Thursday, June 08, 2006

Starting In Earnest

As promised, I received my Missouri Quality Award examiner packet yesterday afternoon via FedEx. As I mentioned earlier, confidentiality forbids me from saying anything about the applicant to anyone. It really ticks my wife off. But, there are sound reasons for keeping applicants' information confidential unless the applicant chooses to divulge it themselves. Of course, if they win the award, they're obligated to share their stories. But for now, loose lips sink ships.



I will say that my applicant is in an entirely new industry for me. That's part of the beauty of the system. They get reviewed by examiners who have no preconceived notions. It makes the award system very fair. It also gives me an opportunity to learn about business through an entirely new lens. It's definitely a win-win.



Once each examiner has reviewed and scored the application, the next step is for all the examiners to come to a consensus. When we're done with the individual review, we send our score books to the award headquarters. Then each examiner for the applicant will receive copies of the other examiners' score books. We'll each take one of the process categories along with the corresponding results categories and combine all the comments. In most cases, there will be a lot of duplication, which will be eliminated.



At the end of July, the team will get together to discuss our work and come up with a consensus score book. If the applicant doesn't go on to a site visit, this is the feedback that they will receive. If they do get a site visit, the consensus score book is the document that will be used to prepare the site visit team.



Our consensus meeting will be here in St. Louis, which is good news. The one day consensus meeting is intense and can get very long. Last time, mine was in Jefferson City. Adding drive time to the meeting time made for a very long day.



Tonight I'll begin the first read-through of the application. The goal of this first pass is to get a feel for the applicant's business and to look for Key Business Factors. Once that's done, then I'll begin to really dig in. They estimate it takes about 40 hours to examine an application. Last time that was about right. We'll see how it goes this year.

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