Organizing Your Baldrige Research

Before you can write a Baldrige application, you must gather and organize the information and data you need to respond to the Baldrige Criteria questions. Your research will produce interview notes from internal subject matter experts; documentation of processes, procedures, presentations, meeting minutes, reports, and other material; and data you will use to create the graphs for the Results category. You will want to organize all of this stuff to help you with two tasks: (1) determine if you have all you need to answer every Criteria question; and, (2) respond to the questions by making it easy to find all relevant information.

The Baldrige Criteria disassemble a management system into seven categories and a profile, 20 items, 41 areas to address, and 150 or so questions. One way to organize Baldrige research is to disassemble it along the same lines. This is easier to do with interviews, during which you have likely asked specific questions about specific areas to address, and for data than it is for supporting documentation.

I’ve done research for dozens of Baldrige and state award applications and my approach is to assign pieces of each interview to…

Leading the Integration of Baldrige

One of the ways organizations integrate Baldrige is by putting an executive in charge of each Baldrige category. The executive is responsible for:

• Understanding what the category addresses, which means understanding the category questions in the Baldrige Criteria

• Knowing how the organization performs on those questions, which means understanding your organizations’ strengths and opportunities for improvement (which requires some type of Baldrige assessment)

• Developing strategies and actions to address the opportunities, which often become part of the organization’s strategic plan

• Being accountable for improving performance on the areas addressed by the category, which usually involves reviewing performance with the senior leadership team on a monthly or quarterly basis

In some organizations, the executive/category “owner” leads a category team that shares these responsibilities. This approach is less effective if the team ends up doing all the work and the executive is a figurehead. Effectively integrating Baldrige will transform your organization, bringing significant change that requires senior leadership. It will be less effective—if it occurs at all—if executives delegate that integration.

Most organizations take a logical approach to assigning executives to categories (with equivalent positions in schools and government agencies):

• The CEO takes Leadership
• The head of marketing and/or sales…

5 Baldrige Application Mistakes

Over the past 20 years, I have had the opportunity to work with or review more than 250 Baldrige and state award applications, Shingo Prize applications, and feedback reports. The goal of an application is to receive the most useful feedback report possible while earning all the points your organization is entitled to. In my experience, most beginning organizations, especially those writing an application entirely on their own, make five basic mistakes that keep them from reaching this goal:

1. Not using figures, including tables and graphics, effectively in the application
2. Not providing key information
3. Not providing key results
4. Ignoring the scoring guidelines
5. Not having someone knowledgeable about the Criteria and the examination process review the application before submission

There are two types of questions in the Criteria: “how” questions asking for the description of a process and “what” questions asking for information. A root cause of mistake #2 often results from not answering a “what” question. One applicant’s feedback report read, “The applicant did not describe the most important goals for its strategic objectives.” The Criteria ask what these goals are.

It is critical to provide the information requested in a space-saving format, which is why bulleted…

Question Your System: Operating Environment

The Baldrige Criteria pose questions that, when answered, can help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your management system.

P.1a in the Organizational Profile asks fundamental questions about your operating environment. A few are easy to answer, such as what products and/or services you offer and how you deliver them. Others require more thought:

• What are the key characteristics of your organizational culture? You may not have thought much about this. For most organizations, culture is what happens when you’ve been around for awhile. Key characteristics others frequently mention include a focus on customers/patients/students, empowered employees with few levels of management, extensive use of teams, promoting innovation throughout the organization, valuing employee safety, and pursuing world-class quality and cycle time.

• What are your core competencies? How do they relate to your mission? Core competencies are your organization’s areas of greatest expertise that help you fulfill your mission and differentiate you from your competitors. If your core competencies don’t align with your mission, you’ve got a problem.

• What are the key factors that motivate your employees to engage in accomplishing your mission? Later, the Criteria ask how you determine these factors, so don’t just pull them out…