How Can We Perform Better?

In the current economic downturn, a lot of organizations are doing more with less. Fewer people. Less money. Same ambitious goals. Businesses have been slow to hire because of the higher productivity of the people they’ve retained.

If you’ve seen your organization’s strategic plan, you have a good idea what its goals are and some ideas about how you can help achieve them. At the same time, you’re probably busy enough not to be looking for more work. So how do you make your job more interesting and your role in the organization more valuable without burning yourself out with the effort?

The answer is to work more efficiently, and the way to do that is through process thinking. A smart question you can ask is, ‘What’s the process?’ The question gets people thinking about flaws in the process rather than blaming people for errors. Inevitably, focusing on the process triggers questions about what can be done to fix it.

If your organization has formal approaches to process management and improvement, you should learn what they are and how you can use them. If your organization doesn’t have formal approaches, or if it has them but reserves them for sanctioned process management/improvement teams, you will benefit from learning and applying some basics of process thinking.

The first is to understand what a process entails, which is captured in this SIPOC …

Welcome to 2013. What Will You Do This Year?

It’s a new year; time to plan, set goals, and determine where your business is going and how it will excel. Where will you go? What will you do? What will you focus on? Will your company branch out in new directions? How will you keep your customers happy? And what about your employees; where do they fall on the totem pole of prioritization? If your strategy is busting at the seams but lacking clear direction, perhaps it’s time to take a look at the Baldrige criteria.

“When you look at the Baldrige Criteria, what a great road map to say if you can do the things in all these categories and do them well, you’re going to be a well-run company.” – Robert F. Pence, President & CEO Freese and Nichols, Inc., 2010 Baldrige Award recipient

The Baldrige criteria for performance excellence are aimed at increasing the competitiveness of U.S. businesses. Some of the core values that are interspersed throughout the criteria include customer-driven excellence, a focus on the future, operational effectiveness, and managing for innovation. These values are tested throughout the seven criteria items: Leadership; Strategic Planning; Customer Focus; Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management; Workforce Focus; Operations Focus; Results. If you’re new to Baldrige, the Strategic Planning section is a great place to start.

So, your strategic plan is overflowing with initiatives in every which way, and the …

At Baldrige.com, We’re More Than Just a Pretty Face

Did you know that Baldrige.com is more than just a resource library? Not only do we love to write about the Baldrige Award and all those who endeavor for quality, but we also offer assessments, training, strategic advice and support, and various improvement programs.

Looking for help with the Strategic Planning portion of the Baldrige criteria, particularly with aligning your business goals and objectives? We provide advice, coaching, facilitating, and education to enable your organization to link its strategy and goals with every business unit and employee to assure the goals are met. Perhaps the Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management section is where your company is lacking, and you need assistance developing a truly balanced scorecard. A proper scorecard has to include the right measures and targets to effectively monitor the performance of an organization, but determining those metrics can sometimes be the most challenging part. We can help with that. Ready to plan and design your new services? With a variety of structured processes, we can help you select the most practical fit for your organization. Are you in need of a controlled improvement program? The number of ways we can help your organization are endless, as we customize each program to your specifications.

Perhaps your trials and tribulations are more ambiguous; it’s hard to identify the cause of the problems, but you’re certain there are problems to …

Does Your Organization Have Good Perspective?

The Baldrige criteria provide a systems perspective for managing your organization and its key processes to achieve results – and to strive for performance excellence. The seven categories, the core values, and the scoring guidelines form the building blocks and the integrating mechanism for the system. However, successful management of overall performance requires organization-specific synthesis, alignment, and integration.

Synthesis means looking at your organization as a whole and building on key business attributes, including your core competencies, strategic objectives, action plans, and work systems. Alignment means using the key linkages among requirements given in the Baldrige criteria categories to ensure consistency of plans, processes, measures, and actions. Integration builds on alignment so that the individual components of your performance management system operate in a fully interconnected manner and deliver anticipated results.

Henry Ford Health Systems, a 2011 Baldrige Award recipient, is one of the country’s largest health care systems, exceeding $4 billion in revenues, and is a national leader in clinical care, research and education. It includes the 1,200-member Henry Ford Medical Group, five hospitals, Health Alliance Plan, Henry Ford Physician Network, 32 primary care centers and many other health-related entities throughout southeast Michigan. In 2010, Henry Ford provided nearly $200 million in uncompensated care. The health system is also a major economic driver in Michigan and employs more than 24,000.

HFHS’s commitment to patient safety is emphasized through …