Improvement Plan Results

 Basic Business Cents

A Community Performance Improvement Plan for Small Business

MONTH ELEVEN: RESULTS

All the effort put into this Community Performance Improvement is of little value unless the organizations have obtained desired results. It should be of little surprise that of the 1000 possible points on the self-assessment, 450 of them are assigned to the Results category. This section examines your organization’s performance and improvement outcomes in all key areas-leadership, product and process, customer, financial, workforce, and market. The major elements of the Results category to be analyzed are:

·      Product and Process Outcomes: What are your product performance and process effectiveness results?

o   Customer-Focused Product and Process Results

o   Operational Process Effectiveness Results

§  Operational Effectiveness

§  Emergency Preparedness

o   Strategy Implementation Results

·      Customer-Focused Outcomes: What are your customer-focused performance results?

o   Customer-Focused Results

§  Customer Satisfaction

§  Customer Engagement

·      Workforce-Force Outcomes: What are your workforce-focused performance results?

o   Workforce Results

§  Workforce Capability and Capacity

§  Workforce Climate

§  Workforce Engagement

§  Workforce Deployment

·      Leadership and Governance Outcomes: What are your senior leadership and governance results?

o   Leadership, governance, and societal responsibility results

§  Leadership

§  Governance

§  Law and Regulation

§  Ethics

§  Society

·      Financial and Market Outcomes: What are your financial and marketplace performance results?

o   Financial and Market Results

§  Financial Performance

§  Marketplace Performance

After completion of the self-assessment on this category, the participants can add their scores from the previous categories to obtain their total score. For comparison purposes, beginning organizations in performance improvement activities should expect to be in the 200 range, really good companies in the 500 range, and world-class organizations score in the 700 range. Where else can you score 50% on a test and feel good about it? This only proves none of us are perfect and we all have a lot of opportunities for improvement.

The essence of the results category is monitoring and reporting the status of the quality improvement initiative.  Measurements help accomplish several important things,

• Define specific opportunities for improvement and focus attention on corrective action
• Create standards for comparison and monitoring improvement

The self-assessments conducted during the year reflect the opinion of the attendees at the time and hopefully they have learned more as the year progressed. Now it is time to take the self-assessment process back to the rest of the organization. A Performance Profile manual will be distributed to the attendees with instructions on how to facilitate a self-assessment by the leadership team of their organization as homework for the next session.

The Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Dana Commercial Credit Corporation stated after winning the Baldrige Award in 1996, “One of the big things about this process is you measure everything and you find you’re not quite as good as what you thought you were. But more importantly, you find out specifically the areas you need to improve.”