All Posts Tagged With: "in-process measures"
10 Critical Questions: Process Management
The Baldrige Criteria describe a process model. Six of the seven Criteria Categories ask powerful questions about the key processes necessary to operate a high-performing organization. Your responses to those questions are evaluated based on the effectiveness of your approaches, how widely and consistently they are deployed, how systematically they are refined, and how well they are aligned with your organizational needs.
The Process Management Category asks how you design your work systems and how you design, manage, and improve your key work processes. The best way to evaluate how well you do this is through a Baldrige 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 process management, here are 10 critical questions to ask and answer:
- How do you design and innovate your overall work system (how the work of your organization is accomplished)?
- How do your work systems and key work processes (your most important internal value creation processes) relate to and capitalize on your core competencies?
- What are your key work processes?
- How do you determine the key requirements for these processes and what are they?
- How do you design and innovate your work processes to meet these requirements?
- How do you ensure that the day-to-day operation of these processes meets their key process…
In-Process Measures
One of the obvious differences between Baldrige Award recipients and organizations new to the Baldrige model is their use of in-process measures: The latter are often unclear about what in-process measures are, what they have, and what is actually useful.
In-process measures track the performance of a process as it is unfolding, providing real-time feedback that can be acted upon without waiting for the process to end, at which point end-of-process or outcome measures tell you the results of that process. In a perfect world, in-process measures align with end-of-process measures. Most of the results in Category 7 of a Baldrige application are for end-of-process measures. The alignment allows an organization to predict how it will perform on those end-of-process measures and fix problems during the process to get better results.
You can pick any result in any Category 7 Item, identify the process or processes that produce that result, and determine the in-process measures that will predict that result. For example, on-time delivery of a product or service is a common end-of-process metric. In-process measures that predict your performance on on-time delivery might include time to enter an order in the system, time to produce a product or service, and time to deliver that product or service to the customer. The time it takes for every step in the process can…
25Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
