It is not compulsory, and therefore is not prescriptive, but it should be seen as a form of guidance in best practice.

Apart from the award process, its use is based on self assessment which itself can be carried out in a variety of ways.

It can be approached in a number of ways. For example a self assessment could be done through a series of workshop type brainstorming sessions, or it could be done initially via a form of internal survey. Alternatively management could use the model themselves initially as a means of getting started, or simply "managing". It is highly flexible.

It can be regarded simply as a way of asking critical questions of the organisation, and then doing something about what is found.

It can be first approached or used in a partial fashion. It is quite possible for an organisation to decide at first say to just focus on just one or maybe two of the nine criteria, and using a very simple scoring mechanism, deal with these areas first in order to gain experience and familiarisation with the model and the various ways it can be used.

An example of how it could theoretically be used in a medium sized business follows.