Tecom Investments - EFQM Excellence Model Implementation - Essay Example

TECOM INVESTMENTS: EFQM EXCELLENCE MODEL IMPLEMENTATION Tecom Investments: EFQM Excellence Model Implementation Customer Name: Lecturer Name: Date: Introduction TECOM Investments is a service-based organization, in the United Arab Emirates. The Dubai based organization is a subsidiary of Dubai Holding, an international company that deals with several services. Dubai Holding is a multi-sector investment organization that deals with concerns itself with life-improving industries dedicated to knowledge acquisition and management as well as enhancement. TECOM investment is concerned with diverse sectors of the economy such as Clean Technology, Information Communication Technology, Life Sciences Education, Media and knowledge management. TECOM has gained global recognition as a leader in the knowledge industry having successfully managed globally recognised institutions such as Enpark, International Media Production Zone, Dubai Internet City, Dubai Studio City, Dubai International Academic City, Dubai Knowledge Village, DuBiotech, eHosting DataFort, Dubai Outsource Zone and Dubai Media City. The company is a creator of vibrant knowledge industry clusters, with the vision of Investing, Creating and Realizing the future of Dubai. TECOM investments values and promotes different ideals such as Environmental & Social Responsibility, Excellence, People, Commitment to Customers, Accountability and Ethics and Integrity. The investment whose mission is to positively shape the future of Dubai by integrating ecological, social and economic consideration through consistent competitive focus on business excellence, innovation, leadership development and global outreach. In order to achieve the desired organizational objectives, TECOM investments has implemented several quality management systems. The company, which values ‘Excellence’, has an all-inclusive culture of quality and excellence. The culture is exhibited in every level of the organizational structure. To achieve quality success, the organization has implemented diverse strategies. This has worn the organization several international quality and environmental certifications as well as a number of awards. The organization received the ISO 9001 certification in October 2005, and the company has maintained the certification. In the year 2007, the organization received OHSAS18001:2007 certification and ISO 14001:2004 certification. The parent company, Dubai Holdings has severally rewarded the organization through Dubai Holding Excellence Award (DHEA) launched in 2006, as well as being a nominee in the Dubai Government Excellence Programme (DGEP). The participation of TECOM Investments in EFQM excellence awards is through Dubai Holding Excellence Award. The Dubai Holding Excellence Awards is based on the EFQM criteria for Performance Excellence. TECOM investment has won a number of awards including Dubai Human Development Award in the Service Category in the year 2007. In the same year, the company won Best Entity Award, Best Policy & Strategy Award, Best HSE (Safety Office Environment) Award. The company won the Best Colleagues Satisfaction Award, Best HSE (Health, Safety & Environment) Award, Best Entity Award and the Best Customer Satisfaction Award in the year 2006. In the year 2008, the company was awarded the Emirates Energy Award. The company again won the awards in the year 2009 and 2010.   The success of the TECOM Investments has won the company several positive relationships attested by local and international joint venture interests such as Emirates International Telecommunications Limited, SmartCity, Empower, Axiom and Interoute. Organizations worldwide have implemented different excellence models in an effort to focuses on what an organisation does, or could do, to offer an excellent products or services to their stakeholders, customers, staff and service users. The European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Excellence Model is a framework for evaluating the strengths and areas for improvement of an organisation through Self-assessment while considering all the organization's activities (EFQM, 2003). EFQM is a membership network spanning several countries and sectors, regardless of the nature, structure, size and maturity of the organization. TECOM Investments implemented EFQM Excellence Model to offer a fundamental basis for the organisation's management system. EFQM also serves TECOM Investments to integrate existing and planned initiatives while identifying gaps and eliminating duplication and redundancy. Furthermore, EFQM enables the organization to evaluate their position, if they are on the path to excellence, while strategically understanding their strengths and possible gaps in relation to the organizations vision and mission. EFQM further enables the organization to enhance collaboration and communication through providing an organization wide Lingua franca and a way of thinking. EFQM was chosen from the numerous management tools and techniques, since it presents a holistic view of the organisation, while providing a means of understanding how several modules can fit together and complement each other. However, EFQM can be used in conjunction with other models. The implementation of the EFQM Excellence Model at TECOM Investments consists of three integrated