All Posts Tagged With: "key work process"
3 Steps to Finding Your Key Processes
The Baldrige Criteria ask what your key work processes are. Baldrige defines these as “your most important internal value creation processes.” If you’re still confused, use these three steps to identify your key work processes.
- Based on what your key customers tell you, what does your organization provide them that they value? What are the main products or services that key customers expect to buy or receive from you? What are the processes that produce each? What are the steps from the input of materials and/or information to the output (the product or service)? How would you name the process for internal identification?
- Which processes are essential to your organization’s purpose? Which processes cost the most in terms of time and money? Which processes will help you compete in the future? Which processes transform information or materials to make it valuable to your customers?
- Rate each process using these questions: How central is the process to our organization’s strategic plan and competitive success? How central is the process to attracting new customers and retaining existing ones? Which processes do key customers feel are central to their satisfaction and loyalty? (And don’t assume you know the answer: Ask them.)
The processes at the top of the list tend to address product/healthcare/program design, production, and delivery, customer/patient/student support, supply chain management, and key support processes.
To find out more about process management, read:
- 10 Critical Questions: Process Management
- Identifying Key Work Processes
- 5 Powerful Process Questions
- The Process Matrix
Identifying Key Work Processes
Organizations new to the Baldrige Criteria often wonder what they should list as their “key work processes” (6.1b1). The Criteria booklet describes them as “your most important internal value creation processes” that “involve the majority of your organization’s workforce and produce” customer/student/stakeholder/stockholder/market value.
I always thought MEDRAD did a great job of identifying and depicting its key work processes in its Award-winning 2003 Baldrige application, as shown in the figure below. Using the MEDRAD model as a guide, you can look for your most important work processes in the following places (you can substitute the language of healthcare or education as needed):
Value Creation Processes
- Identifying, understanding, and serving customers and markets
- Designing products and services
- Producing and delivering products and services
- Marketing and selling products and services
- Billing and supporting/servicing customers
- Determining customer satisfaction and retention
Support Processes
- Developing and deploying strategies, goals, and plans
- Managing financial and physical assets
- Managing information resources and technology
- Recruiting, developing, and retaining high-performing employees
- Managing legal, regulatory, environmental, health, and safety issues
- Managing improvement, innovation, and change
- Managing external relationships (suppliers, distributors, partners, etc.)
Identifying key work processes is one of those basic exercises that the Criteria request but few organizations have taken the time to nail down.
And it’s another reason a Baldrige assessment is so valuable.
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