Organisational Appraisal – The short cut to effective business development

What is an Organisational Appraisal?

An Organisational Appraisal is a process which can look at an organisation and appraise it in a given context. Some tools appraise an organisation in preparation of an award (for example, EFQM, Business Excellence, Baldridge, Investors in People etc) others look at the performance of an organisation in preparation for a buy-out/ buy-in, raising venture capital etc.

The Business Improvement Review is an Organisational Appraisal tool with the purpose of identifying developmental opportunities for the business or organization as a whole. A holistic approach.

The Term Organisational Appraisal is the activity and the Business Improvement Review (BIR) is a tool to deliver an appraisal.

The Business Improvement Review

The Business Improvement Review is a stand-alone organisational appraisal/ situational assessment that allows you to find out how your current business stands as perceived by key stakeholders associated with your business.

It allows you and the management team, in one quick and easy step, to determine:

• How effective are your business systems?
• How consistently are policies & procedures followed?
• How effective are your leaders and what is their contribution?
• How effectively are your strategies determined and implemented?
• Are you effective in getting the best out of all your people?
• How well do you look after all your resources & assets, not just the cash flow?
• Are your processes truly customer friendly?
• Do you monitor the views of your stakeholders, and what are they telling you?
• Are your results as good as they should be?

When to Use the Business Improvement Review

The BIR can be used at any time to obtain a snapshot view of the state of the organisation. The occasions when this might be useful include:

• When the organisation seems to be going through a bad spell relative to its competitors and need to identify areas where things are not going right
• To assess the state of a poorly performing department or subsidiary
• To assess the state of a high performance department or division to identify what they are doing well and identify best practices that could be shared with the rest of the organisation
• As a basis for an on-going performance improvement initiative
• To provide a standard tool for obtaining some information that can be used for internal bench-marking or against other organisations, competitors, or partners

How Does It Work And What Does It Cost?

You can become accredited to use the process in your own organisation or use it with clients.

Facilitated Assessment

1) We will hold an introductory meeting lasting about 2 hours with the Sponsor and, if desired, the senior management team to discuss:

• The background to the assessment
• The assessment survey process
• The respondent community (typically employees but can include suppliers & customers)
• How the assessment is to be explained to the respondents
• The feedback and reporting options

2) We will facilitate a workshop at your premises with strategic decision making managers, which will last approximately 3 hours for up to 10 people to explain and capture their appraisal of the organisations performance in a range of areas.

3) Staff & other managers will be provided with access information to complete a short (20 minute) internet based data capture process.
Optionally we can operate facilitated workshops at your premises, each of approximately 2 hours for up to 25 people at a time, to capture data – this is an additional cost as it is not usually required and part of the standard service.

4) We will summarise the qualitative parts of the assessment and present you with a report of the results in a meeting lasting approximately 2 hours.

The cost to you could be as little as £199 per review.

We are also able to offer a full tailoring service e.g. so that the Reviews use your own logos, as well as variety of other options for presenting the results. (Prices by negotiation depending on the work required.)

Why Use RapidBI?

The advantages that we bring to the process include:

• Our knowledge and experience of organisations, and a range of practical models, allow us to create a tailored offering to meet your organisation’s presentation standards and terminology.
• Our 8 years of experience in using this diagnostic process built upon over 50 years of consulting and business adviser experience.

The Organisational Appraisal can be entirely stand-alone or can form part of an integrated Business Improvement Process where we use the outputs from the BIR assessment as a baseline for a full improvement programme. The process includes providing facilitation in workshops to identify improvement projects linked to your strategic goals and helping you in their implementation, including if required, developing your people through a full training and consulting programme in conjunction with appropriate specialists to meet your specific business needs.

Why undertake a process of business improvement?

It may have been said a thousand times before but organisations no longer have the option of standing still; the operating environment has increasingly higher demands whether as paying customers or as beneficiaries of not-for-profit organisations. This rate of change is not a transient phenomenon that will slow down soon; technology and expectations will continue to rise for the foreseeable future. The pressure of changes means that organisations themselves must continually adapt and improve their products and services so that they can meet the expectations of customers and other stakeholders.