components, the fundamental concepts, the criteria and the RADAR Logic. The fundamental concepts at TECOM are the values of the company namely Environmental & Social Responsibility, Excellence, People, Commitment to Customers, Accountability and Ethics and Integrity, which are an important basis for achieving sustainable excellence. The criteria are the methodologies and framework, which aids the company to convert the Fundamental Concepts and RADAR Logic into practice. The third component of EFQM implementation at TECOM is the RADAR Logic, which is a dynamic evaluation framework and powerful management instrument offering the backbone to maintain the company as mitigates the challenges it has to surmount for it to accomplish its aspiration to attain sustainable excellence. Self-assessment at TECOM Investments for implementing EFQM The main purpose of self-assessment is to evaluate the organizations position to implement and support the work on quality improvement and to quantify progress alongside the organization’s vision, mission and strategic goals. The self-assessment serves several purposes in the organization. Self-assessment reduces bureaucracy and facilitates the organization to focus resources on their core business. The self-assessment at TECOM Investments was more of a process than an occurrence. The phased assessment was aimed at ensuring that the organization achieved the quality excellence. The first undertaking in the process was developing management commitment. The success of every project depends on the endorsement and support of the management, the commitment of the management is a key factor in self-assessment (Davies, Hides & Casey, 2001). The support and approval of the parent company, Dubai Holdings was also important. The support was achieved through written communication, to all the organization’s departments. The management team was engaged in decision-making and their views were sought about their participation in the quality implementation process. . The view of the management was also important, considering that they understood the current position of the company, and support to the improvements. The commitment of the management is obtained through the approval of the plan and actions towards EFQM excellence implementation. During the initial stages of the excellence model implementation, the executive of the company and the managers discussed and agreed on the assessment process, the assessment model to be used and the services to be assessed, (Conti, 2007). The next phase during the self-assessment was the development of the communicating plans. Since self-assessment involves all the parties in the organization, everyone involved in the self-assessment have to understand the objectives of self-assessment. TECOM Investments used different ways to prepare an improvement plan and communication. The staff in each department were informed of the self-assessment, and made aware that their departments would participate in the assessment process. The interactive talk made the employees to have information that their departments were to be assessed, the reasons why the assessment was important and how the assessment was to be done. The process owners, the persons in charge of the departments were then given comprehensive plan about the self-assessment process. The head of departments were given the comprehensive self-assessment process in a general meeting. The head of the services were informed of the assessment methodology as well as the support of management throughout the process. The heads of departments were then tasked to inform the employees of their respective services about the details about the self-assessment process and as well communicate the affirmed support of the process by the management. Consequently, this stage helped in having a companywide understanding of the desired self assessment and all persons were able to understand what was to be done, the reasons as well as the purpose of the methodology In the course of self-assessment, planning the self-assessment was important while considering the various approaches that the company can implement. The current culture of the organization played a role and was taken into consideration when considering the specific Self-Assessment technique to adopt. The imperative factor considered in the methodology selection was the organization having clarity on the outcomes that TECOM investments desired to achieve, then adopting the most appropriate technique for delivering those desired outcomes. TECOM investments carried out a pilot test to learn more about more about the process, before the actual self-assessment. TECOM used the workshop approach, which engaged all levels of service delivery for the pilot test. The actual plan for self-assessment adopted the questionnaire approach, which was faster and simpler and facilitated the assessment. The questionnaire was designed according to the principles of the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Excellence Model. The questionnaire had one hundred and fifty questions, which focused on diverse areas such as policy and strategy, human resource, processes, customer results, people results, leadership, people, society results and key results, leadership as well as partnerships and resources. The important factors were ranked according to degree of importance for