All Posts Tagged With: "Criteria"
What Changed? Examining This Year’s Baldrige Criteria
Intelligent Risks – Opportunities for which the potential gain outweighs the potential harm or loss to your organization’s sustainability if you do not explore them. Taking intelligent risks requires a tolerance for failure and an expectation that innovation is not achieved by initiating only successful endeavors.
Strategic Opportunities – Prospects that arise from outside-the-box thinking, brainstorming, capitalizing on serendipity, research and innovation processes, nonlinear extrapolation of current conditions, and other approaches to imagining a different future. Choosing which strategic opportunities to pursue involves consideration of relative risk, financial and otherwise, and then making intelligent choices (intelligent risks).
This year, NIST added the two terms above to their glossary. These two new terms summarize the changes made to the criteria in a more succinct way than I ever could, but I’ll lay out the differences further below. The purpose of revising the Criteria is “that the Criteria always reflect the leading edge of validated management practice,” inevitably leading to sustainability and success when orchestrated with an organization management program. Some of the more significant changes and their rationale are outlined below
1. The information and decision process for work systems has been incorporated into the strategic planning category.
- Why? Decisions about what should be made or supplied outside the company, core competencies, and how to engage customers are made by senior leaders, and need to be integrated into the strategic planning
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Begin at the Beginning: The Organizational Profile
Whether you’re ready to write your application for the Baldrige Award, or you’re just dabbling in the criteria, creating an organizational profile of your company is the place to begin. It’s like a summary of sorts, and can help you identify your performance gaps at an early stage. If your Baldrige application can be compared to a thesis, your organizational profile is the introduction.
If you’re scratching your head still and asking, “So, where do I start?” like those folks in the Cars.com commercials that inevitably chase a line across the floor to a dealership, you might need someone to point you in the right direction. You’ve come to the right place.
Start at the top. What does your company offer? Hopefully, that’s an easy one to answer. Why is what you’re selling important? If nobody needs or wants it, nobody will buy it. How do you deliver? Obviously, a hospital would answer those questions very differently than a large retail store, so clarity and detail are important. What are your mission and vision for the company? Usually these answers will revolve around the core competencies of your company, or its strengths and areas of greatest expertise. These strengths are what set you apart from your competitors, and are how you fulfill your mission and vision. They should be unique to you and not a regurgitation of …
29Jan2013 | Joseph A. De Feo | 0 comments | Continued2013-2014 Criteria for Performance Excellence Now Available!
NIST has released the 2013-2014 Criteria for Performance Excellence! Click here for pricing and download information.
19Dec2012 | Joseph A. De Feo | 0 comments | ContinuedIs your organization doing as well as it could? How do you know?
What and how should your organization improve or change?The Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence empower your organization—no matter its size, and whether it is in the manufacturing, service, small business, nonprofit or government sector—to
- reach your goals,
- improve your results, and
- become more competitive by aligning your plans, processes, decisions, people, actions, and results.
Source: NIST
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Acknowledging Innovative Excellence – Sharp HealthCare
The status of past Baldrige Award recipients can help guide our attention to where health care should be and what can be done to keep patient satisfaction an active practice. While constantly factoring in the core concerns of their patients, it is no wonder why Sharp Healthcare is globally recognized for their superior programs. Although the provider based in San Diego is the largest source for health care in their region, it is the level of commitment to their patients’ needs that landed them in the position to receive the 2007 Baldrige Award. But what exactly does it mean to respond to “the current levels and trends in key measure indicators of product and process performance that are important and directly serve your customers,” that qualifies health care providers for this award, according to section 7.1 of the Baldrige criteria? Sharp Healthcare generated positive answers, and when continuing to look at “how the results compared with the performance of [their] competitors” their programs appear to be a model for prioritizing patients’ needs. Their current efforts in fighting cardiovascular disease exemplify their commitment to their recognized efforts.
Sharp Healthcare’s goal is to help patients avoid high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, stroke, and peripheral arterial disease––cardiovascular complications. While these diseases are highly preventable and treatable when detected early, it is no wonder why cardiovascular disease is such a major problem; recognizing …
31May2012 | Tom Huizenga | 0 comments | ContinuedFoundation Approves Baldrige Funding Through 2015
Source: NIST
NIST has announced that the Foundation for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, Inc., has committed funds to sustain the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program (BPEP) through fiscal year 2015. The funding is further evidence of the foundation’s commitment to the long-term viability of Baldrige.
The foundation said its support was due in part to its confidence in the ongoing development of the business and financial model by the Baldrige Enterprise, which includes BPEP, the foundation, the Alliance for Performance Excellence, and ASQ. Baldrige will use the funding in conjunction with revenues raised through a variety of fee-based product and service offerings to ensure both its and the Enterprise’s sustainability.
The foundation has stipulated that the use of the funds is the furtherance of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and the Baldrige Program. The foundation will review the gift annually to determine any appropriate adjustments for a rolling three-year period.
For the official press release and more information, click here.
For continued reading on the Baldrige Award:
9Apr2012 | Joseph A. De Feo | 0 comments | ContinuedHow Do You Do What You Do?
Baldrige is a process model. The first six of the Criteria’s seven categories ask how you do what you do, while the seventh category asks for the results of those processes. Your organization, division, department, and work group must think process to drive continuous improvement and achieve your goals.
In Baldrige terms, “how” encompasses four areas: approach, deployment, learning, and integration. When responding to the “how” questions in the Criteria, of which there are more than 130, you must be able to describe how you address each of these four areas for all of your key processes. Ideally, your approaches will be systematic and repeatable. They will be designed, managed, and improved using data and information. They will be deployed to all relevant parts of the organization. They will include cycles of evaluation and improvement. They will align and harmonize with other key processes, plans, measures, actions, and results to achieve the organization’s goals.
You can develop more effective processes at any level of your organization. Start by identifying your key processes. Map out the steps in each. Identify the key customers for the process and determine their requirements for quality, delivery, cost, and service. Identify the key suppliers to the process, both internal and external, and determine what the process requires from these suppliers. Identify the key requirements of the process, again in terms of quality, delivery, cost, and …
5Mar2012 | Steve George | 1 comment | ContinuedBaldrige 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 how good they are and how good they can be.
- Senior leaders and managers manage by fact, using data on
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