All Posts Tagged With: "alignment"
Still Passionate about Baldrige
“There is no question that our adherence to the Baldrige performance criteria has made us a much more efficient university, and helped us weather repeated cuts in state aid without affecting educational quality,” write Charles W. Sorensen and Julie Furst-Bowe, chancellor and provost at the University of Wisconsin-Stout (article here).
UW-Stout earned the Baldrige Award in 2001. Ten years later it remains passionate about the value of integrating Baldrige. According to Sorenson and Furst-Bowe, “The most important change brought about by our Baldrige experience, which is now part of our culture, was the establishment of an inclusive planning process to ensure that, in Baldrige speak, ‘all arrows are pointing in the same direction,’ and not at cross-purposes.”
Having worked with five Baldrige Award winners, I can attest to the value of aligning processes and people with the goals, strategies, and objectives of the organization. Whether you are in business, healthcare, or education, the ability to focus all activities on shared goals dramatically improves performance and is a major reason Baldrige Award winners achieve world-class results.
Sorenson and Furst-Bowe also state that “the Baldrige model…also led to a number of important innovations, including our e-Scholar or student laptop program, our designation as Wisconsin’s polytechnic…
3Jan2012 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedHow Well Do You Leverage Metrics?
One of the strengths of Baldrige Award winners is alignment. Strategies and goals are aligned with the organization’s mission and vision. Action plans are aligned with strategies and goals. The performance measurement and performance management systems are aligned with strategies, goals, and action plans. As a result, everyone in the organization is contributing to achieving the organization’s mission and vision. On every project. Every day.
The power of alignment can be seen in the results Baldrige Award winners deliver, a sampling of which you can review here. These organizations prove that alignment is critical to performance excellence.
A recent study by IndustryWeek and MESA International showed the frequent disconnect between objectives and metrics throughout manufacturing companies. The chart shows that only about a third of respondents believe their objectives and metrics are well or very well aligned across their companies. In which category would your organization fall?
One of the interesting results of the survey was the discrepancy among positions of those who “always” leverage metrics to improve performance: 28% of senior leaders said they did, 35% of department heads, and 50% of team leaders or supervisors. At the “staff” level, 40% claimed they always leveraged metrics. IndustryWeek tried to explain the low figure for senior…
31Oct2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat Path Is Your Organization Taking?
In the day-to-day effort make an organization work, it’s easy to lose sight of the path your organization is on and the direction that path is taking you. The Baldrige model helps you see the big picture and how the work you are doing supports—or ignores—your mission and vision.
The question leaders of organizations, business units, divisions, departments, and teams need to continually ask is: What is truly important? Baldrige can help you answer that.
Baldrige Model: How do you measure, analyze and improve organization performance?
Item 4.1 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how you use data and information to improve 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:
- Selecting, collecting, aligning, integrating, and communicating data and information for tracking daily operations and organizational performance
- Selecting key comparative data and information and voice-of-the-customer data and information and using it to support decision making and innovation
- Ensuring that your performance measurement system can respond to rapid and/or unexpected change
- Reviewing organizational performance and capabilities, including using key performance measures and the analysis of those measures
- Sharing lessons learned and best practices identified during organizational performance reviews across the organization
- Using organizational performance reviews to project future performance and to develop priorities for continuous improvement and innovation
Best practices to consider:
- Develop a performance measurement system, the most common of which is a balanced scorecard, that defines how data and information will be selected and collected, aligns key performance measures with the organization’s mission, vision, and strategic objectives, and communicates performance throughout the organization.
- Role model organizations use comparative data and information for as many key measures as possible to provide context for their performance, helping them understand…
Baldrige Model: How do you implement your strategy?
Item 2.2 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how your organization converts strategic objectives into action plans. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.
Your organization needs processes for:
- Developing short- and longer-term action plans and deploying them throughout your organization and to key suppliers and partners
- Allocating financial, human, and other resources to support accomplishing the action plans
- Identifying human resource plans that support accomplishing your action plans
- Identifying key performance measures you can use to track performance on your action plans
- Modifying action plans if circumstances change and rapidly executing the new plans
Best practices to consider:
- Aligning the organization’s strategic objectives, action plans, and performance measurement system with action plans and key performance measures for divisions, departments, teams, and individual employees ensures that everyone in the organization is working on what must happen for the organization to succeed.
- The performance management process identifies annual goals and objectives for each employee that support the goals, objectives, and action plans of the organization and department.
- Business planning and strategic planning are part of one process that allocates resources to support the strategic objectives of the organization.
- Human resource plans in such areas as learning and development,…
Strategy Deployment at MEDRAD
At MEDRAD, which won the Baldrige Award for the second time in 2010, strategic planning aligns the work of each employee with the mission and philosophy of the company. The process begins with a review of the mission and philosophy and the prior year’s plan. (Learn how Baldrige Award winners develop strategies by subscribing to Baldrige.com’s free report in the purple box on the right.)
According to MEDRAD’s application summary, available here, “each business and function champion uses common planning templates and workbooks designed to ensure that blind spots are addressed, SWOT’s are analyzed, core competencies are defined, and early indications of major shifts are addressed.”
The diagram at the left shows how MEDRAD “waterfalls” its strategic plan, scorecard, and objectives throughout the company. Top 12 and Strategic Action Team objectives flow to managers, who create group objectives and plans. These objectives are refined and aligned through team meetings and discussions and used by employees to create individual objectives in the Performance Management (PM) process.
For hourly employees, objectives are team-based to help drive performance in manufacturing. In addition, all employees create written development plans that address areas to improve and the knowledge and skills they need to move into other roles.
Progress on…
13Apr2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Vital Few
What one thing does your organization value above all else? Is that clearly communicated?
In most organizations, making things simple is an almost impossible task. There are too many strategies because all of them are important. Action plans abound because they all must be done. Organizational performance measures proliferate because everything is critical.
Dan and Chip Heath, the authors of Made to Stick, argue for simplicity in “Analysis of Paralysis” (FastCompany, November 1, 2007). They describe a research study in which doctors were told of a man with chronic hip pain who had been given drugs to treat his pain but they had been ineffective. The only remaining option was hip replacement surgery, but then one more medication was found. Would the doctors try it or opt for the surgery? Forty-seven percent chose the medication.
Another group of doctors received the same facts except that two new medication options had been found. More options are better, right? Not for the doctors: Only 28% chose to try either medicine. “More options, even good ones, can freeze us,” write the Heaths, “leading us to stick with the ‘default’ plan, which in this case was slicing open someone’s hip. This is clearly not rational behavior, but it…
23Nov2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
