4 | Info Mgmt
FREE REPORT: Baldrige Award-Winning Performance Measurement
The fourth Category in the Baldrige Criteria asks questions about how your organization measures, analyzes, reviews, and improves its performance using data and information. You can get a free report on how seven Baldrige Award winners answer these questions by entering your name and email address in the box in the third column.
The report shows a diagram of the measurement system and the balanced scorecard used by the Veterans Affairs Cooperative Studies Program Clinical Research Pharmacy Coordinating Center.
It presents the five-step measurement process used by Heartland Health and shows how it aligns its key measures.
The report includes the City of Coral Spring’s performance management system and talks about the performance agreements the city uses to align the strategic plan with its measurement system.
It lists the criteria MidwayUSA uses to select comparative data.
It describes the types of analysis that Cargill Corn Million performs and how its leadership team sets priorities for improvement.
It shows a diagram of the organizational performance reviews conducted by Premier.
It lists the criteria Iredell-Statesville Schools uses to select its key performance indicators and the process senior leaders use to review performance.
You can also learn about the common elements these award-winning organizations share and how you can use them to create an effective approach for your organization.
Sign up for your free report today and you will automatically receive free copies of the first two reports in this series on performance management and process management.
Sign up today!
22Sep2010 | Steve George | 1 comment | ContinuedCommunicate Information Effectively
How do you make data and information available?
This question from the Baldrige Criteria assumes that you have good answers for the questions that precede it on selecting, collecting, aligning, integrating, and analyzing data and information, because if you don’t do these things well, there won’t be much of value to communicate. But if you have sound processes in place, the critical step in an effective performance measurement system is getting the right data and information in the right hands at the right time.
Very few organizations spend time on how they communicate key data and information. For most, it’s numbers on a chart. A few balanced scorecard followers use a stoplight approach alongside the numbers: green light means on target, yellow light means not quite, red light means trouble. A small percentage shows trend lines and benchmarks for their key measures to give users context for current performance. And that’s about it when it comes to communicating data and information, which is why it is always refreshing to discover a creative way to share information.
GE is awarding $200 million to ideas that help build the next generation power grid. It is accepting ideas in three categories: renewables; grid efficiency; and eco homes/eco buildings. You can read about the more than 1,800 ideas that have been submitted thus far—the Ecomagination Challenge ends September 30th—by clicking here.
GE has taken an innovative approach to communicating this information. Each idea is a dot. The dots turn on an axis that begins with the first day…
8Sep2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedReality Check in Japan
Making assumptions about the world around us is human nature. We have a sense for how the world operates and we interpret information and events based on our experiences and expectations. Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, calls these assumptions “leaps of abstraction.”
We make leaps of abstraction at work all the time. We assume we know what our customers require, what engages our employees, the source of a problem, and our marketplace and competitors. Because our assumptions may not, in truth, reflect reality, acting on them can cause all sorts of problems, and learning the truth through sound data and information can challenge our most dearly held beliefs.
This is what happened recently in Japan. Japan has a reputation for producing many of the world’s oldest people due, it has long claimed, to superior diet and a commitment to the elderly. It assumed it excelled in this area—until police found the body of one of the country’s centenarians, a man believed to be 111, who had been dead for more than thirty years.
The shocking discovery challenged a long-held belief, prompting officials to verify the status of the other centenarians in the country. According to an article in the New York Times by Martin Fackler, one of Tokyo’s oldest citizens at 113 had not been seen since the 1980s. City officials tried to visit a 125-year-old only to discover that her registered address had been turned into a city park in 1981.
To date, authorities have been unable to find 281 Japanese…
16Aug2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedAligning with Strategies & Measures
The Veterans Affairs Cooperative Studies Program Clinical Research Pharmacy Coordinating Center (VACSP Center) won the Baldrige Award in 2009. It has four key strategic goals and 13 key performance indicators, which are listed on its balanced scorecard
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Data from a New Perspective
We have all seen more than our shares of charts and tables. Data in columns and rows. If we’re lucky, a trend chart. Numbers filling pages filling handouts filling binders.
That’s why it is always delightful to find a new way of presenting information, as Doug McCune has done with crime in San Francisco. He took real data, aggregated it geographically, and artistically rendered it as elevation. More crime mean higher elevation. You have to see the maps to understand their impact. Click here to see the hills and mountains of San Francisco created by larceny, narcotics, assault, vandalism, warrants, prostitution, vehicle theft, and robbery.
As McCune points out, the features are pretty consistent across all of the maps. It looks like the northeast center of the city easily has the highest crime rate across all types of crimes. The most dramatic map is the prostitution map with its twin peaks casting shadows over the city.
It made me think of how an elevation map could be used to show an organization’s data. For example, if you measure quality at different points in a process, you could map the process and use the quality measures to create elevation along the route. If you work for a utility, you could use outage data to create elevation maps that showed where most outages occur in the area you serve. Sure, you already have the data and everybody knows that bigger numbers mean more outages, but visualizing those outages can have a powerful impact.
Governments could use elevation…
9Jun2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedMaking Better Decisions, Faster
The Baldrige Criteria devote one Item to how you manage information, knowledge, and information technology. The goal is to make data and information accurate, reliable, timely, secure, confidential, and available to the people who need it, when they need it.
In “How Do You Speed Up Information Delivery?” (HBR, May 26, 2010), Tom Davenport addresses the need for speed in information delivery. He identifies several technical advances that are accelerating this including: (1) storing information in memory rather than on a hard drive for faster retrieval and manipulation; (2) using new forms of databases for faster data retrieval and analysis; and, (3) faster hardware and easier-to-use software the make data analysis easier.
This, he notes, “is the relatively easy part.” Process, behavior, and management change are tougher. The first step is to identify what information really needs to be delivered more quickly. Not all information is critical. Prioritizing will help focus resources on the greatest need.
Davenport points out that managers want information when they want it, which is not necessarily when they get it. For that reason, it’s often better to make information available for online access (pull) rather than issuing reports (push).
The next step is to have executives work with analysts “to identify what information is most needed quickly, and then to create alerts, query and reporting formats, and analyses that truly inform decisions.”
The final step, according to Davenport, is to make decisions faster. This is the whole reason to speed up information delivery in the first place: To make better, more…
1Jun2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige ROI
The Baldrige blog describes a slide shown by Jerry Rose, the head of quality at Cargill, at the recent Quest for Excellence. Cargill has had two businesses win the Baldrige Award and one has received the Award twice.
Rose’s slide divides Cargill businesses into three groups: those with a high degree of Baldrige deployment, those with partial deployment, and those just beginning to use Baldrige. The businesses with a high degree of deployment have achieved 30% cumulative earnings after taxes vs. budget. The businesses with partial deployment achieved 13%. The businesses just beginning their Baldrige journeys had -12%.
Rose summarized the results: “Deciding to embrace the Baldrige program in your company is a commitment to a journey. It takes time, it takes dedication, and it takes resources. What I know for sure is that there is a huge return on your investment.”
To see more results that support this Baldrige ROI, click on these articles:
- Baldrige and Quality Results
- Baldrige and Workforce Results
- Baldrige and Customer Results
- Baldrige and Financial Performance
