All Posts Tagged With: "strategic challenges"
Being 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 can lead you astray.
Once you know what your customers require and how well your organization can meet those requirements, you…
18Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat Are Your Critical Success Factors?
The Baldrige Criteria ask: “What are the principal factors that determine your success relative to your competitors?”
With a little thought, most leadership teams can answer the question fairly easily. As with all things Baldrige, however, a quick response misses the underlying process question: How do you determine what those critical success factors (CSFs) are? Just because leaders brainstorm CSF candidates and agree on the final list doesn’t mean it’s the right list, any more than assuming you know what your customers expect is actually what they expect. You need a process for identifying your organization’s critical success factors because so much of what you do—strategic planning, performance measurement, process management—is aligned with those factors.
In “Finding your organization’s critical success factors—the missing link in performance management” (pdf), David Parmenter describes such a process whose goal is to define five to eight relatively specific CSFs. Some organizations, including some Baldrige Award recipients, use broad terms to describe their CSFs. For example, North Mississippi Medical Center (NMMC), which won the Award in 2006, has five CSFs: People, Service, Quality, Financial, and Growth. Parmenter argues that a CSF should clarify what is expected of all employees, and he gives a few examples:
- Delivering in full, on time, all the time, to our key customers
- Finding better ways to do the things we do everyday
- Maintaining a safe, happy, and healthy…
10 Critical Questions: Strategic Planning
In previous articles we listed 10 critical questions you can ask about your organization’s leadership and its key strengths and opportunities for improvement. As we noted, the best way to evaluate your management system is through a Baldrige assessment using the Baldrige Criteria. You can find out how to do that here.
The Criteria consist of powerful questions, rarely asked, about how an organization functions. If you cannot do a full assessment but want insight into how to improve strategic planning, here are 10 questions to ask and answer about your strategic planning process:
- How do you conduct strategic planning including the key strategic planning process steps and participants in the process?
- How do you identify potential blind spots during this process?
- How do you ensure that strategic planning addresses: (a) your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT); (b) potential major shifts in technology, markets, products, customer preferences, competition, or the regulatory environment; (c) long-term organizational sustainability; and (d) your ability to execute the strategic plan?
- What are your current strategic objectives, the goals for each, and the timetable for achieving them?
- How do these objectives address your strategic challenges and advantages, opportunities for innovation, core competencies, and the needs of all stakeholders?
- How do you develop and deploy action plans to achieve your strategic objectives?
- How do you ensure that financial, human, and other resources are…
10 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 key factors that motivate your employees?
- What are the key requirements and expectations for each customer group you serve?
- How do you…
