All Posts Tagged With: "Iredell-Statesville Schools"
How to Deploy Your Strategic Plan
Iredell-Statesville Schools won the Baldrige Award in 2008. In its application, available here (pdf), it demonstrates the alignment of its success factors, strategic goals, action plans, HR training and development, leading indicators, and results. It does this through the table shown below.
Each of the district’s 17 strategic goals is assigned an owner who is responsible for a district improvement plan that addresses the goal. Action plans that support the improvement plan are then developed within the owner’s department.
The owner reports on progress on the plan quarterly to senior leadership using the key measures listed in the table below and a rubric aligned to the factors by which Baldrige evaluates a process: approach, deployment, learning, and integration.
I-SS has more than 100 leading indicators for monitoring performance on short-term action plans that it tracks monthly. According to the application, “Each action plan is integrated with a PDSA approach, so that each plan must have three evaluation measures that measure completion and fidelity to the overall approach of the PDSA and an evaluation measure that impacts the overall goal.”
To see how all of this helps I-SS achieve its strategic goals, read its Baldrige Award-winning application summary (pdf).
2008 Baldrige Awards Presented Today
Three organizations will receive their Baldrige Awards from Vice President Joe Biden today in a ceremony in Washington, D.C. I attended such a ceremony about ten years ago as a guest of Custom Research, at which President Clinton handed out the Awards, and they are exciting events for the winning organizations.
The 2008 Baldrige Award recipients are:
- Poudre Valley Health System, a not-for-profit health care organization with a service area of 50,000 square miles in northern Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming. PVHS has some of the highest clinical outcomes in the country for mortality rates, complication, and infection rates, and patient satisfaction and financial performance well within the top 10% of all organizations nationally.
- Iredell-Statesville Schools, a K-12 public school system serving nearly 21,000 students in southwestern North Carolina. Its per-pupil operations expenditures are among the lowest in the state at the same time that it is ranked academically in the state’s top 10 school systems.
- Cargill Corn Milling North America, a business unit of Cargill Inc. that manufactures corn- and sugar-based food in nine manufacturing facilities throughout the U.S. CCM’s earnings after tax nearly tripled from 2003 to 2007. From 2006 to 2008, CCM saved more than $15 million from ideas generated by employees.
You…
2Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedKEYSTONE: Customer Knowledge
An organization exists to serve customers whether they are called customers, clients, patients, students, constituents, or another name given to people who come to you for your products or services. A key measure of your success is how well you meet your customers’ requirements: Meet or exceed them and you improve satisfaction and loyalty with the benefits these provide; fail to meet their requirements and you lose customers, revenue, or support.
The first order of business, then, is to make sure you know exactly what your customers require. Most organizations don’t. They think they know. After all, they interact with customers every day. They may even be able to produce a list of customer requirements, which should really be called a list of assumptions about customer requirements because few organizations take a systematic approach to identifying, validating, and communicating key customer requirements.
I once worked with a manufacturer that was the worldwide leader in its industry. After completing its award application, I was asked to share my feedback on the application with the senior leadership team. My first bullet said: You do not have rock-solid understanding of customer requirements.
Boy, did they lay into me! “We’re the market leader,” one said, “of course we know…
22Oct2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued83 Points
That’s what Iredell-Statesville Schools (ISS) scored in its first Baldrige assessment in 2002.
It’s rare to see the starting point for an organization. I mean, who wants to tell people they scored 83 points out of 1000. Kudos to ISS for making this public and for the dramatic progress they made over the next six years. In 2008, ISS received the Baldrige Award and reported its score at 626 points.
I’ve frequently been asked by senior leaders whose organizations are new to Baldrige how long it can take to win the Award. I tell them three years to never.
Three years is impossibly short unless an organization is process-oriented, has been collecting data on key measures for awhile, and is committed to making major improvements quickly. Never is the more likely result because few leadership teams have the desire or attention span to stay the course.
Based on experience, I think it typically takes five to six years to get from “how do you spell Baldrige” to receiving the Award. It takes that long because an organization needs time to identify opportunities for improvement, design or redesign processes that address them, track results and make refinements, collect data on key measures, and find benchmarks. You…
13Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
