Royal New Zealand Navy

Topic : Pursuit of Excellence programme

Summary

Many organisations aspire to be 'world class', but do not have a sense of what this is. The Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence (CPE) is an internationally-recognised framework that assists in the identification, improvement and measurement of the characteristics found in high performing world class organisations. One of the strengths of the CPE is that it is descriptive, and not prescriptive, providing an opportunity to generate real improvements without being forced to fit a particular model.

The Royal New Zealand Navy adopted the CPE in 1998, and launched an evolving programme of Naval Excellence. In 2006 the Navy was assessed against the Criteria by a team of evaluators drawn from private and public sector organisations, and won a Silver Award, achieving the highest score of any New Zealand organisation in over a decade. This case study tells the story of how the Navy did it, and offers insights on how the approach could be used to progress towards the state sector vision of becoming a system of world class professional state services serving the government of the day and meeting the needs of New Zealanders.