What is an assessment for and when is it good?
The aim of the assessment is to determine how “fit” your organization is in competition. You should also receive useful inspiration on how to improve your fitness can continue to improve. Many organizations also simply want official recognition or a Certificate of Success. But that alone is a shame, because this attitude wastes a lot of potential benefits.
Since an assessment involves time and effort, it is worthwhile generating as much benefit as possible. Whether you strive for this and succeed is entirely up to you. Typical potential benefits of an assessment are as follows:
Assessment
An assessment provides you with a clear snapshot of how well your organization is positioned. It shows you where you currently stand and how far away you are from your goals – like a map showing the best route to success.
Valuable tips for improvements
An assessment is a great opportunity to gather new ideas and impulses on how to strengthen your own organization. The assessors make specific suggestions to help you develop your potential.
Meeting external requirements
Some industries and projects require you to demonstrate that you have completed an assessment to meet standards. This demonstrates responsibility and professionalism.
Benchmarking
A comparison with other organizations, which is made possible by an assessment, shows how you perform in the market environment. This often provides valuable information on what makes competitors successful and which best practices you can adopt yourself.
Motivating employees
A good assessment can inspire your employees because it shows recognition for their achievements and the organization’s potential to become even better together.
Prestige and recognition
Many organizations value the official ratings, such as stars or prizes, that can be awarded for a successful assessment. These are not just symbols, but strengthen the image and increase the attractiveness of the organization.
During an assessment, trained experts, known as assessors, visit you. During the on-site visit, the assessor team primarily wants to understand your organization. The assessors want to get a picture of how systematically you do your work in your day-to-day work and how much benefit you achieve with it. To do this, they will talk to you and inspect selected work documents as well as information and data systems.
To ensure that the assessors do not proceed arbitrarily, they use a fixed framework for their work. You do not need to know the framework itself. It is the assessors’ job to translate the framework into your context and express it in a language that is understandable to all participants. What will help you a lot for the assessment and your work, however, is if you know the principles of “business excellence“, which are also the foundation of the assessors’ framework.
The aim of the assessors is to gain a neutral and fair picture of the situation, evaluate your current state of development and provide motivating impulses for effective improvements in the future.
The task of the assessors is not to reproduce individual opinions, point the finger at weaknesses or advise the organization.
