There’s no shortcut around this step. Sure, there are Baldrige surveys and abbreviated assessments you can do, but they do not provide feedback about all elements of your management system, nor do they give you an accurate picture of your entire management system. You need a full-blown assessment to effectively integrate the Baldrige model.

The ninth step in the assessment process is to act on the evaluation. The evaluation will have a number of opportunities for improvement (OFIs) across all categories of the Criteria and a few major OFIs that affect multiple areas. Start with these. As a senior leadership team, discuss the evaluation and the OFIs and prioritize them based on what you believe is most important for the short- and long-term success of the organization.

Next, figure out how you will tackle the top two or three OFIs. The reason it’s only two or three is that these opportunities are big, cross-functional gaps like redesigning the strategic planning process, developing a balanced scorecard, or implementing a formal approach to process management. If you don’t have a systematic process in place for acting on these opportunities, this is a good place to begin deploying Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA).

In my experience, at the start of their Baldrige journeys, very few organizations exhibit a process mentality, which is why they tend to score poorly on their initial assessments. Baldrige is a process model. Nearly all of the questions in Categories 1 through 6 focus on your processes. You can accelerate the integration of the Baldrige model by asking and answering these questions about everything you do:

• How effective is your approach?
• Is it repeatable and based on reliable data and information?
• Is it applied consistently and used by all appropriate work units?
• Is it refined through cycles of evaluation and improvement?
• Is it aligned with your organizational needs?
• Does it produce excellent results?

You can see what a process mentality looks like in the award application summaries of Baldrige Award recipients. Read any or all of Categories 1 through 6 in one of these summaries and you will be struck by the consistency of the organization’s approaches to process design, management, and improvement. That’s tangible evidence of integrating Baldrige.

You also integrate Baldrige by focusing on results. If you don’t have a balanced scorecard, set one up. Identify the key measures that will tell you how well your organization is doing and cascade them throughout the organization. As the Baldrige Criteria state, “A comprehensive set of measures or indicators tied to customer and organizational performance requirements provides a clear basis for aligning all processes with your organization’s goals.”

Alignment and integration are characteristics of a Baldrige organization.

Finally, turn the wheel. Do another assessment next year. Act on the OFIs. Consider applying for your state’s quality award or for the Baldrige Award. Act on the OFIs. Compare your processes and results to world-class benchmarks. Act on the OFIs. Turn the wheel.

Integrating Baldrige is about systematic, continuous improvement to achieve performance excellence. Baldrige Award recipients have proven the legitimacy of this approach.

And they all started in about the same place you are starting today.

1. Answering the Criteria questions will give you a new and deeper understanding of how your organization works—or doesn’t work.
2. Getting feedback from the Baldrige or state program will help you identify strengths you can build upon and opportunities for improvement.
3. Acting on what you learn during #1 and #2 will make you a better organization.

I described the application process in an earlier article. In this article, I want to discuss the feedback you receive when you submit an application.

First, a quick overview of what happens to a Baldrige application after you submit it. (State programs follow a similar process.) Trained examiners are assigned to evaluate and comment on the application. A team of examiners then reviews the application and observations by conference call to reach consensus on your strengths, opportunities for improvement, and scores. If the Panel of Judges does not select your organization for a site visit, one of the examiners on the consensus team produces your feedback report. If you do receive a site visit, the site visit team leader finalizes your feedback report after the judges decide who should receive the Award.

The feedback report begins by identifying the key themes both for the process Items, which are Categories 1 through 6, and the results Item, which is Category 7. It lists your most important strengths or outstanding practices and your most significant opportunities, concerns, vulnerabilities, and gaps.

The bulk of the report details your strengths and opportunities for improvement (OFIs) for each of the Criteria’s 18 Items. Applicants will tell you that the greatest benefit of applying for a Baldrige or state award is these OFIs. Cargill Corn Milling, which received the Baldrige Award last year, got 131 of them in its feedback report—and it won the Award! Getting a list of important areas to improve, agreed upon by consensus of trained examiners, offers priceless insight into the things you need to work on to achieve performance excellence.

If a high-performing company like Cargill Corn Milling can learn from the application process, imagine the value of the feedback to an organization that has more to learn, and more to gain.

You can find Baldrige Award application forms here. To learn more about a state award program, click here.

The plant manager for Cargill Corn Milling was asked how his organization prioritizes the opportunities for improvement (OFIs) it gets from the Baldrige feedback and from Cargill’s Business Excellence process. He noted that they got a total of 131 OFIs from the 2008 feedback reports. Their leadership group used a priority matrix to rank the OFIs based on their importance to Cargill Corn Milling’s mission, vision, and purpose. They then decided to work on the top three OFIs this year.

For people new to Baldrige, a couple of things may be surprising about this. First is the fact that a Baldrige Award recipient got 131 OFIs. What you have to remember is that recipients typically score in the 650 to 750 point range. The missing 250-350 points are OFIs. There are no “perfect” organizations.

The second surprise is that, out of 131 OFIs, the organization is working on just three. I think that’s misleading. In my experience, improving performance on those top three OFIs will lead to improvement on several others. For example, addressing an OFI that questions how systematically you improve your work processes will also address all of the OFIs in other Categories that raised that issue for individual processes. Besides, no organization has the resources to tackle 131 problems and still conduct their daily business.

As all of the speakers stated, the Baldrige process is not about the Baldrige Award: It’s about continuous improvement. And that’s why they welcome their OFIs.

Help grow our community: