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Best Practice Explorer is a simple tool to help organisations develop greater awareness of best practice and identify opportunities for improvement.
To improve, you need to know your starting point. Best Practice Explorer invites you to look at levels of Best Practice in your organisation and uses the findings to direct you to information and resources which are closest to your organisation's needs.
Best Practice Explorer asks for your views on up to 24 aspects of Best Practice in your organisation. It then assesses your responses and shows, for each aspect you looked at, whether your organisation appears to be well-aligned, partially-aligned or poorly-aligned with Best Practice. For each assessed aspect of Best Practice, the Explorer can then recommend advice, such as guides, tools, advisors and events, which might be best suited to encouraging improvement in your organisation.
The business benefits of best practice are becoming widely accepted, but do you know how widely Best Practice has been adopted in your organisation? Are you fully embracing all the opportunities for improving your performance? Best Practice Explorer will help you to answer both of these questions and provide you with a simple Best Practice benchmark for reviewing your future performance.
Best Practice Explorer's primary role is to locate resources which can help you to improve. The use of Explorer may help in a number of circumstances; it may assist you to:
Best Practice Explorer is easy to use, relying on awareness rather than specific facts or data (which need to be collected). Typically, therefore, it would take a user no more than three hours to complete an assessment of all 24 aspects of Best Practice. However, because Explorer stores your responses and assessments, the minimum user session would be about five minutes, the time it takes to deal with one aspect.
You are free to explore the aspects of Best Practice in any order, depending on your interests or the importance of particular aspects to your organisation. You only have to complete the assessment of one aspect to be able to access resources - you don't have to complete the whole sequence.
Used on an individual basis no preliminary training or induction is needed on its use. However, if you would like to use Best Practice Explorer as a way of developing a team or cross-organisational assessment, you will need to commit more time and follow some additional steps; please contact Constructing Excellence if you wish to do this.
Through the Best Practice Explorer you can assess your organisation's engagement with up to 24 wide-ranging aspects of Best Practice. These aspects have been selected to help you develop a balanced profile of Best Practice across your business operations, and have been organised under three zones:
Zone AYour Internal CultureZone BYour External RelationsZone CYour Business Processes
The Best Practice Explorer provides information on and access to a range of best practice activities and guidance that you can engage with, including:
Best Practice Explorer evaluates your individual perception of engagement or alignment with Best Practice in your organisation. It gives a visual summary of the assessments you have carried out and on completion of all 24 aspects, gives an overall best practice score. This score can help to make comparisons within your organisation and build up a profile of best practice. Guidance is available from the Constructing Excellence on how you can use Best Practice Explorer to provide a score for a team or for your organisation.
Best Practice Explorer's main role is to help you to continuously improve by signposting you impartially to appropriate help and advice. By also offering you a way of measuring your engagement with Best Practice over time, it can be used as a stand-alone tool for assessing your engagement with Best Practice.
Organisations will be able to use their Best Practice Explorer score(s) to promote their engagement with Best Practice.
Best Practice Explorer enables you to gauge rapidly your organisation's readiness to engage in more detailed schemes, such as Investors in People or the Business Excellence Model. Used in this way, the Best Practice Explorer can be used to help develop a business case for selecting the most appropriate scheme for your organisation. Best Practice Explorer has not been developed to compete with existing business improvement schemes, but organisations which have a particular interest or focus on Best Practice may wish to continue their use of Explorer alongside established business improvement schemes and contribute to its future development.
The Best Practice Explorer is under constant review and Constructing Excellence welcomes any comments on the content or operation of the web version. Contact: Canute Simpson (email: canute.simpson@constructingexcellence.org.uk).
In addition to the web version, Explorer is also available in a workshop format (Explorer Interactive). Explorer Interactive develops a team perception of their parent organisation, identifying strengths and weaknesses and specific areas where actions might be most beneficial. For details of Explorer Interactive please contact Canute Simpson (email: canute.simpson@constructingexcellence.org.uk) or telephone 020 7592 1100.