All Posts Tagged With: "strategic planning"
Welcome to 2013. What Will You Do This Year?
It’s a new year; time to plan, set goals, and determine where your business is going and how it will excel. Where will you go? What will you do? What will you focus on? Will your company branch out in new directions? How will you keep your customers happy? And what about your employees; where do they fall on the totem pole of prioritization? If your strategy is busting at the seams but lacking clear direction, perhaps it’s time to take a look at the Baldrige criteria.
“When you look at the Baldrige Criteria, what a great road map to say if you can do the things in all these categories and do them well, you’re going to be a well-run company.” – Robert F. Pence, President & CEO Freese and Nichols, Inc., 2010 Baldrige Award recipient
The Baldrige criteria for performance excellence are aimed at increasing the competitiveness of U.S. businesses. Some of the core values that are interspersed throughout the criteria include customer-driven excellence, a focus on the future, operational effectiveness, and managing for innovation. These values are tested throughout the seven criteria items: Leadership; Strategic Planning; Customer Focus; Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management; Workforce Focus; Operations Focus; Results. If you’re new to Baldrige, the Strategic Planning section …
11Jan2013 | Joseph A. De Feo | 0 comments | Continued
At Baldrige.com, We’re More Than Just a Pretty Face
Did you know that Baldrige.com is more than just a resource library? Not only do we love to write about the Baldrige Award and all those who endeavor for quality, but we also offer assessments, training, strategic advice and support, and various improvement programs.
Looking for help with the Strategic Planning portion of the Baldrige criteria, particularly with aligning your business goals and objectives? We provide advice, coaching, facilitating, and education to enable your organization to link its strategy and goals with every business unit and employee to assure the goals are met. Perhaps the Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management section is where your company is lacking, and you need assistance developing a truly balanced scorecard. A proper scorecard has to include the right measures and targets to effectively monitor the performance of an organization, but determining those metrics can sometimes be the most challenging part. We can help with that. Ready to plan and design your new services? With a variety of structured processes, we can help you select the most practical fit for your organization. Are you in need of a controlled improvement program? The number of ways we can help your organization are endless, as we customize each program to your specifications.
Perhaps your trials and …
7Dec2012 | Joseph A. De Feo | 0 comments | ContinuedStrategic Planning with Six Sigma and Lean; Choosing, Certifying, and Implementing
The Strategic Planning portion of the Baldrige criteria asks specifically how you approach process and performance improvement. The category stresses that long-term organizational sustainability and your competitive environment are key strategic issues that need to be integral parts of your organization’s overall planning. Decisions about your organizational core competencies are an integral part of organizational sustainability and therefore are key strategic decisions.
One of the main aspects that the criteria associate with strategic planning is operational performance improvement and innovation. This contributes to short- and longer-term productivity growth and cost/price competitiveness. Building operational capability, including speed, responsiveness, and flexibility, represents an investment in strengthening your organizational fitness.
Of central importance is how you achieve alignment and consistency, via work systems, work processes, and key measurements. Also, alignment and consistency are intended to provide a basis for setting and communicating priorities for ongoing improvement activities—part of the daily work of all work units.
Two methodologies that are commonly implemented to achieve organizational excellence are Lean and Six Sigma. In this piece, we examine the two a little closer.
“Lean is in and Six Sigma is out.”
How many times have you heard this from a colleague? The funny thing about this is that I used to hear the same thing …
12Nov2012 | Joseph A. De Feo | 0 comments | ContinuedDoes Your Organization Have Good Perspective?
The Baldrige criteria provide a systems perspective for managing your organization and its key processes to achieve results – and to strive for performance excellence. The seven categories, the core values, and the scoring guidelines form the building blocks and the integrating mechanism for the system. However, successful management of overall performance requires organization-specific synthesis, alignment, and integration.
Synthesis means looking at your organization as a whole and building on key business attributes, including your core competencies, strategic objectives, action plans, and work systems. Alignment means using the key linkages among requirements given in the Baldrige criteria categories to ensure consistency of plans, processes, measures, and actions. Integration builds on alignment so that the individual components of your performance management system operate in a fully interconnected manner and deliver anticipated results.
