All Posts Tagged With: "performance excellence"
Baldrige and Superior Execution
The answer: The Baldrige model.
The question: How do you solve the top CEO challenge identified by The Conference Board for the last five years?
That challenge is superior execution. According to an article by Accenture in June 2011, available here: “As companies resume the quest for profitable growth and high performance in the upturn, they can no longer afford to ignore the role of process in delivering value to their customers.”
The Baldrige model is a process model. Six of the seven categories in the model ask how you do what you do and what you do to manage and improve those processes, and the seventh category asks for the results of your processes. Companies that integrate the Baldrige model have identified their key processes, understand their value streams, align work with strategy, focus on what is truly important for success, and continually improve their processes. They use Baldrige to achieve what Accenture believes is a four-step journey to process management:
- Link strategy with execution. The Baldrige model demands alignment of processes with stakeholder requirements, action plans with strategies and objectives, and strategies with the company’s mission and vision. If you want first-hand experience with the power of alignment, read the application summary of a Baldrige Award winner.
- Eliminate unnecessary complexity. One of the benefits of evaluating your management system using the Baldrige model is that it reveals unnecessary complexity, exposing issues for senior leaders to prioritize and address.
- Transform in the right way. Senior leaders often face too many problems and too many options to feel confident about…
Tata: World-Class Baldrige Role Model
If your organization wants to achieve and sustain excellent performance, you need a proven, systematic approach. For the Tata companies, India’s largest business conglomerate, that approach is the Tata Business Excellence Model (TBEM), which is adapted from the Baldrige model.
It’s an approach Honeywell took in the mid-1990s with measurable results. As the average scores of its internal Baldrige assessments improved, so did its operating profit.
Tata companies has also internalized the Baldrige process, which is managed by Tata Quality Management Services (TQMS). The description of the Tata process from its Web site sounds exactly like the Baldrige application process:
15Aug2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThrough TBEM, TQMS helps Tata companies gain insights on their strengths and their opportunities for improvement. This is managed through an annual process of applications and assessments. Each company writes an application wherein it describes, in the context of the TBEM matrix, what it does and how it does it. This submission is then gauged by trained assessors who study the application, visit the company and interact with its people. The assessors map out the strengths and improvement opportunities existing in the company before providing their feedback to its leadership team.
TQMS trains and certifies assessors, who are selected from across the group, and it designs and administers an assessment apparatus that helps them evaluate different Tata companies. The contact point person in each company is the “corporate quality head,” nominated by the CEO as the business excellence process owner. Typically, each company has a network of business excellence people from a variety of…
Support Your Baldrige-Based State Award Program
Thirty-three states have quality award programs based on the Baldrige model. You can find out if your state is one of them at the Alliance for Performance Excellence (click here).
The state programs provide excellent local support for organizations that are integrating the Baldrige model. Like the national program, organizations submit applications based on the Baldrige Criteria that are evaluated by trained examiners. Unlike the national program, state programs typically offer levels of awards that range from recognition for starting the journey to a gold-level award similar to the Baldrige Award. State programs often provide training and support to help organizations at all stages of the journey.
Many Baldrige Award winners started with their state programs, identifying and addressing opportunities for improvement until they received their states’ highest awards, at which point they applied for the Baldrige Award. In that way, state programs are like a baseball farm system, providing more personal and hands-on instruction and guidance to prepare organizations for the national stage.
Despite the valuable service they provide, state award programs struggle to stay in business: It wasn’t that long ago that 42 states offered Baldrige-related programs. The marketing difficulties of the national program extend to the state programs, each of which must fend for itself within the business and economic climate of the area it serves.
One example of a thriving state program is the Quality Texas Foundation (QTF), which recently announced an agreement with the Dubai Quality Group “to promote the principles of quality and excellence through training, organizational assessments,…
25Apr2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige FAQs: The Baldrige Criteria
What are the Baldrige Criteria?
The Baldrige Criteria define a management model focused on performance excellence. By answering more than 250 Criteria questions, organizations get a comprehensive snapshot of their management systems that they can use to identify strengths and opportunities for improvement. There are three versions of the Baldrige Criteria, one for businesses and nonprofits, one for healthcare, and one for education. You can view the 2011-2012 Criteria online here.
Who develops the Criteria?
The Baldrige Performance Excellence Program is responsible for the Baldrige Criteria, which are revised and published every two years. The Baldrige Program solicits input from Award applicants, members of the Board of Examiners, and others to update the Criteria.
What do the Criteria address?
