There are many definitions of Business Excellence and models exist that will help your organisation move towards it. Examples are:

• The European Foundation for Quality Model
• Business Excellence Model (used by industry)
• European Excellence Model (used by public sector services)
• The Malcolm Baldrige Award scheme
• Oliver Wight's ABCD Model for Operational Excellence

What do you mean by the term Business Excellence? What does Business Excellence mean to your organisation? What does Business Excellence mean to your employees? What does Business Excellence mean to your customers?

If you have not attempted to answer these questions you may well be talking about the concept of excellence in vain. Business Excellence is not something that you can be vague about, it is measurable and more to the point the excellence of your business is measured by you, your employees and your customers all the time, consciously and sub-consciously. You know, for example, which restaurants you prefer or which television programmes you want to watch. You may not have a quantifiable method of defining why but you have made a comparison between your favoured things and those you like less. Business Excellence differs from that because the opportunity exists to measure the degree of excellence in your business in real quantifiable ways. You can do this periodically to chart your progress or you can benchmark yourself against other friendly organisations or even the competition:

•Know what excellence means to you.
•Understand where you are now in relation to it
•Plot a path towards achieving excellence
•Easy!

Regardless of sector, size, structure or maturity, to be successful your organisation needs to establish an appropriate management system. The Excellence model is a practical tool which helps you to do this by measuring where you are on the path to Excellence, helping you to understand the gaps and then to stimulate and deliver solutions.

Using this tool, your organisation can assess whether it is doing the right things and getting the right results. The ensuing assessment of your performance is measured both by results and by the quality of the processes and systems developed to achieve them.

The National Directorate and all local areas are required to undertake an annual self-assessment against the European Excellence Model (EEM) from 1st April 2001. You must also deliver the requirements of the Government’s Better Quality Services (BQS) initiative from 1st April 2001.

As with CPA, issues surrounding the European Excellence Model (EEM) relate, not only to how the assessment is undertaken, but also to the way that the ‘key areas for improvement’ are identified within your organisation and then actioned.

A management methodology therefore must be implemented to ensure that those improvements are actually carried through and that they can genuinely be reflected in any subsequent assessment of your organisation.

Whether you use one of the models listed above or want to develop your own methodology we can help you steer a path towards excellence and the consequent improvement of your business.

Driving Excellence aims to provide the basis for that management methodology, with the provision of comprehensive modules on the Government’s Better Quality Services (BQS), Programme Management and Process Management. These modules include learning sets, workshops and training. Limited consultancy advice may be required over a period of time.

Driving Excellence is based on our comprehensive experience in both the commercial and public sectors, including the Probation Service, and improves your performance, adds value and reduces your costs.

Driving Excellence aims to provide information to all those involved in these requirements. It also helps you to understand how improved processes and systems can be followed through from an initial EEM assessment to programme and process solutions. This will greatly enable all aspects of the National Service to engage with the implications of BQS.

Better Quality Services (BQS)
The purpose of fundamental reviews is to provide Better Quality Services for customers/users at optimal cost to taxpayers.

The essential elements of a BQS review are:- clear definition of service or activity; consideration of the options; identification of best supplier; results managed through a service level agreement or contract.

The EEM can be used effectively as an underpinning framework for Better Quality Services. The value of the Excellence Model is its comprehensive diagnostic capability and the role it plays in informing, planning and managing continuous improvement. The use of evidence to identify areas for improvement and promotion of continual improvement are functions clearly necessary for Better Quality Services.

Driving Excellence will provide a comprehensive framework and the specialist techniques you need to achieve the planning, management and continuous improvement necessary to meet the BQS requirements.
Process Management.

Processes are the main arteries of an organisation and carry the service delivery to the ultimate recipient. Each process is the string of activities that provide the value of the delivered service. Unless processes are both managed and improved, then scoring within the EEM will not progress year-on-year.

Managing a process means understanding it in detail, identifying its value-adding elements and delivering these with less wasteful effort in a shorter time.

Improving a process requires the people within your organisation to identify the waste and eliminate it. Such an ongoing exercise of continuous improvement often requires a considerable culture change within an organisation. Driving Excellence can assist with the changes required in your organisation to achieve effective process management.

Process maps must be produced that are accepted by all your staff as being a representation of the existing processes. Whilst it may be tempting to have an expert produce these, in practice maps produced by your own staff under expert guidance are far more acceptable and likely to engage the very people who will need to improve the processes in the future. They are usually much more cost effective too.

Once the framework and documentation are established, an improvement approach is defined. This should involve those of your staff who are involved with the process – but to achieve their concerted effort, appropriate training needs to be given. This training must form an integral part of the leadership objectives implicit in the Excellence Model.

It is the elimination of micro-waste and detailed delays that cumulatively lead to significant improvement – hence the need to ensure that each small initiative is aligned to your organisational objectives. Once started, this approach is well proven to support Driving Excellence.

An unprecedented influx of change will have the effect of overwhelming the best intentioned people unless the changes are carefully identified, prioritised, segmented and planned.

Driving Excellence offers a management framework into which all the changes you need to make can be incorporated, ensuring nothing gets missed. Using Product Based Planning, the end result of improved service delivery is broken down into its component parts. This makes the development of each part more manageable and controllable.

Each part or product is then defined and scheduled. The essential task of resourcing is undertaken with a level of knowledge of the overall requirement and timescale, whilst allowing for your current workload. Both internal and external resources can be identified, together with the estimated costs.

Priorities may need to be adjusted to suit the resources you have available and to fit in with timescales driven by outside authorities. This will allow for some “quick wins” which will provide incentives and enthusiasm for your staff to progress in other areas.

Medium and longer term initiatives, which will include some of your improvement projects that may not be fully met for several years, can all be included and managed effectively.

Once planned your programme is carefully monitored to ensure progress is being achieved and maintained. The initial definition of the product is used as a template against which the finished product is judged. When it meets the criteria laid down, its completion is clearly evident.

Additional requirements, or changes to the current requirements, can be handled through effective change management with consequential changes to your plan being made as necessary. This approach will allow you to derive excellence from a wide range of activities all targeted at the same overall result.

Effective Programme Management is, therefore, the key organisational tool for Driving Excellence.

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