not sat well with some of our senior managers. This feels like a really good opportunity to kick-start our efforts.
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