All Posts Tagged With: "Baldrige application"
New Conditions for Baldrige Award Eligibility
The Baldrige program has announced new conditions for applying for the Baldrige Award. In addition to the existing eligibility requirements—i.e., headquartered in the U.S., in existence for at least one year, able to share information, and categorized as a business, educational institution, healthcare organization, or nonprofit—an organization must meet one of the following conditions to apply for the Baldrige Award:
- Be a previous Baldrige Award recipient
- Have received the top-tier award from a member of the Alliance for Performance Excellence within the past 5 years
- Have received a Baldrige site visit within the past five years
- Have received a combined scoring band range of 8 or better in the past five years
- Have 25% or more of its employees outside the organization’s home state
- Have no Alliance member program available for your organization
The new requirements “leverage the larger Baldrige enterprise—in particular, the state and local Baldrige-based award programs,” according to Harry Hertz, Baldrige program director. The new requirements will compel first-time applicants to use their state programs unless one is not available, which is currently true for just one state: Utah. You will find a complete list of state and local award programs here.
The change will likely strengthen the state programs while reducing the number of applicants…
21Dec2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Real Value of a Baldrige Site Visit
Of the 69 applicants for the 2011 Baldrige Award, 11 have made it to the final stage. They will receive site visits in October by a team of examiners who will verify and clarify their applications.
The finalists for the Award are:
- 6 healthcare organizations (40 submitted applications)
- 3 nonprofits/government organizations (14)
- 1 educational organization (8)
- 1 small business (2)
Two manufacturers and three service companies also submitted applications but none was awarded a site visit.
According to the press release from the Baldrige program, “examiners will provide 300 to 1,000 hours of review to each applicant receiving a site visit, and all applicants will receive a detailed report on the organization’s strengths and opportunities for improvement.”
Organizations that take integrating Baldrige seriously recognize that the site visit and resulting feedback are the real value of the Baldrige process. Sure, winning the Baldrige Award is satisfying and rewarding, a testament to the hard work you’ve been doing, but visionary leaders see the Award as recognition for the quality of their management systems while the site visit and feedback drive significant improvements to those systems. They are passionate about improving performance and a Baldrige site visit and feedback report feed that passion.
This has been true since the earliest days of…
16Sep2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedHow Can We Promote Baldrige?
The Baldrige program announced that 69 organizations have applied for the 2011 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The number is down from last year, primarily because of a significant drop in healthcare applicants (54 in 2010, 40 in 2011). The number of education applicants doubled from 7 to 14 while the number of small business applicants dropped from 7 to 2. A total of five businesses larger than 500 employees applied for the Award in both years; only seven businesses, large and small, applied for the 2011 Award.
As the chart shows, the dearth of business applicants is a long-term trend. The Baldrige program can survive by appealing to healthcare and government agencies, both of which are under pressure to get their acts together, but its roots are in business. For the first 13 years of the Baldrige program, only businesses could apply for and win the Award. It wasn’t until 2001 that three educational institutions won it and the first healthcare winner received the Award in 2002.
While a few businesses, especially at the state level, show interest in the Baldrige model, it is almost invisible on the national business stage.
How do we change that? How can we make Baldrige relevant…
15Jun2011 | Steve George | 4 comments | ContinuedBaldrige Program Releases Applicant Data
I am frequently asked how many points an organization must score to receive the Baldrige Award. I usually answer, “at least 600,” which is probably a safe bet, but the actual number is lower: Of the 66 organizations that won the Award from 199 to 2006, the lowest score was approximately 460 and the highest was 811.
The Baldrige program has released an analysis of data from 17 years of applications representing all sectors. You can access the data analysis here. Highlights include:
- The minimum total score at independent review was 51; the maximum was 811; the mean was 417.
- The mean score for small business applicants was 354, well below the mean for manufacturers (478) and service companies (467)
- In 2006, the lowest-scoring applicant received 185 points and it was an outlier: The mean for all applicants ranged from 429 to 519 points. This is significantly different than 1990 when most of the manufacturing, service, and small business applicants scored in the 50 to 350 range, there was a gap with no scores from 350 to 450, and then a few scored from 450 to 811.
- The range of scores for manufacturing applicants has narrowed significantly from 1990, when it ranged from 100 to…
Gearing Up for Baldrige Season
If you want to identify the flaws in your management system—flaws that directly affect performance by increasing costs, decreasing revenues, and inhibiting sustainable growth—and you want to know how to prioritize those opportunities, you need to assess your management system using the Baldrige Criteria.
You can do an assessment internally or you can submit that assessment as an application for a state award or the Baldrige Award. Much like tax season in the U.S., this is Baldrige season, with applications due on or before May 17. If you plan on applying for the Award, you must first submit your intent to register, which is due by March 1 if you want someone in your organization to be trained as a Baldrige examiner. You can find the award application forms at the Baldrige program’s Web site here.
If you have questions about the application or application process or would like to discuss getting outside support for the effort, click here.
If you’re new to Baldrige and want to test it out, or if you are doing an assessment for the first time, you should start by answering the questions in the Criteria’s Organizational Profile. Pal’s Business Excellence Institute is offering a free webinar on how to do…
17Feb2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige FAQs: The Baldrige Assessment
Organizations integrate the Baldrige model by performing assessments using the Baldrige Criteria. The serious ones typically do it annually, although some wait two or even three years before repeating it because they want to work on the opportunities for improvement identified by their previous assessment. A Baldrige assessment may be done internally or submitted as an application for local or state awards or the Baldrige Award.
What is a Baldrige assessment?
Organizations conduct a Baldrige assessment by responding to the questions in the Baldrige Criteria. The simplest assessments respond to the questions in the Organizational Profile, which is the first part of the Criteria and addresses your organizational environment and relationships and your competitive environment. The most common—and most valuable—assessment responds to all of the questions posed by the Baldrige Criteria. To see what the best Baldrige assessments look like, read one or more of the award application summaries of Baldrige Award winners, available here.
How does this work?
Each question in the Criteria asks about a specific element of your management system, organized by seven major categories. A Baldrige assessment responds to all of the questions with accurate and concise answers, which may be narrative or graphic or a combination of the two.…
9Feb2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedQuestions–and Answers–about the Quality of Your Organization
Holidays often provide moments of reflection. Leaders who use the opportunity to reflect on the condition of their organizations may face some difficult questions, such as:
- Why aren’t we performing better?
- What are our biggest opportunities to improve?
- How can we prepare the organization to compete in the future?
- How good are we, really?
You can answer these questions and more with a Baldrige assessment. With an assessment, you ask and answer more than 130 questions about all aspects of your management system, about how you do what you do. The result is a comprehensive snapshot of your organization at a moment in time that reveals the strengths upon which you can build and the opportunities for improvement that can make your organization perform better.
A Baldrige assessment typically takes more than three months. If you do it internally, it usually involves one or two people full-time or a half-dozen or more part-time. If you hire a Baldrige expert to do the assessment, it can cost $50,000 or more. In my experience, both the time and money commitments are smart investments because of the bottom-line benefits of a Baldrige assessment including:
- Getting a clear and complete picture of your management system
- Identifying your organization’s strengths and opportunities for…
