The New York Times ran an interview with the former chairwoman and C.E.

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Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, Charlotte Beers, who stated, "The best scorecard is the
one you keep for yourself" (Bryant, 2012). Ms. Beers points out that by engaging in
self-assessment, one is better able to find out information that may be hard to
determine in other ways. In particular, a good self-assessment scorecard must
include the good, the bad, and the ugly. Unilever HPCE successfully demonstrates
the importance of self-assessment as it uses the system to improve results.
Unilever HPCE starting using self-assessment and immediately opportunities for
improvement were discovered. In order to successfully utilize the self-assessment
model, management stressed its importance. In addition, it is important to note that
as "the understanding of the benefits increased the level of deployment steadily
increased throughout all parts of the organization" (Oakland, 2003). At this point, the
self-assessment needed to change to address the differing needs of units, achieve
quantifiable business objectives focused on each unit's actions, and improving
results of each unit. Experts point out the importance of follow up for successful self-
assessment in order to adopt "a culture of continuous improvement in
manufacturing and service organizations" (Tari, 2010).
In following up, Unilever HPCE made several changes. The company changed the way
enabler questions were worded from "What do you" to "How do you" so that the
respondents must probe more deeply to answer question. The company also
changed the format and made the checklist more rigorous by including a question
for each enabler. A major change was made to improve activity based upon the
results of the survey. Utilizing a "share and go" format, team members became more
involved in the process because there was a greater understanding of evidence and
data. The goal was to not simply identify issues but in addition, create an
improvement plan for specific actions to be taken, based upon the business needs
and potentially incorporating best practices from other organizations (Oakland,
2003). Units were given options to either have a separate improvement plan or
"integrate the output of the self-assessment with business planning activities"
(Oakland, 2003). Key among these changes in the model was to ensure that actions
would deliver measurable results to the business and support the achievement of
key performance indicators, or increase performance in a measurable manner. To
further increase results, the company was visited by a team of assessors to
determine how the organization would rank against other high performing
companies based upon national awards. Further improvement suggestions were
given, including the need to continue collecting good practices from other, and
promote the use of the good practice information.
The organization further changed its self-assessment model, switching from
individual targets to team targets and teamwork plans. Best practices were better
identified and spread utilizing trained facilitators and the EFQM Excellence Model.
Communication was identified as one of the main steps of the program. President
John Sharpe helped ensure that outcomes generated a plan that could be
implemented by advising units to focus on the "three things that would have the
most significant effect on improving business performance in the next year"
(Oakland, 2003). This "rule of three" stems from the U.S. Marine Corps rule which
"dictates that a marine should limit his attention to three tasks at one time"
(Lightstone, 2003) to avoid confusion.
Over the six years, one can view the improvements made to the self-assessment
process as it evolved from a simplified checklist to a world-class process that
promoted business excellence. In terms of bringing about improvements to the
company, HPCE has shown tremendous results. HCPE has increased its market share
2.5 percent, realized double digit growth in its top 15 customers, and received many
customer awards, and improved people satisfaction and safety, according to surveys.
In addition, there has been a continued improvement in all key performance
measures in terms of environmental impact. Furthermore, turnover, trading profit
and trading margin "have shown a minimum 20 percent improvement over six to
seven years in each of these areas" (Oakland, 2003). Revenue has also grown.
Ultimately, the organization has been able to transfer increasing in self-assessment
scores into increases in business results as an output of steadily improving their self-
assessment model.