Baldrige
“Brown-ing” Baldrige
I’m a big fan of author and Baldrige expert Mark Brown. The LinkedIn Baldrige Improvement Discussion Group recently launched a discussion about how to improve the Baldrige Criteria and, while many contributed, I was struck by Brown’s insights and ideas. Here are a few—and make sure you read all the way to the end:
- Eliminate 75% of the words. “Review the Criteria from the 1990s and the current Singapore criteria or the abbreviated criteria used by New Zealand or California to see a closer approximation of what the Criteria need to become.”
- Lose Results Item 7.4. “No one understands this, most don’t have any data to include, and, when combined with 1.2, leadership and governance are worth 50 points more than financial and market results, which is completely ridiculous,” Brown wrote.
- Overhaul Category 2. Change the terminology (i.e., goals instead of objectives), make Item 2.1 about your planning process and Item 2.2 about what your plans are. “Regarding points, the process for doing planning is far less important than the plan itself.”
- Lose the questions that ask how you design work processes and systems. Having tried to respond to these questions dozens of times, I completely agree. “No one sat down with a blank sheet of paper when creating a hospital, restaurant, or airline.” Answering questions about how you design a work system or process is one of the biggest challenges in a Baldrige application.
- Remove questions about emergency preparedness, which “is another…
Baldrige.com Joins Alltop
Baldrige.com has been selected to join the ranks of top leadership sites at Alltop, which lists the headlines for the top sites in a number of categories. Unfortunately, Alltop doesn’t list these sites alphabetically so you have to scroll down to the bottom of the leadership page here to find us.
Take a moment to browse the listings and you will notice that 90% or more of the content of these sites focuses on the personal side of leadership with topics such as “10 No-Brainer Ways to Become a Better Leader,” “6 Tips to Set Goals That Will Get You Where You Want to Go,” and “Job Search and Person-to-Person Networking.”
Baldrige.com is different. The information we provide focuses on how to develop a more effective management system: Information you need to build the organization you want. As Alltop shows, it’s easy to find websites that tell you how to improve your leadership style but harder to find sites that tell you how to improve your leadership system.
Baldrige.com now offers more than 550 articles on all aspects of performance excellence as defined by the Baldrige model. Fundamental information is listed in the second column on this page while most of the articles are organized by Baldrige category, Baldrige process and Award, and sector—the tabs at the top of the page. You can find a sample of what Baldrige.com has to offer by clicking on a recent summary article, “What…
17Jun2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedHow Can We Promote Baldrige?
The Baldrige program announced that 69 organizations have applied for the 2011 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The number is down from last year, primarily because of a significant drop in healthcare applicants (54 in 2010, 40 in 2011). The number of education applicants doubled from 7 to 14 while the number of small business applicants dropped from 7 to 2. A total of five businesses larger than 500 employees applied for the Award in both years; only seven businesses, large and small, applied for the 2011 Award.
As the chart shows, the dearth of business applicants is a long-term trend. The Baldrige program can survive by appealing to healthcare and government agencies, both of which are under pressure to get their acts together, but its roots are in business. For the first 13 years of the Baldrige program, only businesses could apply for and win the Award. It wasn’t until 2001 that three educational institutions won it and the first healthcare winner received the Award in 2002.
While a few businesses, especially at the state level, show interest in the Baldrige model, it is almost invisible on the national business stage.
How do we change that? How can we make Baldrige relevant to the business community? How do we get it to show up on the radars of senior leaders?
What do you think?
15Jun2011 | Steve George | 4 comments | ContinuedBaldrige 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 not treated as partners to assist in reaching your organization’s goals and objectives.
To read more about process management, click on these articles:
- Smart Question #1: What’s the Process?
- The Benefits of Process Thinking
- Ask What, Not Who
- What Process-Centered…
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 external expertise.
- The organization uses lean, Six Sigma, ISO, and other tools to improve quality and cycle time and reduce costs.
- The organization maintains an emergency response plan that is deployed to all functions, each of which…
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 assume they know what employees require or they rely on generic employee satisfaction surveys to provide a list, but they fail to validate their assumptions.
- No performance management system has been developed.
- Employee surveys are conducted annually…
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 we can be first to market on these products.”
The article in Area Development Online was written by Dave Claborn, director of Development and Communication Relations at Ohio State University. He answers the question posed by…
1Jun2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
