Your boss asked you to find out if he or she should look at Baldrige, which means you need to know what it is, who uses it, how it works, whether it can help your organization, what it’s going to cost, how long it’s going to take, what good it will do you, how to win the Baldrige Award, and where to start.

Start here:

What is Baldrige?

Baldrige refers to the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, which the U.S. Congress legislated in 1987. The first Baldrige Awards were presented in 1988.

Each year, applicants for the Baldrige Award prepare detailed assessments of their management systems. Their applications respond to the Criteria for Performance Excellence (click here to read the Criteria booklet), which have seven Categories that cover everything important in a management system:

1. Leadership
2. Strategic Planning
3. Customer Focus
4. Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management
5. Workforce Focus
6. Process Management
7. Results

Who uses it?

Any organization that wants to systematically improve its management system. You can find a complete list of Baldrige Award recipients here. It doesn’t matter what size your organization is or what it does, you can use the Baldrige model and process to improve.

How does it work?

Organizations assess their management systems using the Baldrige Criteria to identify strengths and opportunities for improvement. They prioritize the opportunities for improvement and develop action plans to address the top priorities. A year later, most repeat the process. And the year after that and the year after that…

The application process is simple: Ask and answer all of the questions in the Criteria. The hard part is that many of the questions have probably never been asked before and you are unlikely to have high-quality answers for all of them. It also takes some time to research and write an application that responds to nearly 150 questions.

You don’t have to apply for a Baldrige Award to follow this process. Some organizations do internal assessments using the Criteria, hire one or more experts to evaluate them, and use the feedback to drive improvement. Others apply for state quality awards, which you can learn more about here. The pros and cons of each option are presented here.

How would we know if it can help our organization?

Easy: It will. I’ve worked with industry leaders and industry laggards and everything in between and the Baldrige process has helped them all. The tangible evidence of the value of integrating Baldrige is the results of Baldrige Award recipients. You will find a good summary of those results in their Profiles, which are online here. Scan the list for an organization you want to know more about and click on “profile” under the organization’s name. You can also see a list of financial results achieved by Baldrige Award recipients here and a list of their customer-related results here.

What’s it going to cost?

That depends on how you do the assessment. If you do it all internally, you can expect to spend 300 to 400 hours researching and writing an application/assessment. You may also choose to spend a few thousand dollars on an outside consultant to facilitate the process and/or provide initial feedback on your application. If you hire an outside person or group to do the research and writing, it could cost from $40,000 to $75,000 or more depending on the size and complexity of your organization.

Baldrige Award application fees for 2010 are $1,250 for education, nonprofit, K-12; $3,500 for other educational institutions, businesses, healthcare organizations, and nonprofit organizations with 500 or fewer staff/employees; and $7,000 for organizations with more than 500 employees. You can find complete award application guidelines here.

State award programs charge less. You can find out if there’s an award program in your state and how to contact it here.

How long is it going to take?

You can produce an application/assessment in three months—but I wouldn’t advise it. Give yourself at least six months for the first one. Subsequent applications will not take nearly as long.

As for how long it will take to integrate Baldrige, the answer depends on your organization. You can produce a world-class management system in three years. Five years is more common. For organizations hungry to remain on top, the journey never ends.

What good will it do?

If you produce just one application/assessment, you will come away with a powerful list of things to improve that will help you become a better organization. You can use the list to get consensus from senior leaders on priorities, develop action plans that address them, and allocate resources to support the improvement effort. Such lists tend to feature “big picture” opportunities like developing a performance measurement system/balanced scorecard, gaining a better understanding of customer requirements, improving employee engagement, deploying a systematic approach to process management and improvement, or reengineering strategic planning. Without a Baldrige assessment, these opportunities rarely appear on leadership’s radar, which means your organization will continue suffer ineffective and damaging approaches.

If you do annual Baldrige assessments and close the gaps they reveal, you will develop an outstanding management system that will give you a competitive advantage, enable you to provide world-class service to your customers, patients, students, or constituents, and move you toward the vision for your organization.

How do we win the Award?

Very few organizations win the Baldrige Award on their first try. In fact, most of the organizations I’ve worked with, including some industry leaders, scored in the 250 to 350 point range the first time out. Baldrige Award winners typically get around 700 points. So there’s a lot of work to do identifying and closing gaps.

You win the Award by having effective, systematic, well-deployed approaches to every area addressed by the Baldrige Criteria, by providing evidence of evaluation and improvement and organizational learning, and by reporting good-to-excellent results on most areas that are important to your organization. To see what this looks like, read the award application summary of a Baldrige Award recipient. You will find the summaries here. Scan the list for an organization you want to know more about and click on “award application summary” under the organization’s name.

How do we start?

Start by assembling enough information for senior leaders to make an informed decision. You should be able to do that with the explanations and links provided in this article and with other relevant articles and pages on Baldrige.com. Invite leaders of organizations that have won the Baldrige Award or been using the Baldrige model to speak to your leadership team. Ask senior leaders what else they need to know to make a decision. If your state has an award program, have one of its representatives meet with your leadership team.

The best use of the Baldrige model is to integrate it into the way you do business, and that will transform your organization. Senior leaders need to be on board with that.

If you do all this research only to be asked for a quick summary, try this: Baldrige is a proven approach for understanding how your management system works and where it needs to be improved to achieve performance excellence and world-class results.

And you’ll have the information you need to back up that statement.

If you still have questions, post them in a comment to this article and we’ll get answers for you.

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