Baldrige.com
Feature Article

How Can We Perform Better?

In the current economic downturn, a lot of organizations are doing more with less. Fewer people. Less money. Same ambitious goals. Businesses have been slow to hire because of the higher productivity of the people they’ve retained.

If you’ve seen your organization’s strategic plan, you have a good idea what its goals are and some ideas about how you can help achieve them. At the same time, you’re probably busy enough not to be looking for more work. So how do you make your job more interesting and your role in the organization more valuable without burning yourself out with the effort?

The answer is to work more efficiently, and the way to do that is through process thinking. A smart question you can ask is, ‘What’s the process?’ The question gets people thinking about flaws in the process rather than blaming people for errors. Inevitably, focusing on the process triggers questions about what can be done to fix it.

If your organization has formal approaches to process management and improvement, you should learn what they are and how you can use them. If your organization doesn’t have formal approaches, or if it has them but reserves them for sanctioned process management/improvement teams, you will benefit from learning and applying some basics of process thinking.

The first is to understand what a process entails, which is captured in this SIPOC …

| May 20th, 2013 | Continued

Feature Article

Update: Tuesday, September 12, 2012

Over the course of the next week, Baldrige.com will be undergoing some site maintenance and construction. We ask that you please be patient as we make these changes, and apologize for any inconvenience we may cause.  We’re working hard to make the site a safer and better-looking version of itself, and can’t wait to show it to you!

Below is a link to a survey relating to the form and function of our site; we need your feedback to improve the value being delivered to you, your organization, and fellow professionals. Thank you taking five minutes to fill out this survey.

Kind regards,

Joe, Tom, & the Baldrige.com team

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GRGPJC8…

| September 12th, 2012 | Continued

Feature Article

The Birth of Baldrige

The following post is being featured once again, in light of the 25th anniversary of the Baldrige Award. Please enjoy!

(The following excerpt describing how the Baldrige Award came about is taken from Steve George’s first Baldrige book,The Baldrige Quality System, published by Wiley & Sons in 1992)

In the early 1980s, U.S. business and government leaders worried about the nation’s ability to compete. They formed councils to study the problem. They participated in conferences and sat on committees whose sole aim was to figure out how to improve the quality of U.S. products and services on a national level.

Read More…

In 1983, the final report on seven computer networking conferences sponsored by the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC), in which about 175 corporate executives, business leaders, and academicians participated, recommended the creation of a National Quality Award.

Later that same year, the National Productivity Advisory Committee, a group of corporate executives, academicians, labor leaders, and government officials, recommended creating a national medal for productivity achievement.

In April 1984, a report by the White House Conference on Productivity called for a national medal for productivity. Other groups, both public and private, debated solutions to American competitiveness. Many called for a national award.

In September 1985, corporate quality business leaders formed a Committee to Establish a National Quality Award. Over the next year, the committee developed a …

| July 11th, 2009 | Continued

About this Site

Joseph A. De Feo

Joseph A. De Feo, MBA, President and CEO of Juran Institute, Inc., is recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on transformational change systems and breakthrough management principles. For nearly 25 years, De Feo has worked as a Juran Executive Coach helping business leaders increase sales, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction through the deployment of process improvement programs, including Lean and Six Sigma, strategic planning, and cultural transformation.

His ability to cut through complex issues and apply proven methodologies and solutions has made hima sough-after business partner for industry leaders around the globe such as Anthem, Duracell, Emhart Glass, Lance Foods, Raytheon, Samsung, and Unilever.

Mr. De Feo is co-author of Juran’s Quality Handbook 6th Edition, The Complete Guide to Performance Excellence; the “go to” resource for deployment leaders. De Feo’s belief that a relentless customer focus and integrity drives business results was recently noted by Steve Denning of Forbes.com.

“By re-focusing primary attention on the customer and on exceeding the customer’s expectations, the Juran Quality Handbook has done quality management a great service.”

Michelle Matschke

Michelle Matschke is the Editor at Baldrige.com, in addition to being the Sr. Business Development Associate at Juran Institute. Michelle has worked for Juran in a few different positions over the years, but has settled into this role and truly enjoys promoting performance excellence through Baldrige.com. For …

Other Recent Articles

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The Architect of Quality & Statistical Quality Control

Section 4.2 of the Baldrige criteria ask applicants how their organization manages and grows its knowledge assets and learns. The processes behind the assurance of quality and availability of data, information, software, and hardware needed by the workforce, suppliers, partners, collaborators, and, of course, customers, are outlined. Applicants are expected to describe how they acquire their data, how they know it’s good data, and how they use it. In Dr. Joseph M. Juran’s 2004 book, Architect of Quality, he describes the birth of Statistical Quality Control at AT&T’s Hawthorne plant and puts a new perspective on the ripple effect that innovative thinking can have.

Enter Statistics

In late 1925, AT&T’s Bell Telephone Laboratories (Bell Labs) set in motion an initiative that would change inspection practices profoundly, first in Hawthorne and later in industry generally. The end result came to be known as Statistical Quality Control (SQC).

AT&T and Use of Probability Theory

The roots of Bell Labs’ initiative go back to AT&T’s use of probability theory, starting early in the twentieth century. A seminal event was M. C. Rorty’s memorandum, “Application of the Theory of Probability to Traffic Problems,” dated October 22, 1903.

When any subscriber took the telephone receiver off its hook, he or she needed to be connected to an idle trunk line and given a signal (dial tone) to go ahead and dial. The question then …

14May2013 | | 0 comments | Continued
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Buzzword: Baldrige?

