6 | Process
Conference on Performance Management & Measurement
If your leaders are looking for insight into issues they are facing, want to learn about strategies for managing change, can benefit from case studies about structured and successful improvement approaches, or are curious about how to integrate Baldrige , especially in the areas of strategic planning and performance measurement, then sign them up for ActiveStrategy’s 2011 conference on May 3rd and 4th in Philadelphia. Click on the blue banner on the right for details. Enter Baldrige11 on the registration page to receive $100 off the cost of the conference.
Held since 2004, the conference features case-study presentations that describe real-life issues and how organizations are dealing with them. It’s a smaller conference—usually around 100 people—that encourages asking questions, discussing problems, and exploring solutions. You will walk away with practical and proven ideas for dealing with your most challenging issues.
Most of the presenters use ActiveStrategy software to turn strategic plans into measurable results, but you don’t have to be an ActiveStrategy client to benefit from the experiences of the presenters, which include:
- Clayton Fitzhugh, executive VP of share services for Catholic Health East, will talk about “A Leader’s Role in Performance Excellence.”
- Allison Diego, assistant director at the Miami-Dade County Park & Recreation Department, will describe her department’s journey to receiving the Florida Sterling Award.
- Scott Walters, vice president of national accounts for AlliedBarton Security Services, will speak on “Using Performance Metrics to Win Business and Manage Customer Relationships.”
- Leaders from Aria Health will talk about “Measuring and Managing Performance from All Angles.”
- Col. John Harris, assistant adjutant general…
Innovation Big and Small
A lot of organizations are embracing innovation, or trying to, which is why you can find so many articles being written about it. Innovation is key to creating new value by offering new and better products and services to customers, serving new markets, and improving quality and productivity.
Managing for innovation is a Baldrige core value. As the Baldrige Criteria note, “Innovation should lead your organization to new dimensions of performance.” The new dimensions can be as grand as the reason your organization exists or as mundane as the day-to-day work of every employee.
Jack Dorsey is an innovator. In an interview on Fast Company, available here, the cofounder of Twitter talks about his process, which is to find a solution to a “what if” question, mess around with it, and then decide if it’s a viable product. In the case of Twitter, the solution was first proposed in 2000 but the cofounders decided the time was not yet right, so they waited until 2006 to introduce it, with obvious success.
His latest venture is Square, which is a small gadget that fits into the audio port of an iPhone or iPad, enabling it to accept credit card payments. Square recently closed a $27 million funding round and is adding 60,000 to 70,000 new merchants every month. Square makes mobile credit card payment possible for millions of merchants who lack a storefront and a cash register.
Jack Dorsey is an innovator, but not every innovator has to be a Jack Dorsey. In fact, the…
14Feb2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedSmart Question #1: What’s the Process?
(This excerpt is from The Baldrige Edge, an e-Guide from Baldrige.com. You can learn more about the guide by clicking on the black-and-red box on the right.)
Over the past 22 years, I’ve helped more than 50 organizations evaluate their management systems using Baldrige. While every question in the Baldrige Criteria is important, you can distill them into three smart questions that, when used daily, will set you apart from your peers while providing a proven, effective path to fixing most problems.
The first smart question is: What’s the process?
We’ve all sat in meetings called to solve problems. Too often, the first order of business is figuring out who screwed up. If you work in such an environment, what I call a “culture of blameology,” you’ve learned to keep your head down and your excuses ready.
You’re not going to change that culture all by yourself but you can shine a light on the real culprit deserving the blame: the process.
All work is process. Dictionary.com defines process as “a systematic series of actions directed to some end.” The steps you take to get something done are steps in a process. The actions you take every day are part of one or more processes. A process may exist entirely in your work group or department (functional) or you may have a chunk of a process that spans several departments (cross-functional). Many of our major processes have names like product design, teaching math, surgery, accounts payable, supply chain management, drivers’ license renewal, and customer service.
All work…
31Jan2011 | Steve George | 1 comment | ContinuedInnovation and Communication
Two of the key elements in a world-class organization, as defined by the Baldrige model, are innovation and communication. In “Eight Communication Traps That Foil Innovation” (HBR, January 12, 2011), Georgia Everse, who was the chief communications officer for Steelcase, argues that innovative ideas, initiatives, and products need smart communications to succeed. She proposes eight traps to avoid as you innovate. Here’s the positive action you can take to avoid those traps:
- Link innovation to your mission and vision. Projects are more likely to succeed if they support your organization’s reason for being.
- Make your thinking visible. Create a space where project teams can post charters, objectives, process diagrams, measurement trends, prototyping efforts, etc. to help teams stay on track, reinforce their goals, and bring new stakeholder quickly up to speed.