The Baldrige Criteria are organized into an Organizational Profile and seven categories: Leadership; Strategic Planning; Customer Focus; Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management; Workforce Focus; Operations Focus; and Results. Each category is divided into Items, and each Item is further divided into Areas to Address that pose the questions to be answered.
For example, the Leadership category has two Items: Senior Leadership and Governance and Social Responsibility. The Senior Leadership Item has two Areas to Address: Vision, Values, and Mission and Communication and Organizational Performance. Each Area groups questions by subject. For example, the Vision, Mission, and Values area groups questions into three subjects: Vision and Values, Promoting Legal and Ethical Behavior, and Creating a Sustainable Organization.
What do the Criteria value?
The Baldrige Criteria are built on a set of interrelated core values and concepts, which are embedded beliefs…
30Dec2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedQuestions–and Answers–about the Quality of Your Organization
Holidays often provide moments of reflection. Leaders who use the opportunity to reflect on the condition of their organizations may face some difficult questions, such as:
- Why aren’t we performing better?
- What are our biggest opportunities to improve?
- How can we prepare the organization to compete in the future?
- How good are we, really?
You can answer these questions and more with a Baldrige assessment. With an assessment, you ask and answer more than 130 questions about all aspects of your management system, about how you do what you do. The result is a comprehensive snapshot of your organization at a moment in time that reveals the strengths upon which you can build and the opportunities for improvement that can make your organization perform better.
A Baldrige assessment typically takes more than three months. If you do it internally, it usually involves one or two people full-time or a half-dozen or more part-time. If you hire a Baldrige expert to do the assessment, it can cost $50,000 or more. In my experience, both the time and money commitments are smart investments because of the bottom-line benefits of a Baldrige assessment including:
- Getting a clear and complete picture of your management system
- Identifying your organization’s strengths and opportunities for improvement
- Comparing your organization’s performance to world-class standards
- Using the assessment and evaluation to get consensus on priorities and next steps
- Involving leaders and managers in a systematic approach to improving performance
- Focusing the organization on what it must do to excel
While these benefits appeal to most leaders, not every organization wants to commit…
26Nov2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedFind Your Blue Ocean
This is a guest article by Brian Lassiter. If you want to contribute an article to Baldrige.com, check out the guidelines here.
In a recent talk, Bill Mills, CEO of Executive Group, claimed that “organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they are getting.” I think that’s a compelling thought. If you’re struggling right now, blame it not on the economy but on your business model—one that may not be appropriate for today’s environment. Bill’s premise—and I completely agree—is that success is largely due to an organization’s strategic positioning in the marketplace: being at the right place at the right time to capitalize on a market need, to create value for a set of buyers, and to benefit from the flow of resources (money).
But Bill goes on to claim that strategic positioning may only be part of the equation: Success is also based on an organization’s ability to create a business model that fully capitalizes on that market need. In other words, just being at the right place at the right time doesn’t ensure success.
Enter the notion of a “blue ocean strategy.” In their book by that name, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne ask readers to imagine a market universe composed of two sorts of oceans: red oceans and blue oceans. Red oceans represent all industries in existence today; it is the known market space where industry boundaries are defined and accepted and competitive rules are generally known. Blue oceans represent all the industries not in existence today. Basically, this is the unknown—or at least untouched—market space.
“In…
25Jan2010 | Brian Lassiter | 4 comments | ContinuedWhere to Play and How to Win
What makes a good strategy? According to Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and author of The Design of Business, it is two fundamental, reinforcing choices: where and on what basis you will compete.
In “Why Most CEOs Are Bad at Strategy” (Harvard Business Review, January 6, 2010), Martin argues that most executives and strategy consultants are good at strategic analysis but not at strategy, which requires creative insight. “Strategy is a creative act,” he writes, “and the way to produce good strategy is to go beyond basic analysis to creatively integrate your choices concerning where you play and how you propose to win.”
The Baldrige Criteria ask a number of questions to guide your strategic choices including:
- How do you identify potential blind spots in your planning?
- How do you address long-term sustainability?
- How do you determine your strategic challenges and advantages and your core competencies?
- How do your strategic objectives address them?
- How do your strategic objectives address your opportunities for innovation?
The focus of the Criteria leans more toward analysis than creative insight. That’s not to say that Baldrige Award recipients haven’t excelled at figuring out where to play and how to win, but integrating these choices creatively to plan the most promising course of action is not something the Criteria specifically request. The Customer Focus category comes close with questions about how you identify current and future customer groups and markets, how you determine which customer groups and markets to pursue, how you identify and anticipate key…
21Jan2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