the service, and its degree of implementation through likert scale ranking criterion, (Van & Brown, 1999). A weighted average was calculated for each item from the results, this played a role in detecting the aspects, which were in place and those out of place, hence providing the organization view with a conceptual of the strengths and areas for improvement. Quality Assurance experts at Dubai Holdings developed the questionnaire. The questionnaire underwent several stages and revisions between the managers and the quality assurance experts, which included simplification before coming up with the final questionnaire. This phase was important towards the selection of the most appropriate method for conducting self-assessment, and consequently determination of the required resources. The next consideration before the self-assessment was the selection and training of persons directly involved in the process. Every department-seconded person to the assessment team completes the assessment process. In addition, external persons were included in the team to offer a complete identification of strengths and areas for improvement. Considering that EFQM had several components, the training of the selected persons was important as a major component of quality management. Whereas initially most of the staff were familiar with quality standards and models, most of the employees, were unfamiliar with the EFQM models. All the departments at TECOM investments were involved in the training, which was prerequisite for gaining understanding and a way of gaining employee motivation. The training sessions provided employees with a platform to be acquainted with the EFQM model and acquire a working methodology to have an in-depth knowledge on conducting self-assessment. The training focused on several issues such as EFQM excellence model fundamentals such as criteria, methodology, marking and consensus. Whereas there were challenges on understanding the initial processes by the employees, the training imparted on them knowledge on what was exactly required of them and the relevance and consequence of the training on the EFQM model implementation. Conducting self-assessment Conducting self-assessment is a consequence of several interrelated stages. TECOM Investments conducted the self-assessment through meetings of the members from various departments, training sessions and workshops. These meetings were aimed at identifying the main major stakeholders’ strengths, areas for improvement, processes and improvement actions based on information collected from varied sources, such as the questionnaire based on the EFQM model, questionnaire for the employees, and the data collected through administering questionnaires to the users as well as the information derived from the training sessions. The surveys carried out by the quality management experts served the purpose of providing an insight into satisfaction levels of the departmental representatives. In addition, self-assessment was essential to determine the company’s strengths and areas for improvement and as well offer a limelight to progress the organisation’s performance. A number of persons in each department filled the questionnaires, the results of the survey were used to list the strengths as well as areas for improvement, after which the quality personnel could then decide the improvement actions. These were captured in a tabular format: TECOM Investments Self Assessment Details 1. Introduction 1.1 Departmental seconded Members of the self-assessment committee 1.2 Service description, relevance and structure 1.3 Success critical factors, vision and Mission 1.4 Services Objectives 1.5 Stakeholders concerns 1.6 Process mapping The members were able to understand the fundamental requirements and develop the following sections 2 Survey results analysis 2.1 Population and sample 2.2 Data collection process Departments were handed in the surveys. Surveys analysed by a quality management team expert and results send back to departments. This was important to give the users varied views of defining strengths, areas for improvement and improvement actions 3 Identification of the strengths, areas for improvement and improvement actions Using the results from the surveys, team members filled the section. 4. Improvement plan Based on the findings of the previous section, the improvement plan drafted which contained several attributes of the desired improvement action: resources person responsible task, time and follow-up. Each department could identify the areas, which concerned it. 5. Appendices Extra content not included in the main text of the self-assessment. After the training of trainers at TECOM Investments, the heads of the various departments met with the quality management experts as well as the representatives of the executive Board. The quality management team visited every department were the persons in those departments were given questionnaires. The staff in the departments were also given chance to ask questions in order to understand the detailed view of the department or the service. The next stage was establishing an action plan. According to (Samuelsson & Nilsson, 2002), self-assessment is only deemed to have been sufficiently done after the executive management is given and improvement plan. This therefore is a very important stage. Accordingly, failing to hand