- Follow well-defined innovation processes. Develop and refine innovation processes to ensure consistent progress and results.
- Follow well-defined communication processes. Don’t wait until the team is ready to hand the innovation off for production or marketing or integrating it into your culture. Communicate from the start the opportunities, the options being explored, progress on the project, and your innovative solutions.
- Bring the future to life. “Tell stories and create experiences that put [internal stakeholders] in the role of the customer, where they can touch and feel a prototype of the new product or service.”
- Share insights into customer wants and needs. “The best ideas are born out of a discovery process that unveils insights into the behavior patterns of people.” Those insights are valuable to other parts of your organization, too.
- Build a common…
Baldrige and Process Improvement
“Have you seen process owners or other organizational structures that sustain cross-functional process improvement?”
Brad Power poses this question at the end of his article, “Where Have All the Process Owners Gone?” (HBR, January 7, 2011). Anyone who’s been following Baldrige.com or been involved with integrating Baldrige or evaluating Baldrige assessments knows that some of this country’s best examples of “organizational structures that sustain cross-functional process improvement” are Baldrige Award winners.
The Baldrige model is a process model. The first six of seven categories in the Baldrige Criteria ask how you design, manage, and improve your key processes, while the seventh category requests the results of those processes. Each Baldrige Award winner has found its own way to improve processes, some of which include process owners and most of which use similar quality tools and techniques.
They have also developed systematic approaches to sustaining process improvement. Power bemoans the fact that too many organizations attempt process improvement by establishing process owners, only to revert to functional management in the end. He suggests six reasons for this; none of these reasons hold true at Baldrige Award winners.
- Attention shifted. Organizations lose their focus on process improvement when senior leaders are distracted by new or more urgent issues. Baldrige Award winners sustain their focus on process improvement through unwavering, visionary leadership.
- Roles were misunderstood. They botched the process for improving processes. Baldrige Award winners clearly define roles and responsibilities, deploy reporting and review processes to keep everything on track, and provide the necessary training for process owners, process improvement teams,…
Keys to Successful Process Improvement
The Baldrige model is all about process improvement. The first five categories in the Baldrige Criteria focus on an organization’s key processes in leadership, strategic planning, customer relationships, measurement, and your workforce, and the sixth category asks how you design, manage, and improve these processes.
Baldrige Award winners achieve what many organizations attempt, which is to realize the benefits of process improvement in world-class results. Why do they succeed where others fail? Brad Power attempts to answer that question in “What the C-Suite Needs to Do for Process Improvement?” (HBR, December 15, 2010) He draws on 30 years of experience as a consultant to identify three reasons that process improvement initiatives fail:
- Organizations optimize processes within functions and departments rather than across them. Your most important processes involve multiple functions and departments.
- Frontline workers can’t properly contribute to company goals when they lack information about how to have an impact on them. Organizations that integrate Baldrige use strategic planning and performance measurement systems, as well as frequent communication, to show workers what the organization’s goals are and how everyone contributes to reaching them.
- Top managers can’t realize the substantial benefits of process improvements if they, rather than workers, identify what needs to change. The people who work the process are in the best position to improve it.
Power proposes three deliberate actions to turn this around:
- Listen to how well your organization meets customer expectations. The third category in the Baldrige Criteria examines how you engage your customers for long-term success. That means listening to them, measuring…
Creating a Culture of Excellence with Baldrige
If you’ve ever walked along a Miami beach (or seen one on television), chances are it was maintained by the Miami-Dade County Park and Recreation Department. The department also oversees the third largest county park system in the country, marinas, pools, programs for children, nature centers, arts and culture programs, Zoo Miami, and much more. It won the 2009 Florida Sterling Award for Performance Excellence and shared its journey this week during a webinar sponsored by ActiveStrategy. If you missed the webinar, you can still catch the archived copy by clicking here.
The department started its quest for the Sterling Award, which is based on the Baldrige Award and Criteria, in 2006. It traces the beginning of its quality journey to 2001 when it adopted a strategic planning process that involved stakeholders in developing its first comprehensive plan, which was rolled out in 2004. It worked with ActiveStrategy to build a Balanced Scorecard-based performance framework to align its strategic plan with its performance measurement system.
By the time it applied for the Sterling Award it had received several awards for excellence and considered itself a leader in its industry. The feedback on its application was an eye-opener, revealing gaps in its management system that it used as a blueprint for improvement. One gap was that upper management was using the balanced scorecard but the rest of the organization wasn’t. It addressed this gap by training 180 managers and supervisors in its strategic business planning process, conducting individual business planning meetings in each…
11Nov2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
