Blessed with OFIs

At the latest Quest for Excellence, an annual event where the previous year’s Baldrige Award recipients discuss their management systems, the leaders of the three winning organizations answered audience questions for about a half-hour. The YouTube video of that panel discussion is here.

The plant manager for Cargill Corn Milling was asked how his organization prioritizes the opportunities for improvement (OFIs) it gets from the Baldrige feedback and from Cargill’s Business Excellence process. He noted that they got a total of 131 OFIs from the 2008 feedback reports. Their leadership group used a priority matrix to rank the OFIs based on their importance to Cargill Corn Milling’s mission, vision, and purpose. They then decided to work on the top three OFIs this year.

For people new to Baldrige, a couple of things may be surprising about this. First is the fact that a Baldrige Award recipient got 131 OFIs. What you have to remember is that recipients typically score in the 650 to 750 point range. The missing 250-350 points are OFIs. There are no “perfect” organizations.

The second surprise is that, out of 131 OFIs, the organization is working on just three. I think that’s misleading. In my experience, improving performance on those top three OFIs will lead to improvement on several others. For example, addressing an OFI that questions how systematically you improve your work processes will also address all of the OFIs in other Categories that raised that issue for individual processes. Besides, no organization has the resources to tackle…