All Posts Tagged With: "Baldrige assessment"
Diagnosing for Excellence
In healthcare, you never treat before you diagnose. The doctor never walks in and says, “I’m scheduling you for surgery on your knee, now tell me why you’re here.” Yet many organizations do just that when it comes to treating their performance: “We know we have problems so we’ll implement Six Sigma and see if that works.” It’s a prescription for sustained mediocrity.
In a webinar on Friday, Katie Owens, Baptist Leadership Group’s director of research and performance improvement, described a more logical approach her consulting organization calls “Diagnosing for Excellence.” It starts with a comprehensive inquiry into how a healthcare organization operates with the goal of creating a roadmap to achieve patient-centered excellence. Katie identified five steps in this process:
- Define accountability for patient-centered excellence
- Diagnose performance gaps
- Develop the skills of leaders and staff
- Execute best practices in sequence and customize to outcomes
- Evaluate your results and make sure the improvements stick
The Baptist Leadership Group is part of Baptist Health Care, as is Baptist Hospital, which won the Baldrige Award in 2003. The Group understands the value of a comprehensive assessment from Baptist’s experience with the Baldrige process. It also uses Baptist Hospital as a “living laboratory” to test and prove the tools, tactics, and best practices that it offers its clients.
You can find out more about Baptist Leadership Group by clicking here.
To read more about best practices in healthcare, click on these articles:
13Dec2010 | 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 improvement
- Comparing your organization’s performance to world-class standards
- Using the assessment and evaluation to get consensus on priorities and next steps
- Involving leaders and managers in a systematic approach to improving performance
- Focusing the organization on what it must…
Seeking Information about Baldrige
Baldrige.com is now getting more than 200 unique visitors a day and 80% of them find us through search engines. The top ten keyword searches are all variations of the word Baldrige such as Baldrige model, Baldrige Award, and Malcolm Baldrige, plus the most common misspelling of the word: “baldridge.”
If you are visiting us for the first time because you want to know what Baldrige is about, I invite you to check out these articles:
- What Is Baldrige?
- Baldrige 101
- Baldrige Gets Results
- How the Baldrige Award Works
- How to Integrate Baldrige
- 10 Steps to an Effective Baldrige Assessment
The core of the Baldrige program is the Baldrige Criteria, which identifies the critical elements of any management system through questions that help you assess how your organization operates. The Criteria have been refined every year for more than 20 years (click here to read more) to ensure that they address everything an organization must do to achieve performance excellence. The Criteria are built on a foundation of 11 core values (click here). When leaders ask whether integrating Baldrige is a good choice for their organization, I describe the core values. If you want your organization to reflect those values, then integrating Baldrige is a smart decision.
You integrate Baldrige by asking and answering the questions in the Criteria, identifying opportunities for improvement, and acting on those opportunities to improve performance. Most organizations that embrace Baldrige perform annual assessments until they win a Baldrige Award…
3Nov2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Perfect Question
Anyone who has done the research to write a Baldrige assessment knows what it feels like to ask the perfect question. You’re sitting with a subject matter expert. You ask one of the questions in the Baldrige Criteria. The expert gives you a general answer that provides some of what you need to know, but not all of it, so you ask more questions. How do you do that? What’s the process? Who are the customers for that process? What do they think? How do you know that? Who is involved in the process? How do they know what to do? How do you measure performance? What do the results of those measures show? And so on.
Each of these questions probes how systematically an organization does what it does. As you can see, they sound like fairly standard, basic questions, and that is where they get their power, because very few organizations and very few subject matter experts routinely ask these fundamental questions.
You can see it in their eyes. The question is simple and direct and it gets at the heart of what the expert is describing, but the focus of the question has been ignored or forgotten. I don’t know how many times I’ve had an expert pause, think hard about how to answer the question, and then say, “That’s a really good question,” and then write a reminder to look into it. Those…
27Oct2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedReady to Go Big
The results speak for themselves:
- Same store sales have grown for 24 years
- Market share has grown for 24 years
- Service speeds four times faster than competitors
- Order accuracy at least ten times better than the closest competitor
- Employee turnover half the industry average
Pal’s Sudden Service has accomplished all of this with what may be the ugliest store design in fast-food history—and it may be coming to a major thoroughfare near you. Pal’s was recently named one of Restaurant Business magazine’s “Future 50,” which are restaurant chains that have proven their concepts, are fast growing, and are getting ready to go big.
Pal’s key concept is a management system based on the Baldrige model. The restaurant chain won the Baldrige Award in 2001. It established the Business Excellence Institute to share its best practices with other organizations, and those lessons aren’t just for food service companies. More than 50 nonprofit organizations and government agencies have taken the training BEI offers, which once again demonstrates the universality of Baldrige principles. You can learn more about Pal’s BEI by clicking here.
Pal’s did its first Baldrige assessment in 1995. As I’ve seen with other organizations, the first assessment often produces profound insights, and the same was true for Pal’s. “From the founding of this company until 1995 we didn’t know what business we were in,” said Thom Crosby, the CEO at Pal’s. “We took it for granted that we were in a service industry. When…
29Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat Great Organizations Achieve
The bottom-line question every senior leader asks about Baldrige is: What does this management system stuff have to do with the bottom line?
John Friel, former president and CEO of Baldrige Award-winner Medrad and the man responsible for leading the metamorphosis of its management system, answered that question for himself in 1989 when he visited Milliken, a textile manufacturer that had won the Baldrige Award the previous year. “They talked about two things that struck me,” said Friel. “They were the market share leader, charging the highest prices and getting the highest margins in the industry, and they had the highest customer satisfaction and retention. That’s when I was converted.”
Milliken’s second point put the responsibility to act on Friel’s doorstep. “They told everyone to stand on a chair and yell at the top of their lungs, ‘Management is the problem!’”
When Friel took over as Medrad’s CEO in 1998, he solved that problem by committing Medrad to annual Baldrige applications. The results came quickly. The company’s revenue started growing at 15% a year. It increased operating income as a percent of revenue, a measure of profitability, from 16 percent in 1999 to 20 percent in 2002. Its percent of “very satisfied” customers exceeded 70, with more than 80% very satisfied with its service. Employee satisfaction exceeded the best-in-class industry benchmark. In a national survey of 57 medical imaging companies, Medrad ranked second. None of its direct competitors…
22Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Organization You Want
What information do you need to build the organization you want?
We’ve been answering that question now for one year with nearly 370 articles on all aspects of a world-class management system. Our guide for what to address is the Baldrige model defined by the Baldrige Criteria and used to determine Baldrige Award winners. No other management model in the world has been as thoroughly tested, refined, and deployed.
The goal of any management system is to produce the results you want your organization to achieve. Ideally, those results align with your organization’s mission and vision. In world-class organizations, results are multi-dimensional and not just profits for a business or test results for a school. The Baldrige Criteria identify six areas where excellent results are necessary for long-term success.
The rest of the Baldrige Criteria address the development and deployment of the systematic processes needed to achieve world-class results. The Baldrige model is a process model: It asks how you do what you do more than 130 times.
Process has four dimensions:
- The approach you use to get something done
- Consistent deployment of the approach to all relevant areas of the organization
- Refining the approach through cycles of learning
- The integration of your approach with the rest of your management system
Questions about your processes are organized in six Categories: leadership, strategic planning, customer focus, measurement, workforce focus, and process management. Everything you do to run your organization fits into one or more of these Categories.
The articles…
12Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
