Case Study
Customer
London & Quadrant (L&Q) Housing Association
Customer's main objective
- To carry out their first organisation-wide self-assessment against the EFQM Excellence Model
- they had used other mechanisms to review various parts of the group, and now wanted to look at the group overall against a demanding framework of excellence
Feedback comments
For views on this work with L&Q, go to (in a new browser window) the article in Public Sector Benchmarking Service News Summer 2005
Approach
- We developed a process to combine the use of our own Excellence questionnaire, a short site visit incorporating discussion groups with a number of people, and a facilitated self-assessment workshop.
Outcomes/benefits
- Use of outputs from our questionnaire as inputs to the workshop allowed perceptions from people outside of the self-assessment team to be seen
- Identified a range of specific Areas for Improvement and themes for prioritisation and action
- Gave an opportunity to feed our own independent views from site visit into the self-assessment workshop. This sometimes threw up new issues, and at other times supported the self-assessors' views. But because they were input to the workshop process, they were discussed and the decisions owned by the organisation.
- Gave a relatively low-resource opportunity to test the benefits of the EFQM Excellence Model in the Association. This experience is informing the debate on how to use the Model further.
Summary of our role
- Designing the self-assessment process based on the Association's objectives, including use of a questionnaire by a small sample of people, and short site visit/discussions sessions.
- Delivering training to the 30 people who were to complete the questionnaire, some of whom were also the self-assessors
- the questionnaire is intended to help discussions in the workshop more than to provide a statistically robust 'answer'
- Short site visits to two locations, identifying issues to input to the consensus workshop
- Facilitating the self-assessment workshop
- Creating the feedback document for the Association to use in their usual prioritisation and improvement planning.
