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CAF Application Guide

Methodology for Preparing a Self-Assessment Report According to CAF (CAF Application Guide)

CAF represents a Common Assessment Framework (of quality) for public sector organizations. Its purpose is to promote continuous improvement of public governance, services provided to the public, and the sustainable development of the area managed by a public administration organization through self-assessment, by applying principles of excellence in the pursuit of organizational excellence.

The current basic structure of CAF as a “Common Assessment Framework” consists of:

Users who encounter CAF for the first time should first familiarize themselves with the terminology, thereby expanding their vocabulary with specific concepts from the field of quality management in public administration. Equally important is understanding the sequence of steps through which an organization proceeds from the decision to conduct a self-assessment to the implementation of an improvement plan and the planning of the next self-assessment. CAF terminology as well as the description of the steps for CAF implementation are presented in the CAF guide in the final chapters.

Self-assessment is a key element in the implementation of CAF for effective and efficient improvement. Employees of the organization know best the organization’s strengths as well as its weaknesses and problems that need to be addressed or improved. Conducting a self-assessment represents the most challenging task for most beginning members of CAF teams. During self-assessment, CAF team members describe how their organization manages a specific area defined by an example (from the perspective of established enablers, achieved results, or learning and improvement processes). This is where self-assessors sometimes encounter difficulties. The descriptions and explanations provided under the criteria and sub-criteria are sometimes insufficient to gain a full understanding of how to work with the examples. In CAF 2020, examples are presented in simplified and condensed language. Despite the good intentions of the authors, this may sometimes lead to an incomplete understanding of an example by self-assessors. This may result either in descriptions of the organization’s situation that do not correspond to the actual purpose of the self-assessment for which the example was included, or in the belief that a particular example is not relevant to the organization. This methodology aims to provide organizations conducting a self-assessment with an explanation of the context of CAF examples and thus the reason for their inclusion.

The description or statement of self-assessors regarding a specific example should lead to an assessment of the organization’s situation in the given area, based on which it is possible to determine whether improvement is needed (an area for improvement), whether good practice worthy of being followed by other organizations exists (a strength), or whether the situation is merely satisfactory.

For these reasons, this Methodology for Preparing a Self-Assessment Report According to CAF, also referred to as the CAF Application Guide, was developed. The Application Guide aims to facilitate users’ understanding of specific CAF examples by providing, for each example, a deeper explanation of the subject of the example (what the example is about), recommendations for self-assessors on what to focus on (deepening the view of the specific example), as well as related examples from the enablers and results criteria. The latter emphasizes a key feature of CAF that makes it a consistent whole – linkages. The related examples, respecting logical linkages, make it possible to achieve shared reasoning and a common understanding of the organization’s situation in a specific area.

In addition to explanations and contexts, the Application Guide provides, for each specific example, prompts for approaching the example from the perspective of external assessors, as well as application examples from the fields of education and local self-government, as these areas have strong potential for future CAF implementation.

The authors of this Application Guide recommend that beginning CAF users first thoroughly study the CAF guide, including the very valuable but often underestimated textual descriptions of the criteria and sub-criteria. The explanations of the examples provided in this Application Guide build on these descriptions and aim to help organizations better understand them and thus simplify the implementation of organizational self-assessment.