Spreading the word about Baldrige is one of the biggest challenges faced by the Baldrige community. The principles of the Criteria are simple, logical, and brilliantly successful when implemented correctly, yet sometimes it seems as though only a small segment of organizational leaders seem to know about them. Those that are in the loop are fanatics, but I think many of us struggle to understand why the rest of the world hasn’t caught on yet. At the Quest Conference earlier this month, a new session was added to the lineup that this author thinks was on the cusp of something great, which actually reminds me very much of what the EFQM Excellence Model is doing over in Europe. Let’s discuss.

At Quest this year, a session entitled Category Best Practices Panel was held. Three organizations were represented; Maury Regional Medical Center, Northwest Vista College, and PricewaterhouseCoopers Public Sector Practice. Each group shared best practices from two categories of the Criteria, and one of the common threads throughout the ks6016session was the subject of benchmarking, both within and outside of their industries. They told about the specifics within their strategic plans, and why they did things the way they did. For example, Maury Regional Medical Center made a point of observing the Baldrige examiner teams interviewing their employees, so that they could get a feel for the culture of their organization …

25Apr2013 | | 0 comments | Continued
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Conducting Collaborative Assessments

As the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program celebrates its 25th year, it continues to evolve to meet the needs of key stakeholders. Recently, the program announced that it will offer Collaborative Assessments as a new service. The announcement states that this assessment against the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence will provide timely, actionable feedback to be used immediately to improve organizational performance. While not explicitly stated, the service seems to be targeting organizations that may be new to the Baldrige Criteria.

So you may be wondering, “What is a Collaborative Assessment?” Good question!

The collaborative assessment is a proven method that has been used in multiple organizations worldwide. It is not a new concept; this author has been successfully implementing this approach to assessment for over 15 years. In general, it is an event-focused approach to efficiently complete an assessment in a short period of time. The approach uses the input from subject matter experts with assistance from criteria and assessment experts.  The participants collaborate to identify the vital few strengths and opportunities for improvement within the organization. These strengths can be used as input to generate an application for a state or national quality award. The opportunities for improvement can be prioritized and converted into action plans for improving organizational performance.

While this article will focus primarily on collaborative assessments using the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence, the approach …

4Apr2013 | | 0 comments | Continued
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Baldrige Fits In Everywhere!

A recent FastCompany article entitled “How the Most Successful Brands Take a Peek into the Future” wound itself around a handful of facets that a successful futures-insights company should embrace. The author, Mark McNeilly, wrote about organizations having the ability to take advantage of the future by listening to their customers, competitors, and comparables. Perhaps inadvertently, he has summarized a number of Baldrige criteria questions, and in doing so gave yet another example of how Baldrige can be applied in any organization, regardless of size or industry.

Real-time marketing requires a team of coordinated, aware, and proactive individuals. With the mindset of out-performing competitors, most companies have turned to social media to try and get a better grasp of their who their customers are, and engage in “culture conversations.” McNeilly writes about Oreo’s use of Twitter during the Super Bowl blackout: “Within the hour the tweet had been RT’d over 10,000 times. Oreo was successful at executing their marketing virtually instantaneously because its social media trackers, agency creatives, and marketing execs were all co-located.” In Baldrige lingo, what Oreo did answered the questions in section 3.1 (VOTC) referring to using social media to listen to, interact with, and observe customers, as well as section 3.2 (Customer Engagement) on leveraging social media to enhance customer engagement and relationships with the organization. They were very aware of what their …

19Mar2013 | | 0 comments | Continued
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Using Quality Awards as a System Assessment Tool

Many organizations use the criteria from national quality awards for the benefit of getting a thorough organizational assessment, often with no intent of even applying for award recognition. There are various methods that can be used to complete an assessment, based upon many factors, including the size and geography of the organization, the number of facilities, and the availability of internal expertise to conduct an assessment.

Written Responses

Without completing a formal application, organizations can use a question-and-answer approach to respond to the criteria question from an awards program. There could be multiple responses for each question if more than one input is desired for the response. Some more advanced formats for written responses could seek more probing information for each question. For example, a Baldrige-based written response questionnaire may be formatted to seek a specific response for approach, deployment, learning, and integration for each process-related question. This provides richer information for the purposes of scoring the application using the awards process scoring guidelines.

Survey

This approach can be used to gather assessment input from a large number of people. Questions are designed to gather the collective input of the performance of the organization as it relates to the awards criteria. The Baldrige National Quality program provides a free survey for this purpose called Are We Making Progress? This is a 40-question survey which can be completed in about 10 …

6Mar2013 | | 0 comments | Continued
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Acknowledging Innovative Excellence – The City of Irving, Texas

It’s not every year that a city wins the Mac Baldrige Award; in fact, Irving is only the second to have ever done it. Part of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Irving contains Las Colinas, one of the first master-planned developments in the United States. The Dallas-Fort Worth Airport also falls within its 68 square miles. The city is over a hundred years old, but didn’t see much growth until the manufacturing, transportation, and finance industries moved in during the 1930s, opening the doors for huge organizations like Citigroup, Verizon, Nokia, Allstate, Microsoft, Neiman Marcus, ExxonMobil, and Kimberly-Clark. In 2011, Irving was awarded the Texas Award for Performance Excellence, qualifying it for the big B.

So, how did they do it? Mayor Beth Van Duyne reached out for some extra help. Freese and Nichols, Inc. is a multi-discipline consulting firm that offers services in engineering, architecture, environmental science, planning, construction services, and program management. It doesn’t hurt that they are 2010 Baldrige Award recipients, and based out of Fort Worth, Texas. Freese and Nichols worked with Irving through their initial processes, helped review Irving’s application, practice for site visits, and did mock interviews with innumerable staff members in an effort to help make everyone on the city payroll to become more comfortable with the Baldrige Criteria. In addition, they shared best practices, and considering that F&N received the National and Tarrant …

26Feb2013 | | 0 comments | Continued
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