In order to address the wide raft of competing pressures, as time does not permit each issue to be addressed when they occur, organisations need to have an improvement framework that enables them to constantly change in line with current and anticipated future demands. The framework must address all areas of the organisation and because of cost pressures needs to be structured enough to be certifiable but yet flexible enough to be useful.

The advantages of a widely accepted and structured improvement framework include:

• A fact based approach to assessing and measuring the state of an organisation
• The creation of a common language and understandable approach to improvement
• The integration of individual initiatives under a common heading
• The ability to undertake comparisons with previous performance in areas others than sales and profit
• The ability to undertake comparisons with other organisations

Introduction to the RapidBI – Business Improvement Process

This describes the Business Improvement Review (Organisational Appraisal Process) that is based on the work of Durham University Business School’s Growth Model.

The process is applicable to all types of organisations, and consists of three fundamental stages:

1) Knowledge – an assessment of the current state of the organisation
2) Understanding – a review of the future state of the organisation
3) Action – moving the organisation from its current state to its desired future state

Each stage is managed by the client with assistance from the Business Improvement review process. In the first two stages this assistance takes the form of facilitation to help the organisation to form its own views of where it is now and where it needs to get to. In stage three this is about people in the business taking responsibility for the desired actions with an appropriate level of assistance from outside the business if appropriate. This may or may not include advice, consultancy or training.

This may if required, lead to a repetition of the process at an appropriate point in the future to measure performance to date, re-appraise progress and implement a revised or re-tuned action plan ensuring progress to the desired goals of the business. Effectively introducing an organisational improvement cycle.

Appraising the Organization

The Business Improvement Review is an Organisational Appraisal based upon the PRIMO-F model. This Review (Appraisal) is used as a basis for the business to assess its status against these principles of best practice as laid down in the Model. The initial cycle therefore starts with this baseline appraisal and ‘ends’ with another appraisal that in turn becomes the starting point for the next cycle.

The Business Improvement Review is not:

• Praise, or criticism, of the history or current position of the organisation
• A consultant’s opinion of the organisation

The BIR is:

• A snapshot at a point in time
• An appraisal of the state of the organisation, by the organisation

The Business Improvement Review process is concerned with assisting organisations to improve themselves irrespective of their starting position. The organisation therefore needs to decide how they wish to apply the BIR including:

• The degree to which each criterion is applicable across individual sections of the organisation
• The levels, within the organisational staffing hierarchy, that are involved in the process.

The senior management team alone can take the BIR, or the process can involve everybody within the organisation; it can even be used at a departmental level. The more ‘levels’ involved the more informed the results.

The Review takes the form of a structured survey within each of the criterion of the model with the person completing the survey identifying the degree to which they agree or disagree with the various statements. Their views are also sought to determine what they feel are the organisation’s ‘Strengths’ and ‘Areas for Improvement’ under each heading.

The Business Improvement Review does not make any value judgments in respect of any of the responses.

Reviewing the Small Organisation

Where there is a limited number strategic managers (owner/ manager or partnership) the process we use to collect data and the type of initial data collected is slightly different from a team managed business. In this situation it is vital that all staff are involved in the data capture process along with any operational managers in the business – otherwise we end up with just the view from one person and this can lead to in-appropriate action plans

Planning

The Business Improvement Review (organisational appraisal), although it can be an end in itself, provides a basis for planning how the organisation can take advantage of their Strengths and address any required actions.

The BIR process helps the business to identify (proposed) priorities as well as areas for consideration of action.

The BIR process does not produce a report – but a document that acts as a focus for discussion in the business.

Re-Appraising

This is a repeat of the initial appraising step. If requested by the organisation, any further review carried out will include a section showing progress from the previous appraisal. This re-appraisal is a form of benchmarking activity

** prices correct as at 1/1/15 and may be subject to change.

Organizational appraisal page reviewed June 2015