Managing Quality

Chapter 24. Self-Assessment, Models and Quality Awards

B. G. Dale, A. van der Wiele and J. D. van Iwaarden

Introduction

If a process of continuous improvement is to be sustained and its pace increased it is essential that organizations monitor on a regular basis what activities are going well, which have stagnated, what needs to be improved and what is missing. Self-assessment provides the framework for generating this type of feedback about an organization's approach to continuous improvement. It helps to satisfy the natural curiosity of management as to where their organization stands with respect to the development of TQM.^[1] Self-assessment against the criteria of a quality award/excellence model on which evaluation and diagnostics can be based is now being given a considerable amount of attention by organizations throughout the world. The main reason for this increasing interest is the MBNQA, introduced in America in 1987, and the EQA, introduced in Europe in 1991. The criteria of these awards encapsulate a comprehensive and holistic management model covering its various activities, practices and processes, and provide the mechanism for quantifying an organization's current state of TQM development by means of a points score. There are many definitions of self-assessment provided by writers such as Conti (1993, 1997) and Hillman (1994), but an all-embracing definition is provided by the EFQM (1999):

Self-assessment is a comprehensive, systematic and regular review of an organization's ...