Monthly Archives: December 2017

In our days, public organizations come under severe criticism for offering poor value for the taxpayer’s money and less bureaucracy is on the tongue of almost every citizen making eloquent the need for these organizations to get out of their status quo and become more efficient and responsive.

It is further understood that excellence is not the sole province of businesses and that no more can it be considered a strange issue for public organizations. Excellence is also equally important for the public organizations.

It is for this reason that EIPA (European Institute of Public Administration) has launched its own instrument of Excellence, the Common Assessment Framework (CAF) specifically developed for the public sector. Here, following, are a few words about CAF with the intent to introduce it to those that have not come across it before:

CAF translates to the public sector the concepts of excellence as defined by EFQM aiming at orienting the public organizations toward Total Quality.
Like the EFQM model, it has 9 Criteria very similar in name with those of EFQM, presented in a diagram as Enablers and Results, but their explanatory content is adjusted to reflect the concerns of public organizations. Each criterion is analyzed into sub-criteria (28 in total) which are explained and each is illustrated by examples.
The model includes a scoring and self-assessment stage aiming at discovering strengths and areas of improvement and the linked improvement actions. While for self-assessment EFQM adopts the philosophy of RADAR, CAF adopts Deming’s cycle of PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) against which the sub-criteria and criteria are assessed. Further, the user organization is allowed, according to its degree of maturity, to choose between two PDCA assessment panels: (a) the simpler classical scoring [...]

In search of excellence, many organizations are discovering that there is no single Holy Grail to seize and that excellence comes from work on a set of organizational critical issues that, furthermore, must be appropriately combined in scope and depth if they are to yield the desired results.

This holistic approach to organizational issues is addressed by a number of Management Models or Programs. Each model envelops what it considers as critical organizational issues and then, to a greater or lesser extent, goes on to describe and explain them. Examples of these are the Viable System Model, Mckinsey 7S, ISO 9004, the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, TQM and of course EFQM Excellence Model and CAF (The EFQM model adjusted for Public Organizations).

The EFQM Excellence Model, like a true TQM tool, has two important features: it is customer-centric, and it is a self-assessing tool. The latter builds into the organization the continuous improvement while the latter puts to the front not what the organization offers but what its internal and external customers/stakeholders receive i.e. the emphasis is not on the service but on the perception and experience.

The EFQM Model is basically a business management model to help organizations achieve excellence by offering them guidance and assessment toward that goal and has 3 components:

(a)    The Fundamental Concepts which serve as the underlying principles of the model

(b)   The Criteria that constitute the organizational issues and serve as focal areas to collect the necessary guidance points and actions which the model expands and explains. They are divided into two groups: Enablers and Results. Every criterion is broken down into a number of, usually 4 or 5, parts that consist of typical behaviors from excellent companies.

(c)    The RADAR that offers [...]