New Report on Process Management

How Baldrige Award Winners Design, Manage, and Improve Their Processes

Get a copy of this free report by entering your name and email address in the orange box on the right. You will read how seven Baldrige Award winners excel at process management, including the common elements you can use to create an effective approach:

• Process design or redesign includes clearly identifying customer requirements, piloting or testing to make sure the process works as planned, training or retraining for those involved in the process, and identifying key process performance measures.
• Process measurement is vital to process management and improvement.
• A person or group is responsible for every key process.
• Everyone needs to be involved in process improvement.
• Process improvement must be managed.
• Best-practice process improvements are identified and shared.

Here’s what you’re signing up for when you submit your name and email address. First, you will receive the free report, and then you will get an email with the second free report on performance management. You will receive three emails over the next three weeks that talk about information on Baldrige.com that you may not be aware of—all of which is free. Finally, you will receive email occasionally…

The Next Generation Collaborative Enterprise

When you’re doing Baldrige, it’s easy to get immersed in fixing the problems with your management system, which is good as long as you also keep looking outside your organization to see if adopting a new system should get as much attention as improving the old one.

For example, Padmasree Warrior wrote on Cisco’s blog (click here) about the Next Generation Collaborative Enterprise (NGCE), which is a very different type of management system. Here’s how she describes it:

Priorities are set by clusters of experts that make decisions. Decisions are communicated real-time through social media applications. Work is shared on a secure collaboration technology platform. Individuals are able to apply themselves to the work based on their skills and availability, regardless of their geographic location. Expertise outside the Enterprise is included ‘on-demand’ to bring necessary knowledge to bear. Funding is directed based on milestones. Direct accountability is embedded into the social network. Finally, organizational functions become less relevant and ‘Re-orgs’ become obsolete. Leadership is defined as the ability to influence, envision, and execute―rather than the authority to command and control.

Despite its innovative design, NGCEs must still address the components of a management system addressed by the Baldrige Criteria, which Warrior lists as “strategy and planning, delivering value to customers and partners, human capital, innovation and design, manufacturing and distribution, marketing, and messaging.”

3 Steps to Finding Your Key Processes

The Baldrige Criteria ask what your key work processes are. Baldrige defines these as “your most important internal value creation processes.” If you’re still confused, use these three steps to identify your key work processes.

1. Based on what your key customers tell you, what does your organization provide them that they value? What are the main products or services that key customers expect to buy or receive from you? What are the processes that produce each? What are the steps from the input of materials and/or information to the output (the product or service)? How would you name the process for internal identification?
2. Which processes are essential to your organization’s purpose? Which processes cost the most in terms of time and money? Which processes will help you compete in the future? Which processes transform information or materials to make it valuable to your customers?
3. Rate each process using these questions: How central is the process to our organization’s strategic plan and competitive success? How central is the process to attracting new customers and retaining existing ones? Which processes do key customers feel are central to their satisfaction and loyalty? (And don’t assume you…

Innovation in the U.S.: The Bigger Picture

“For the past three decades, funding for science research has slipped, the education system has continued to decline, and immigration policy has become less and less rational. Tax and regulatory policies have been made with more thought to domestic special interests than America’s long-term competition,” writes Fareed Zakaria.

Zakaria acknowledges that the U.S. has long been the global leader in innovation in “Is America Losing Its Mojo?” (Newsweek, November 14, 2009). But it’s losing its lead. According to the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, “in recent years, the United States has made the least progress of the 39 countries analyzed in improving its innovation capacity and internal competitiveness.”

What does this mean from a Baldrige perspective?

For businesses, it means establishing processes to detect the innovative products, services, and systems being developed by competitors worldwide. Zakaria gives examples, such as a fourfold increase in global pharmaceutical patent applications since 1995 and the dominance of foreign manufacturers in solar, wind, and battery production. It also means managing for innovation, a Baldrige core value that seeks new dimensions of performance.

For education, it means fixing a system that, as I noted in “Reinventing Education with Baldrige,” needs far-reaching…