ABSTRACT
British Telecom Northern Ireland (BTNI) entered the 1994 UK Quality Award on the crest of a wave. This former monopoly had successfully come to terms with competition and, in 1993, had been the first operational unit of BT to achieve ISO 9001 registration. To continue the improvement process, BTNI had adopted self-assessment in 1993, winning both the BT Group and Northern Ireland Quality Awards within 12 months. Conceptualized as a gauge of organizational response to external feedback, the transition phase model outlines the various stages through which the management team will progress during successive self-assessment exercises. The success of BTNI in this context is a measure of how quickly and effectively the management team was able to work through the first three phases of the model. In recognition that a static approach to feedback integration results in decelerated rates of improvement, the propensity for improvement from ongoing self-assessment exercises is limited to the momentum in place.
