Benchmarking Baldrige for Management System Excellence
This is the first in a series of posts that will look at key elements of the Baldrige Criteria. If you’re not familiar with the Malcom Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence, download here-it’s free!
Why mess with Baldrige at all, except that if you’re good enough to win, you get a cool award from the President of the US? As was discussed in Beyond the Standard: Compliance to Commitment it’s a matter of scope and intent. Both ISO and the Baldrige models can be intelligently utilized as benchmarks, without pursuing ISO certification or going after the Baldrige award.
Categories and topics examined in this series include (numbers represent the categories / sub-categories):
Baldrige, ISO, Six Sigma, Lean, Balanced Scorecard et al There has been a long-running discussion about the value in general of the Malcolm Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence. Specifically, how does the Baldrige model fit in, with ISO9001 and approaches like Lean, Six Sigma and Balanced Scorecard? In a nutshell, very well. This post has links to, and excerpts from, several sources that help to validate the fit from several angles.
Learning From the Baldrige Evaluation Dimensions: The way the Baldrige scoring is structured is itself worth learning from, examined in this post.
1.1 Senior Leadership: How do your senior leaders lead? Describe how senior leaders’ actions guide and sustain your organization. Describe how senior leaders communicate with your WORKFORCE and encourage high performance.
2.1 Strategy Development: How do you develop your strategy? Describe how your organization establishes its strategy to address its strategic challenges and leverage its strategic advantages. Summarize your organization’s KEY strategic objectives and their related goals.
2.2 Strategy Deployment: How do you deploy your strategy? Describe how your organization converts its strategic objectives into action plans. Summarize your organization’s action plans, how they are deployed, and KEY action plan performance measures or indicators. Project your organization’s future performance relative to KEY comparisons on these performance measures or indicators.
4.1 Measurement, Analysis, and Improvement of Organizational Performance: How do you measure, analyze, and then improve organizational performance? Describe HOW your organization measures, analyzes, reviews, and improves its PERFORMANCE through the use of data and information at all levels and in all parts of your organization.
ISO is a management system model primarily designed to manage daily operations, presented as a set of requirements in the ISO standard: “The organization shall (insert element / requirement)”. The Baldrige model is more strategic in nature. It does not present requirements but a series of questions used to assess the organization’s effectiveness. What an organization provides as answers to the questions are key indicators of performance excellence. Example: “How do senior leaders set organizational vision and values?” How you do that is up to you. But you’d better be doing it very well–not just to go after the Baldrige but to compete, stay in business and succeed!
