Improvement process RATING- indicator of your success efforts

The following is prepared to assist in "rating" the 17 step process within the client's organization. Purpose of the rating is to have a relative indication of the efforts as part of the process towards success. As such, this rating instrument can be an important means of communication.

The implementation/improvement process meant here is directed at improving an organization, through the development and implementation of a "standing plan" or plans to which I also refer as the "management system" or the management system elements. Although dealing with specific problems or projects ("single use plans") is really outside the scope of this scoring system, it is felt that a major part of the 17 steps would also apply on these limited time projects.

Putting value factors of Process Steps

Setting up an improvement process rating system was not really a difficult issue. I started with the 17 steps - see below - and assigned a value of 100 points to the entire process. Then I divided these 100 points over the 17 steps, the way I saw it. This is shown in the table below as the maximum value for each step. After that I developed criteria for each of the steps to make it possible to score the actual efforts of a company between zero and the maximum value. 

The score provided by the improvement process rating system is arbitrary and not based on any scientific or validated grounds. So as a user, you may wish to alter the numbers as you prefer. A total score can be obtained by adding up the individual step scores. The maximum is 100 points. If the total score is substantially less than 100, that may indicate that important issues are missing - the individual step score will indicate where additional action may be required.

Interdependancy of steps 

Using the scoring system as shown in the table, one could score each step on its own merits.

However, a (close to) maximum score is required for certain steps or combination to allow (full) scoring of some other steps in the process or of the process entirely. For example: the process can only succeed if the proper basis, in the form of leadership from the top (to include steps 1, 2 and 3 ) is there. Therefore my argument is if the total score of the first three steps is less than maximum, the score of other steps may have to be reduced or even eliminated. Obviously, if step 15 is not done, the score of the entirety will be reduced to zero. For this reason I added additional scoring opportunities to the original method to allow reduction of the total score if the scoring in specific steps or combination would be less than maximum.

My book contains the rating system in more detail, including the criteria to score each step between zero and maximum. The book also gives the additional scoring method to indicate interdependency of various steps.