Henry Ford Health Systems, a 2011 Baldrige Award recipient, is one of the country’s largest health care systems, exceeding $4 billion in revenues, and is a national leader in clinical care, research and education. It includes the 1,200-member Henry Ford Medical Group, five hospitals, Health Alliance Plan, Henry Ford Physician Network, 32 primary care centers and many other health-related entities throughout southeast Michigan. In 2010, Henry Ford provided nearly $200 million in uncompensated care. The health system is …
1Nov2012 | Joseph A. De Feo | 0 comments | ContinuedThe 3 P’s: Starting Points for Integrating Baldrige
Where do you start? You want to make your organization more competitive, better able to meet customer needs, less inclined to mistakes, but you’ve been doing things the same way for years and you’re not sure where to begin.
When I get this question, I suggest starting with one or more of the 3 P’s: processes, people, or planning.
Start with Processes. The Baldrige model is a process model because the work of an organization is done through processes. Organizations that haven’t taken a formal approach to process management usually spend way too much time firefighting because their processes are out of control, or they blame people when their processes fail. Neither is a prescription for long-term success.
You can develop a process orientation by first identifying your key work processes, which Baldrige defines as your most important internal value creation processes. If you’re not sure where to start, look at what products and/or services you provide to your customers and figure out the internal steps that design, produce, and deliver those products and services. Then consider the support processes that make these customer-driven processes possible, such as your key processes in sales, marketing, finance, human resources, IT, etc. Once you’ve identified your value creation processes, assign a process owner …
17Aug2012 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedStrategic Quality Planning, Improvement, and Control
Quality can be applied as a strategic tool by developing a quality niche that focuses on one or a small number of quality dimensions throughout the universal processes of planning, improvement, and control. Seldom is it advisable, or even possible, to pursue all eight (performance, features, reliability, conformance, durability, serviceability, aesthetics, and perceived quality) of the quality dimensions simultaneously. This is because of both resource allocation toward quality and trade-offs that may be inherent among the dimensions. Similarly, objectives and activities should be aligned so that quality initially planned into a processed product is consistent with and reinforced by day-to-day control and longer-term improvement efforts. As pointed out by Porter (1996), “strategy involves creating ‘fit’ among a company’s activities.” When developing a quality niche strategy, specific, conscious choices must be made. The key is to discover which quality dimensions are most important to your customers and which are poorly met by competing products and firms.
Quality Strategy Failures in Processing
It is instructive to consider quality strategy failures as they relate to processing-based companies and the lessons they suggest.
- Failure to measure the correct dimensions. Injected drugs marketed on the presumption that efficacy is the driving factor in determining value may be superseded by less effective formulations that take
…
Acknowledging Innovative Excellence – Iredell-Statesville Schools
As a school system, Iredell-Statesville K-12 Schools (I-SS) are committed to igniting a passion for learning and are rigorously challenging all students to achieve their academic potential. Regardless of the fact that I-SS has per-pupil operations expenditures ranked among the lowest in North Carolina, the 2008 Baldrige Award winner’s average SAT scores have drastically increased in the last 10 years. They have a strategic plan to keep moving forward, realizing high student performance, and long-term student success.
I-SS isn’t succeeding by motivating faculty and staff alone, but instead have implemented a number of research-based best practices to raise achievement and close gaps. By implementing formative assessments, essential curriculum, and collaborative teams, a learning-centered atmosphere has developed. I-SS asked themselves questions such as, What do students need to know?, How will they learn it?, and What will we do if they already know it? Quarterly performance measures are generated based on “customer” requirements and satisfaction, stakeholder requirements, how services will be provided, and how I-SS will know if the services are operating efficiently and effectively. When student performance does not meet targets, the gap is addressed through the systematic use of a Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) cycle to identify and implement improvements.
Iredell-Statesville Schools has a drop-out rate of …
24Apr2012 | Tom Huizenga | 0 comments | Continued
