All Posts Tagged With: "Nonprofit"
The Real Value of a Baldrige Site Visit
Of the 69 applicants for the 2011 Baldrige Award, 11 have made it to the final stage. They will receive site visits in October by a team of examiners who will verify and clarify their applications.
The finalists for the Award are:
- 6 healthcare organizations (40 submitted applications)
- 3 nonprofits/government organizations (14)
- 1 educational organization (8)
- 1 small business (2)
Two manufacturers and three service companies also submitted applications but none was awarded a site visit.
According to the press release from the Baldrige program, “examiners will provide 300 to 1,000 hours of review to each applicant receiving a site visit, and all applicants will receive a detailed report on the organization’s strengths and opportunities for improvement.”
Organizations that take integrating Baldrige seriously recognize that the site visit and resulting feedback are the real value of the Baldrige process. Sure, winning the Baldrige Award is satisfying and rewarding, a testament to the hard work you’ve been doing, but visionary leaders see the Award as recognition for the quality of their management systems while the site visit and feedback drive significant improvements to those systems. They are passionate about improving performance and a Baldrige site visit and feedback report feed that passion.
This has been true since the earliest days of…
16Sep2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedHow Can We Promote Baldrige?
The Baldrige program announced that 69 organizations have applied for the 2011 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The number is down from last year, primarily because of a significant drop in healthcare applicants (54 in 2010, 40 in 2011). The number of education applicants doubled from 7 to 14 while the number of small business applicants dropped from 7 to 2. A total of five businesses larger than 500 employees applied for the Award in both years; only seven businesses, large and small, applied for the 2011 Award.
As the chart shows, the dearth of business applicants is a long-term trend. The Baldrige program can survive by appealing to healthcare and government agencies, both of which are under pressure to get their acts together, but its roots are in business. For the first 13 years of the Baldrige program, only businesses could apply for and win the Award. It wasn’t until 2001 that three educational institutions won it and the first healthcare winner received the Award in 2002.
While a few businesses, especially at the state level, show interest in the Baldrige model, it is almost invisible on the national business stage.
How do we change that? How can we make Baldrige relevant…
15Jun2011 | Steve George | 4 comments | ContinuedBaldrige Benefits the U.S.
“Our country is discussing ways to meet the economic challenges and global competition facing our nation and the necessity to make some concessions to help solve our national debt and deficit problems, and yet we already have a program that benefits the United States by driving economic development through increasing business productivity, workforce efficiency, and job creation.”
Last Friday, E. David Spong, president of the American Society for Quality, past chairman of the board of the Baldrige Foundation, and CEO of two Baldrige Award winners, testified before the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies in support of increasing, not decreasing, funding for the Baldrige program. President Obama has proposed cutting the program’s funding from $9.6 million annually to $7.7 million.
Spong points out that “federal funding is in fact only a small measure of the total amount of hours, funding, and value contributing to the program. Yet government support is significant as it provides the integrity, consistency, and continuity the program needs; and without an efficient and effectively managed program, the entire stakeholder system would collapse.”
To those who think the purpose of the Baldrige program is the Award, Spong argues that “the intention is not to simply give out…
15Mar2011 | Steve George | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Organization You Want
What information do you need to build the organization you want?
We’ve been answering that question now for one year with nearly 370 articles on all aspects of a world-class management system. Our guide for what to address is the Baldrige model defined by the Baldrige Criteria and used to determine Baldrige Award winners. No other management model in the world has been as thoroughly tested, refined, and deployed.
The goal of any management system is to produce the results you want your organization to achieve. Ideally, those results align with your organization’s mission and vision. In world-class organizations, results are multi-dimensional and not just profits for a business or test results for a school. The Baldrige Criteria identify six areas where excellent results are necessary for long-term success.
The rest of the Baldrige Criteria address the development and deployment of the systematic processes needed to achieve world-class results. The Baldrige model is a process model: It asks how you do what you do more than 130 times.
Process has four dimensions:
- The approach you use to get something done
- Consistent deployment of the approach to all relevant areas of the organization
- Refining the approach through cycles of learning
- The integration of your approach with the rest of your management system
Questions…
12Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued83 Vie for 2010 Baldrige Award
The Baldrige program reported yesterday that 83 organizations have applied for the 2010 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The breakdown of applicant categories is 54 in health care, 10 in education, 7 in nonprofit/government, 7 small businesses, 3 manufacturers, and 2 service companies.
As the graph shows, last year the health care category accounted for 60% of all applicants. This year it represents 65%. While health care is embracing the Baldrige model, businesses are snubbing it: Only 14.5% of the applicants came from the three business categories, down from 15.7% last year. The Baldrige program came into existence to make American businesses more competitive. While it got business leaders’ attention during its first decade, it has fallen off their radars over the last ten years. It’s hard to imagine the Baldrige program could have survived if it had not added the health care category.
So what will it take to get business leaders to consider the Baldrige model? Or is the program’s inability to market its product too complete to overcome?
To read more about the Baldrige Award, click on these articles:
- What Is Baldrige?
- How the Baldrige Award Works
- Baldrige 101
- How to Integrate Baldrige
- Baldrige Gets Results
- A Baldrige Leader
- Summaries of 2009 Baldrige Award Winning Applications
…
2Jun2010 | Steve George | 1 comment | Continued2009 Baldrige Award Winners Announced
Click on the organization to learn more.
Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies, Kansas City, Missouri, in the manufacturing category. With 2,700 employees and an annual operating budget of $540 million, FM&T is a management and operating contractor at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Kansas City plant. Performance highlights include:
- Overall customer satisfaction at or above 95% for the last four years compared to a commercial best-in-class benchmark of 85%
- A Management Assurance System for identifying, implementing, measuring, and sustaining the “critical to quality” needs necessary for desired performance
- An Enterprise Alignment Process for daily accountability, aligned with FM&T’s balanced scorecard and strategic plan
- Cost savings of $23.5 million to $27 million annually for the past three fiscal years through the Six Sigma Plus Continuous Improvement Model
MidwayUSA, Columbia, Missouri, in the small business category. MidwayUSA has 243 full-time and 100 part-time employees and annual revenue of $185. It is a catalog/Internet-based retail merchant that offers shooting, reloading, gunsmithing, and hunting products. Performance highlights include:
- 1,500 documented processes, each focusing on the customer
- Overall customer loyalty of 94%
- Growth rate of 30% compared to 10% for its top competitor
- Strategic planning process that systematically aligns key processes to company goals, customer key requirements, and core competencies
AtlantiCare, Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey, in…
7Dec2009 | Steve George | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Universality of the Baldrige Model
Any organization of any size or type can integrate the Baldrige model. It wasn’t always that way.
When the Baldrige program started, the Criteria reflected the quality movement in manufacturing. While service organizations could apply for the Award, few had similar experience with quality management. They had trouble relating the Criteria to their businesses. It took three years for the first service company, FedEx, to win the Award.
The Criteria evolved. With the feedback of experienced examiners, NIST made the Criteria more “user-friendly” for service companies and then, in the mid-90s, for small businesses. In this decade, the Criteria have become relevant for healthcare and education and then for nonprofits and government agencies.
Today, every organization can integrate the Baldrige model. Scan the lists of state award winners if you need evidence of that (click here to find their Web sites). And it’s not just every organization in the United States: International programs based on the Baldrige model demonstrate its universality (click here to find out more).
Every organization likes to think it’s unique—at some level, it is—but on the key factors that affect organizational performance, it doesn’t matter what you do. A manufacturer can learn how to improve strategic planning from a medical center. A…
5Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
