D&D News March 2007: some of our recent Excellence work
Tailoring our approach
We were delighted to be asked to help a firm in the insurance industry through their first self-assessment using the Excellence Model. The company is looking for further growth, and it felt that undertaking a self-assessment now could help it build on sound foundations by identifying its key Strengths and addressing Areas for Improvement.
We adapted our approach to undertake a short 'friendly site visit' involving interviews with the company's internal suppliers, as this was an area where the management particularly wanted unbiased, independent, feedback. The other people in the Group were pleased to be able to help out their colleagues, and the discussions gave some valuable insights which we were able to feed into the consensus. They intend to self-assess again at the end of the year to determine the progress made and ascertain the success of the various improvement actions.
Three strengths from the evaluation of the self-assessment reflected some of the key benefits of this sort of exercise:
- The Excellence Model seemed to be a robust methodology to lead a good structured debate around business excellence
- Prompting thinking around things we might take for granted
- Realising how we all look at the same things from different angles
If you want to see other examples of the way we work with the Excellence Model, don't forget that we have included on this site a number of case studies.
Some other work
Dave has continued his involvement into 2007 with the public sector organisation which occupied his time during the latter part of 2006. This innovative approach to supplier selection and alliancing has recently reached the end of one phase (with Dave having carried out, as part of the team, eleven assessments) and he is waiting to learn when the next phase will start.
Derek has been involved in further Investors in Excellence and Recognised for Excellence assessments on behalf of the BQF, for relatively large organisations and involving longer site visits. In each case, the site visit experience seems to have been well received by the applicant's people as well as enabling Derek to get a good sense of the deployment of approaches across various units.
One site visited was in Swansea, where Derek stayed in The Towers Hotel. Not only is it a nice hotel, but the tower shown in the picture here was originally built in the 1860s as a 'camera obscurer' - very appropriate in view of Derek's sometimes obscure pictures from his own camera!
He has also done some assessment work again with our friend Mike Curry. Mike left the wilds of west Dorset and headed to the wilds of west Kent for the consensus meeting. We treated Mike to some more D&D hospitality, including short visits to two local micro-breweries and tasting some beers that were new to him. It was great that Julie and Gary Tite, well-known Excellence Model supporters from Sussex, were also able to join us for an evening get-together. A good time was had by all, and Mike's client was pleased with the feedback, so in management-speak it was a win-win situation for all!
