ABSTRACT
Two US-based awards programs have actually integrated the logic of the Plan-Do-Knowledge-Act process into their programs: The United Way of America’s Excellence in Service Quality Award (ESQA) for the not-for-profit human service sector and the President of the United States Quality Award Program (PQAP) for federal organizations. ESQA has a feedback implementation learning tool that is a guide for not-for-profit human sector organizations to use. The tool is designed as an eight-step process, each step building on the other. If a company follows this step-by-step process, it automatically uses the tool. The PQAP feedback comments provide an objective perspective about the applicant organization within a common criteria-based framework. The PQAP process states that the key and focus of an organization’s efforts should be integrating change opportunities into its strategic planning and into business processes and identifying both near- and long-term strategies to drive improvement.