the executive management the improvement plan jeopardizes the whole activity since the improvement actions may not be implemented, resulting to process failure. The improvement plan suggested by every team was scrutinised by every team member, to understand their opinions and concerns as suggested by (Ford & Evans, 2006). Furthermore, the staffs who headed the department under which the service was, was expected to approve the improvement plan, before it proceed to the next level. The quality management team then critically analyses the self-report. The project manager then closes the self-reporting stages, so that the implementation can begin. From the analysis by the EFQM assessors, TECOM investments developed and action plan based on the identified strengths and areas of improvement. The plan consisted of tasks to be developed, starting-ending date, person(s) responsible for the development, task to be developed, indicators of progress, improvement actions to be implemented, resource requirements and implementing action plans (Tarí, 2006). After securing the approval of the executive, the heads of departments and people responsible for each service reported to the quality manager and the top management. It is imperative that some review had to be carried out, to determine the position of the company in implementing the quality systems. The monitoring was carried enhanced by the Management-approved improvement actions. The review involved intermittently monitoring the degree of implementation of the actions proposed at TECOM investments. Processes had to be streamlined while implementing the EFQM Excellence model TECOM investments already had quality systems, which share several similarities with EFQM. Therefore, a minimum set of activities were immensely altered. However, there are a host of activities, which were altered to foster the implementation of the EFQM excellence model. The company however had to streamline some processes according to the Eight Basic Rules of Excellence. Considering results orientation, the company changed the reporting process its business parks, such as Dubai Internet City, Dubai Media City, Dubai Knowledge Village and Dubai Outsource zone and in its subsidiaries to be result oriented focussed. Actions were gauged against its consequences and results. Furthermore, the company implemented change management concepts. The process streamlining incorporated methodologies that fostered effecting, accepting and integrating change by the team members (Sandbrook, 2001). TECOM Investments also streamlined its focus to concentrate on service and the client. The employees at the company were encouraged to view service delivery from the perspective of the customers and clients. The streamlining also involved enhancing the entire process by examining and fixing the individual steps process. The company also streamlined the process of innovation, continuous learning and improvement through effecting change and challenging the status quo through continuous learning, which fostered innovation and improvement opportunities (Clavo-Mora, & Roldán, 2006). How TECOM Investments tackled the issue of people satisfaction Implementation of the EFQM excellence model affected different people in the organization. These people had different needs therefore the company had to adopt different ways to satisfy the different persons. (Williams, et.al, 2006). There were customers, employees and the management who were to be satisfied. Employee satisfaction was relevant since it affected Productivity, Performance, and Customer Satisfaction. Considering that, TECOM investments has several subsidiaries and parks, and is it owned by Dubai holdings, there were several persons who were to be satisfied in order to successfully implement the EFQM excellence model. To achieve people satisfaction, the company educated the employees on the importance of implementing the EFQM excellence model. The employees were part of the implementing team and their concerns and issues raised are addressed promptly to the employee’s satisfaction. In addition, the company implemented comprehensive employee recognition program, where positive performers were rewarded. The company also promoted positive attitudes through considering the persons in the company’s strategic goals. This enabled the employees to feel as part of the team, and be motivated to be more productive. The company also promoted people satisfaction through having a strong leadership from the management team. During the entire EFQM excellence model implementation, the management were at the forefront while enhancing the confidence in senior management’s abilities. The company also endured that there was two-way communication between managers and employees, regular performance feedback, and having a pleasant atmosphere and workplace as presented by (Waugh, 2002). References Ahmed, A. M., YANG, J. B. & Dale, B. G. (2003). Self-assessment methodology: The route to business excellence. Quality Management Journal, 10(1), 43-57. Clavo-Mora, A., Leal, A. & Roldán, J. L. (2006). Using enablers of the EFQM model to manage institutions of higher education. Quality Assurance in Education, 14(2), 99-122. Conti, T. A. (2007). A history and review of the European quality award model. The TQM Magazine, 19(2), 112-12 EFQM. (2003). 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