Business Excellence Model
What is the Business Excellence Model?
The Business Excellence Model is a nine-box model, originally developed by the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM). Its purpose is to "support the management of Western European organizations in accelerating the process of making quality a decisive influence for achieving global competitive advantage" (EFQM publication).
How does the Model work?
The idea is that you conduct a Self-Assessment by comparing your organization to the Model. The Model presents a plausible logic. Results - financial, customer satisfaction, people satisfaction and impact on society are achieved through acting on Enablers - leadership, policy and strategy, people management, resources and process management. By improving the ‘how’, it is argued, improved results - the ‘what’ - will follow. But how well does a Self-Assessment describe the relationships between results and enablers? Can managers act with confidence in their actions leading to improvement?
Many early users of the Model are disenchanted; they haven’t seen a rise in quality, excellence or the bottom line. This is how a director of an engineering organization spoke of her experience with Self-Assessment:
"We did what most companies would do. Some of us were trained as assessors and we did a company assessment, identified gaps, prioritized actions and so on. It was after about two years, as we were going round the cycle for the third time, that we suddenly stopped ourselves and asked what we were getting out of it. It may seem silly, but we had not thought to question it. We implicitly assumed it would be beneficial, perhaps because we were told to believe it to be so. However, when we questioned what we had been achieving, the bottom-line benefits were not obvious."
Rather than drop the use of the BEM, her management team carried on questioning what they had learned. She now advises others:
"My advice to anyone using the BEM is start with processes. We didn’t appreciate how important processes were. We now know that we didn’t get the quantum leap we were hoping for, because we went down the scoring route – Self-Assessment by comparison to the Model. We should have started with a definition of our work processes and focused on the value work – how we deliver what matters to our customers. Once we discovered these ideas we were on our way."
This is, perhaps, the most important point to emphasize. If it was to be put more broadly, the advice is that change should not start with comparison to a model, it should start thorough understanding of the ‘what and why’ of current performance.
The problem of method
Self-Assessment by comparison to the Model is an unreliable method for starting change. In so many cases I have found that it does not lead to a good understanding of what is going on in an organization – ‘how the work works’ - and hence leads managers to decisions and actions that have little or no basis in knowledge. The consequence is often plausible, but fruitless actions for improvement.
source : www.systemthinking.uk.co
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