All Posts Tagged With: "Profile"
Gearing Up for Baldrige Season
If you want to identify the flaws in your management system—flaws that directly affect performance by increasing costs, decreasing revenues, and inhibiting sustainable growth—and you want to know how to prioritize those opportunities, you need to assess your management system using the Baldrige Criteria.
You can do an assessment internally or you can submit that assessment as an application for a state award or the Baldrige Award. Much like tax season in the U.S., this is Baldrige season, with applications due on or before May 17. If you plan on applying for the Award, you must first submit your intent to register, which is due by March 1 if you want someone in your organization to be trained as a Baldrige examiner. You can find the award application forms at the Baldrige program’s Web site here.
If you have questions about the application or application process or would like to discuss getting outside support for the effort, click here.
If you’re new to Baldrige and want to test it out, or if you are doing an assessment for the first time, you should start by answering the questions in the Criteria’s Organizational Profile. Pal’s Business Excellence Institute is offering a free webinar on how to do…
17Feb2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBeing Good at the Right Things
The questions in the Organizational Profile of the Baldrige Criteria ask you to describe your organization’s characteristics and competitive environment. This includes the key requirements of three groups: employees, customers, and your supply chain. It also asks about key strategic challenges and advantages that relate to creating a sustainable organization.
The strategic planning category picks up this thread by asking how you determine your core competencies and strategic challenges and advantages. It also asks how your strategy development process identifies potential blind spots and your ability to execute the plan.
Some organizations use simple priority quadrant diagrams to help identify blind spots and assess capabilities. Here’s an example that matches organizational capabilities to customer requirements.
The diagram may be simple but the data, information, and analysis behind it is not. First, you need a profound knowledge of who your customers are and what they require. You can read articles about this here and here. If you assume you know what these requirements are, the decisions you base on your assumptions can lead you in the wrong direction.
Second, you need a profound knowledge of what your organization’s capabilities are. Again, if you assume you know what they are without doing a reality check, your assumptions…
18Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued10 Critical Questions: Your Organization
In any field, being the best means knowing what is important and working to improve in those critical areas. Organizations are no different. Those that have received the Baldrige Award have used the Baldrige Criteria to help determine and address what was important to their success. The Criteria consist of powerful questions about how an organization functions: How do you do what you do? They are questions that have never been asked or that have been overlooked by people too busy to step back and consider how their organization operates. As a result, important decisions, processes, and information are missed. Continuous improvement is difficult to sustain and the mission and vision of the organization remain a distant dream. I encourage you to assess your organization using the Baldrige Criteria. You can find out how to do that here. If you cannot do a full assessment now, there are critical questions from the Criteria that, when answered, will illuminate key strengths and opportunities for improving your management system. Let’s start with 10 critical questions from the Organizational Profile:
- What are the key characteristics of your organizational culture?
- What are your organization’s core competencies?
- How do your core competencies relate to your mission?
- What are the…
