Baldrige Model: How do you design, manage and improve your work systems?

Item 6.1 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how you design, manage, and improve your work systems. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.

Your organization needs processes for:

• Designing your work systems
• Capitalizing on your core competencies
• Determining which processes will be internal and which will be external
• Determining work system requirements
• Managing and improving your work systems to deliver customer value and achieve organizational success and sustainability
• Control costs of your work systems including preventing defects, service errors, and rework, and minimizing the costs of inspections, tests, and process/performance audits
• Ensuring work system and workplace preparedness for disasters or emergencies

Best practices to consider:

• Unlike most organizations whose work systems evolve over time, role model organizations make a deliberate effort to identify their work systems, design or redesign them to better accomplish the work of the organization, and manage them to achieve strategic objectives and goals.
• The organization uses its strategic planning process to determine how to capitalize on its core competencies and to identify needed competencies for the future.
• The organization uses specific criteria to determine whether key processes will be internal or external, including cost/benefit analysis, internal capabilities and capacity, and the availability of…

Process Management: Work System Design

Raise your hand if you’ve ever taken part in designing a work system? I didn’t think so.

The Baldrige Criteria (6.1a1) ask how you do this. It defines work system as “how the work of your organization is accomplished.” No organization can exist without a work system, which evolves over the life of the organization from the informality of a new venture to the policies and procedures of an established organization. Unless you’re starting a new organization by intentionally designing your work system, the opportunity to do so quickly passes.

Now, that doesn’t mean you won’t redesign your work system as the organization grows and changes. I think that’s what the Criteria should focus on, the redesigning and improving and not the designing.

Applicants tend to punt this question. Here’s how 2008 recipient Poudre Valley Health System answered it: “PVHS designs and innovates its work systems to achieve its world-class vision and meet its customer requirements through the Strategy Development & Deployment process.” That’s it, and that’s about as much as most organizations offer.

Almost the same argument can be made for another question (6.2a1) about how you design your work processes. While it’s true that new processes may be created to meet new…