Overview

I have spent a fortune travelling to distant shores and looked at lofty mountains and boundless oceans, and yet I haven't found time to take a few steps from my house to look at a single dew drop on a single blade of grass.

Rabindranath Tagore

Travellers accept that even if they have a good road map with landmarks and milestones they will get lost if they do not know where they are. In the quest for operational excellence the first task is to carry out a health check of your organization. A health check is not an audit. Audits are usually formal, conducted by experts external to the organization. A health check, on the other hand, is a less formal self-assessment conducted by people from within the organization.

In previous chapters we have described the six pillars of an organization and the 20 underpinning foundation stones. We have developed 200 questions - 10 questions for each foundation - for carrying out a self-assessment health check of an organization (see the Appendix).

The traditional assessment processes, such as ISO, MBNQA or EFQM, are usually carried out as audits by external consultants while a health check by 200 questions is designed to be conducted by an internal team of the organization. We believe that there are substantial benefits to be gained from designing your own benchmarking or health check process rather than following a consulting firm's standards. We are not suggesting that you should reinvent the wheel, rather we explain...