All Posts Tagged With: "benchmarking"
Find Your Bright Spots
I’ve been reading Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath. It’s well-researched, well-written, and thought-provoking, and I highly recommend it.
One of the brothers’ recommendations is to pursue the bright spots in your organization. In an interview in McKinsey Quarterly (March 2010), Chip Heath says, “The principle of bright spots is that you shouldn’t try to be more like Apple; you should try to be more like yourself at your best moments.” As the Heaths write in their book, figure out “what’s working and how can we do more of it.”
The Baldrige Criteria address this by asking how you manage organizational knowledge to accomplish the rapid identification, sharing, and implementation of best practices. To many organizations, identifying best practices means benchmarking. Chip Heath is not a big fan of benchmarking. In the interview, he says, “If you believe that organizations differ in their cultures, capabilities, and structures, there’s something fundamentally odd about saying that you want to be more like another company that has a very different culture, structure, and set of capabilities.”
While most formal benchmarking processes try to address these differences, a lot of time can be wasted trying to fit someone else’s best practice…
16Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedMy Personal Baldrige: Process
Baldrige is a process model. The first six categories in the Baldrige Criteria ask “how” things are done more than 130 times—and “how” means “what’s the process.” Processes are evaluated based on how systematic and effective your approaches are, how consistently they are deployed, how systematically they are evaluated and improved, and how well they are aligned with what your organization is trying to accomplish. In addition, the Process Management category specifically explores how you design, manage, and improve your key processes.
Here are steps you can take to apply process thinking to your job:
- Identify the processes you participate in. Everything you do is part of a process.
- For each process, figure out who your customers and suppliers are (they may be internal).
- Determine your, your customers’, and your suppliers’ requirements. You all have requirements of the process, i.e, levels of quality, delivery, service, and cost. Ask customers and suppliers what their requirements are.
- Identify measures you can use to evaluate how well these requirements are being met and start collecting and graphing the data for these measures. You can find information about tools to collect and analyze data here.
- When you have enough data (you need three data points to show a trend, so start with three months…
Learning, Teaching and Benchmarking
“Are you learning as fast as the world is changing?” asks business strategist Gary Hamel. Bill Taylor quotes Hamel in a thought-provoking article, “The Rise of the Teaching Organization” (HarvardBusiness.org, November 17, 2009). Taylor takes it a step further, stating “that the most determined innovators—the organizations with the most original ideas about how to compete and win—aren’t just committed to learning. They are just as committed to teaching.”
There’s ample evidence of that among Baldrige Award recipients. All winners are required to share information on their performance and strategies with other U.S. organizations. Many provide tours and offer workshops for interested leaders and use those workshops to identify best practices in other organizations. Several have formed consulting organizations to provide further support. They are teaching and, in the process, they are learning.
Taylor describes how Virginia Mason, a Seattle-based hospital system, became a healthcare leader by integrating the Toyota Production System. Last year, it created the Virginia Mason Institute to do what Baldrige Award recipients do: conduct tours, explain how they work, and share what they know. Its CEO, Dr. Gary Kaplan, said, “Part of our mission as a company is to help improve our industry. But the more we educate, the faster…
23Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued10 Steps to World Class
What are the characteristics of a high-performing organization? What do they do or how do they act to distinguish themselves? What can your organization do to join their ranks?
The Baldrige model has identified the beliefs and behaviors of high-performing organizations. These 11 core values and concepts, embedded in the Baldrige Criteria and in Baldrige Award recipients, are essential to achieving performance excellence. You can find the complete list here and an explanation of each in the Criteria booklets here.
So how do you get your organization from where it is today to world-class status? Twenty years of Baldrige reveal the steps you can take to create a high-performing organization:
- Lead the transformation. It won’t happen without leaders committed to excellence, and it won’t happen without recognizing that the steps you take will transform your organization. Plan the journey, communicate the plan, measure progress, and facilitate change.
♦To learn more, read Is Baldrige Right for Your Organization, 10 Critical Questions: Senior Leadership, and An Achievable Mission and Vision; - Develop management system experts. You will need these experts to help focus resources and attention on what must happen along your journey. Take a few existing or rising stars and ask them to be Baldrige or state award examiners for…
Reinventing Education with Baldrige
In the United States, one-third of eighth graders are proficient in reading. One-third of high school students do not graduate on time. One-third of first-year college students require remediation in either math or English.
Is it any surprise that one-third of K-12 teachers approve of how their schools are run?
The figures come from a study of school performance by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Center for American Progress, and Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute. The fact that these three organizations can write a report together when they rarely agree on anything suggests that this is not just a right-wing or left-wing issue.
The study evaluated state performance in eight categories: school management; finance; staffing—hiring and evaluation; staffing—removing ineffective teachers; data; pipeline to postsecondary; technology; and state reform environment. You can see how your state did here. You can read about the methodology behind the grades here.
The report offers a blunt assessment: “Our school system needs far-reaching innovation. It is archaic and broken, a relic of a time when high school graduates could expect to live prosperous lives…And while the challenges are many—inflexible regulations, excessive bureaucracy, a dearth of fresh thinking—the bottom line is that most education institutions simply…
10Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedOutside-the-Box Benchmarking
Procter & Gamble’s feminine-care business unit benchmarked a gecko, flower petals, armadillos, squirrels, and anteaters. That’s way outside the box.
In “Stop Solving Your Problems” (Fast Company, November 2009), Dan and Chip Heath start with an extreme example of solving problems by looking at how others have solved them—i.e., benchmarking—and then move toward a more common example: “For instance, health-care advocates trying to reduce medical errors have learned from total-quality-management experts in the manufacturing world who obsess about ways to reduce product-defect rates.”
The Baldrige model promotes benchmarking in two significant ways:
- The Criteria ask how “you select and ensure the effective use of key comparative data and information to support operational and strategic decision making and innovation.” The Criteria define benchmarking as “identifying processes and results that represent best practices and performance for similar activities inside or outside your organization’s industry.” For P&G, “outside” meant the San Diego Zoo.
- Baldrige Award recipients share their applications online. If you want to improve any part of your management system, one of the inputs should be these applications. Choose a few from the list, read the relevant sections, and figure out if your organization could learn anything from them. If so, you’ll find contact information in the…
10 Critical Questions: Data, Information & Knowledge
You manage what you measure, which is why, for decades, leaders managed their companies’ financial performance: They reviewed financial data regularly and other types of data sporadically if at all.
Category 4 in the Baldrige Criteria asks how you measure organizational performance, which for most organizations involves some type of balanced scorecard. It asks how you analyze and review performance and how that leads to performance improvement. And it asks how you manage your information, organizational knowledge, and information technology.
As we noted, the best way to evaluate your measurement system—and your management system—is through a Baldrige assessment using the Baldrige Criteria. You can find out how to do that here.
The Criteria consist of powerful questions, rarely asked, about how an organization functions. If you cannot do a full assessment but want insight into how to improve your measurement system, here are 10 critical questions to ask and answer:
- How do you select and collect the data and information you use to track (1) daily operations and (2) overall organizational performance, and how do you align and integrate these data?
- What are your key organizational performance measures?
- How do you select and use comparative data and information to provide benchmarks for these measures and to…
