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Baldrige Model: How do you design, manage and improve your work systems?

Steve George — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 13:52:48 +0000

Item 6.1 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how you design, manage, and improve your work systems. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.

Your organization needs processes for:

Designing your work systems
Capitalizing on your core competencies
Determining which processes will be internal and which will be external
Determining work system requirements
Managing and improving your work systems to deliver customer value and achieve organizational success and sustainability
Control costs of your work systems including preventing defects, service errors, and rework, and minimizing the costs of inspections, tests, and process/performance audits
Ensuring work system and workplace preparedness for disasters or emergencies

Best practices to consider:

Unlike most organizations whose work systems evolve over time, role model organizations make a deliberate effort to identify their work systems, design or redesign them to better accomplish the work of the organization, and manage them to achieve strategic objectives and goals.
The organization uses its strategic planning process to determine how to capitalize on its core competencies and to identify needed competencies for the future.
The organization uses specific criteria to determine whether key processes will be internal or external, including cost/benefit analysis, internal capabilities and capacity, and the availability of external expertise.
The organization uses lean, Six Sigma, ISO, and other tools to improve quality and cycle time and reduce costs.
The organization maintains an emergency response plan that is deployed to all functions, each of which develops and maintains its own plan, and the plans are tested annually to see what works and what needs to be improved.

Common problems areas:

The work systems are what they have evolved to become and have never been designed, redesigned, or reviewed.
The organization focuses on perceived customer needs with little thought to how it can capitalize on its core competencies.
No process exists to determine whether a key process should be internal or external.
Cost control occurs as a reaction to problems, not as an ongoing strategy to improve quality and efficiency.
Emergency plans are not tested or improved.

To read more about work systems, click on these articles:

3 Steps to Finding Your Key Processes

Steve George — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 18:17:20 +0000

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:

Identifying Key Work Processes

Steve George — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 14:33:04 +0000

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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