Baldrige
Baldrige Model: How do you design, manage and improve your key work processes?
Item 6.2 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how you design, manage, and improve your key work processes. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.
Your organization needs processes for:
- Designing efficient and effective work processes to meet all key requirements, including incorporating new technology, organizational knowledge, product excellence, and the need for agility
- Determining and meeting key process requirements
- Managing your supply chain including evaluating supplier performance
- Improve processes to achieve better performance, reduce variability, and improve products and services
Best practices to consider:
- Process thinking is a cultural attribute of the organization.
- Every key process and its key requirements has been identified, the processes have been mapped, in-process and end-of-process measures have been identified, and data from these measures are analyzed and used to continuously improve the processes.
- Supply chain management involves suppliers in improving quality and cycle time.
Common problem areas:
- When problems occur, people look at who to blame rather than where a process failed.
- The organization has never tried to identify its key processes or determine their requirements.
- No systematic approaches are in place to manage and improve key processes.
- Few in-process measures are taken and few end-of-process measures are used to improve performance.
- Suppliers are…
Baldrige Model: How do you design, manage and improve your work systems?
Item 6.1 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how you design, manage, and improve your work systems. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.
Your organization needs processes for:
- Designing your work systems
- Capitalizing on your core competencies
- Determining which processes will be internal and which will be external
- Determining work system requirements
- Managing and improving your work systems to deliver customer value and achieve organizational success and sustainability
- Control costs of your work systems including preventing defects, service errors, and rework, and minimizing the costs of inspections, tests, and process/performance audits
- Ensuring work system and workplace preparedness for disasters or emergencies
Best practices to consider:
- Unlike most organizations whose work systems evolve over time, role model organizations make a deliberate effort to identify their work systems, design or redesign them to better accomplish the work of the organization, and manage them to achieve strategic objectives and goals.
- The organization uses its strategic planning process to determine how to capitalize on its core competencies and to identify needed competencies for the future.
- The organization uses specific criteria to determine whether key processes will be internal or external, including cost/benefit analysis, internal capabilities and capacity, and the availability of…
Baldrige Model: How do you engage your workforce to achieve organizational and personal success?
Item 5.2 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how you engage, compensate, and reward employees to achieve high performance. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.
Your organization needs processes for:
- Determining the key factors that affect employee engagement
- Creating a culture and a performance management system that promotes open communication, high-performance work, and an engaged workforce
- Assessing employee engagement and correlating the findings of these assessments with business results to identify opportunities for improvement
- Developing a learning and development system that serves the needs of the organization and the development needs of all employees
- Managing effective career progression and succession planning
Best practices to consider:
- The organization uses employee data from a number of sources including employee surveys, turnover rates, and exit interviews to determine and prioritize employee requirements and then validates those requirements with employees.
- An effective performance management system supports both individual and organizational performance, aligns individual goals/objectives with the organization’s mission and vision, and addresses individual development.
- Employee satisfaction/engagement surveys are done more frequently than the typical annual survey, often with a statistically-valid sample of employees.
- Every employee has a development plan that supports both personal and organizational improvement.
Common problems areas:
- Organizations tend to…
A Pathway to Innovation
I worked with MEDRAD on both of its Baldrige Awards. Rose Almon-Martin, vice president of Performance Excellence and Brand, managed those Baldrige application processes. Over the last eight years, she has become a Baldrige examiner and become involved in establishing Pennsylvania’s state award program.
Rose is quoted in “The Baldrige Process: World Standard in Manufacturing Quality Improvement – But Still Relevant?” She compares the resources spent on Baldrige to doing maintenance on a physical plant. “It’s not extra. It’s part of how we do things. What Baldrige does is keep you constantly improving the intangible assets. Since we started using the criteria back in the early ‘90s, we have doubled our revenue per employee.”
The article quotes Andy Tannen, a reputation management expert who wrote in IndustryWeek that “the business press, not to mention the mainstream media, pays little attention to what amounts to the Oscars for business.”
For too many leaders, Baldrige is synonymous with the mundane side of running an organization: process management, measurement, and employee satisfaction. Eric Franks, manager of Technology and Quality Assurance at PRO-TEC, another Baldrige Award winner, explains that the real value of Baldrige is in creating an innovative culture.
“Baldrige helps us drive innovation and incorporate new processes so…
1Jun2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige Model: How do you build an effective and supportive workforce environment?
Item 5.1 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how you create a supportive work environment. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.
Your organization needs processes for:
- Assessing workforce capability and capacity needs and preparing employees for changing needs
- Recruiting, hiring, placing, and retaining new employees
- Organizing and managing your workforce to accomplish work, capitalize on your core competencies, reinforce a customer and business focus, exceed performance expectations, and address your strategic challenges and action plans
- Managing your workforce to ensure continuity, prepare for growth, and prevent layoffs or minimize their impact if they become necessary
- Creating a healthy, safe, and secure work environment
- Supporting employees through policies, services, and benefits
Best practices to consider:
- The organization has developed a workforce plan that identifies its current capability and capacity and anticipates future needs based on different scenarios.
- The hiring process focuses on choosing people who fit the organization and providing training and support to ensure that they are retained.
- The workforce is organized and managed to benefit from diversity (gender, age, race, etc.).
- Strategic leadership, careful planning, and a commitment to employee well-being enables the organization to ramp up during times of rapid growth and find new opportunities…
Baldrige Model: How do you manage information, knowledge and information technology?
Item 4.2 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how you build and manage your knowledge assets. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.
Your organization needs processes for:
- Managing the accuracy, integrity, reliability, timeliness, security, and confidentiality of data, information, and knowledge
- Making needed data and information available to employees, suppliers, partners, collaborators, and customers
- Managing organizational knowledge
- Ensuring that hardware and software are reliable, secure, and user-friendly
- Ensuring the continued availability of information systems during emergencies
Best practices to consider:
- The organization has identified what information its employees, customers, suppliers, and partners need to improve performance and has deployed processes that get the right information in the right hands at the right time.
- In a learning organization knowledge is currency, which is why a learning organization has processes for collecting and transferring knowledge and identifying, sharing, and implementing best practices.
- Critical data and information are backed up and stored offsite in case of an emergency, and the backup system is checked on a scheduled basis to ensure reliability.
Common problems areas:
- The right information either is not collected or is not distributed to the right people when it can be useful.
- Knowledge is lost when employees leave the…
Baldrige Model: How do you measure, analyze and improve organization performance?
Item 4.1 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how you use data and information to improve performance. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.
Your organization needs processes for:
- Selecting, collecting, aligning, integrating, and communicating data and information for tracking daily operations and organizational performance
- Selecting key comparative data and information and voice-of-the-customer data and information and using it to support decision making and innovation
- Ensuring that your performance measurement system can respond to rapid and/or unexpected change
- Reviewing organizational performance and capabilities, including using key performance measures and the analysis of those measures
- Sharing lessons learned and best practices identified during organizational performance reviews across the organization
- Using organizational performance reviews to project future performance and to develop priorities for continuous improvement and innovation
Best practices to consider:
- Develop a performance measurement system, the most common of which is a balanced scorecard, that defines how data and information will be selected and collected, aligns key performance measures with the organization’s mission, vision, and strategic objectives, and communicates performance throughout the organization.
- Role model organizations use comparative data and information for as many key measures as possible to provide context for their performance, helping them understand…
