All Posts Tagged With: "benchmarks"
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…
Communicate Information Effectively
How do you make data and information available?
This question from the Baldrige Criteria assumes that you have good answers for the questions that precede it on selecting, collecting, aligning, integrating, and analyzing data and information, because if you don’t do these things well, there won’t be much of value to communicate. But if you have sound processes in place, the critical step in an effective performance measurement system is getting the right data and information in the right hands at the right time.
Very few organizations spend time on how they communicate key data and information. For most, it’s numbers on a chart. A few balanced scorecard followers use a stoplight approach alongside the numbers: green light means on target, yellow light means not quite, red light means trouble. A small percentage shows trend lines and benchmarks for their key measures to give users context for current performance. And that’s about it when it comes to communicating data and information, which is why it is always refreshing to discover a creative way to share information.
GE is awarding $200 million to ideas that help build the next generation power grid. It is accepting ideas in three categories: renewables; grid efficiency; and eco…
8Sep2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedCreating a Balanced Scorecard
Performance measurement improved significantly with the advent of the balanced scorecard. Before that, no matter what an organization did, it tended to emphasize one set of measures at the expense of all others. Businesses focused on financial performance. Schools targeted test scores. Government concentrated on…I have no idea.
Each set of measures was important but just part of a bigger picture, and each a lagging indicator of performance on all of the processes that produced these results.
The balanced scorecard directs leaders’ attention to how their organization operates, and how it operates determines how it will perform. A scorecard is also a powerful tool for aligning the activities of an organization with its vision, mission, goals, and objectives. Most Baldrige Award winners rely on balanced scorecards, along with their strategic plans, to focus everyone on what the organization must do to succeed.
I recently sat in on a Webinar by Stacey Barr, a performance measurement expert, in which someone asked a basic question about how you figure out what to measure. The Baldrige Criteria put it this way: How do you select data and information for tracking daily operations and overall organizational performance?
Barr suggested asking a different question. Rather than thinking about how…
14Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued10 Critical Questions: Results
The Baldrige model focuses on results: You don’t transform an organization without a very good reason, and for those organizations that transform themselves through Baldrige, the reason is because it delivers results. Check out some of the results achieved by Baldrige Award recipients in the following areas:
Better yet, read Category 7 in the award application summary of any winner you choose (click here) and you will find impressive results across all six of the areas measured.
The Results Category is the only Category in the Baldrige Criteria that examines your organization’s performance and improvement—but this one Category is worth 45% of the possible points when scoring a Baldrige application because the Baldrige model focuses on results. The best way to evaluate your results is through an assessment using the Baldrige Criteria. You can find out how to do that here. If you cannot do a full assessment but want insight into how to improve your results, here are 10 critical questions to ask and answer:
What are your current levels and trends in key measures of:
- Product performance OR student learning and improvement in student learning OR health care outcomes, health care process results, patient safety, and patients’ functional status?
- Customer/student/patient and stakeholder satisfaction,…
Really Fast Food
Pal's Sudden Service
Pal’s Sudden Service is one of my favorite Baldrige stories. The only restaurant to receive the Baldrige Award (2001), Pal’s is a small fast-food chain headquartered in Kingsport, Tennessee, that boasts world-class performance:
- Service speeds four times faster than its competitors
- Order accuracy at least ten times better than its closest competitor
- Employee turnover half the industry average
- Customers who come back 3-4 times per week compared to 3-4 times per month for its competitors
- Same store sales and market share that have grown for the past 24 years
A great article on SunHerald.com traces the evolution of Pal’s from a single store selling 12-cent mini-hamburgers to a beacon for best practices. The company formed Pal’s Business Excellence Institute (BEI) in 2000 to share its operational ideas with other organizations and a bunch have jumped at the chance, including hospitals, school systems, law firms, charities, churches, and more than 50 nonprofits and government agencies. Ken Schiller, head of a barbeque restaurant in Texas, brings his management staff to BEI every year. “Coming to Pal’s allowed us to know where the bar can be set,” he said. “It gave us a benchmark that we otherwise wouldn’t have even known was possible.”
In the article, David McClaskey, who…
18Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedHealth System Benchmarks
Thomson Reuters just released a white paper, “100 Top Hospitals®: Health System Quality/Efficiency Benchmarks Study,” that provides excellent national benchmarks on five clinical and efficiency measures that appear on many health system scorecards:
- Risk-adjusted mortality index
- Risk-adjusted complications index
- Risk-adjusted patient safety index
- Core measures mean percent
- Severity-adjusted average length of stay
Thomson Reuters evaluated the performance of U.S. health systems with at least two short-term general acute-care hospitals plus a few Critical Access Hospitals that passed its exclusion rules. You can access the study online for a complete explanation of the process and results.
Here are the relevant benchmarks:
|
Winning Health Systems |
Peer Group |
% Difference |
Best System |
|
| Mortality Index* |
0.82 |
1.00 |
17.6% |
0.63 |
| Complication Index* |
0.83 |
1.00 |
16.8% |
0.68 |
| Patient Safety Index* |
0.97 |
1.00 |
3.0% |
0.75 |
| Core Measures Average Score |
93.5% |
88.7% |
N/A |
95.8% |
| Average Length of Stay (days) |
5.0 |
5.6 |
10.7 |
4.1 |
(*based on national norms; ratings <1 indicate fewer adverse events than expected)
11Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
