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be used to give a quick overview of the assessed unit for the management, it
might be designed as a self-assessment that covers only some topics. Whereas
when the assessment is used to support the general alignment of strategic
procurement, it should cover a thorough and comprehensive analysis of the
unit that is performed by external assessors to foster best-practice sharing.
• Assessors: The assessor is the key role during the process. Not everybody
can do this job, so it is useful – besides preparing a detailed job description
– to train people for it. A training program should be worked out and entry
requirements should be defined. After completion of the training the assessors
usually gain rights in the form of the permission to conduct assessments under
defined circumstances and their status is valid for a certain period of time.
• Initiative: Initiative for an assessment can stem from repeated complaints of
other departments, again peculiarities in KPIs or a continuous assessment
cycle. The assignments must then be integrated in the assessment schedule,
which has to be agreed on with the stakeholders.
• Information gathering: This is the core part of most assessments and usually
consists of three sub-components: definition of minimum requirements to
be met for an assessment to be considered as valid; definition of the exact
procedure used for information gathering with respect to sources, timetable,
questions and definition of an evaluation strategy after all information is
collected and compiled.
• Learning: Learning in this context means answering two main questions.
Firstly: how to identify what is worth learning and how to utilise the newly
gained knowledge? This knowledge mainly refers to best practices, unknown
by the assessor team at the time. They have to be collected, validated and
should have some influence on future assessments or versions of the model.
The other question to be answered is: how can the existing knowledge in the
group be shared to improve the performance of the assessed unit? To support
the learning process a feedback and a subsequent tracking process have to be
established and tools such as a best practice database and a workflow-tool to
track the implementation of defined measures can be used.
• Measures: After all information is gathered and evaluated, and a maturity level is
assigned, measures have to be developed in order to improve the assessed units
skills and capabilities. The defined improvement measures should meet some
basic requirements (adequate level of detail, business case, responsible etc.) and
maybe even only stem from validated and beforehand permitted persons or units.
• Implementation: The implementation of measures requires a motivated team in
the recently assessed unit and knowledge on their side on how to effectively do so.
A strategy and an implementation path must be developed. Capacity planning is
also necessary to support implementation by defining realistic measures and/or
support the unit in terms of the provision of an implementation team. Electronic
tools such as webinars have in some cases proved to be important enhancers
for the implementation process in the form that they help the building of a
community of practice and an exchange of good practices.