Key Characteristics of the Performance Excellence Criteria

Why use the BaldrigeCriteria for Performance Excellence?

The Criteria focus on results

Key areas of organizational performance:

• Product and service outcomes

• Customer-focused outcomes

• Financial and mission outcomes

• Workforce-focused outcomes

• Process effectiveness outcomes

• Leadership outcomes

Why a mix of measures?

The use of a composite of measures is intended to ensure that strategies are balanced – that they do not inappropriately trade off among important stakeholders, objectives, or short and longer-term goals.

The Criteria areadaptable and do not prescribe

The Criteria are made up of results-oriented requirements.

However, the Criteria do not prescribe:• how your organization should be structured;• that your organization should or should not have

departments for planning, ethics, quality, or other functions; or

• that different units in your organization should be managed in the same way.

These factors differ among organizations; they are likely to change as needs and strategies evolve.

Why are the Criteria nonprescriptive?

• The focus is on results, not procedures, tools, or organizational structure.

• The selection of tools, techniques, systems, and organizational structure depends on a variety of organizational factors such as type and size and organizational capabilities.

• Focusing on common requirements fosters understanding, communication, alignment, and integration, while supporting innovation and diversity in approaches.

Maintaining organization-widegoal alignment

• A systems perspective is embedded in the integrated structure of the Criteria and its component parts.

• Alignment is built around connecting and reinforcing measures derived from organizational processes and strategies.

• Alignment ensures consistency of purpose while also supporting agility, innovation, and decentralized decision making.

Organizational Learningand the Criteria

• A systems perspective to goal alignment, particularly when strategy and goals change over time, requires dynamic linkages among Criteria Items.

• In the Criteria, action-oriented cycles of learning take place via feedback between processes and results.

Learning Cycles within the Criteria

The learning cycles have four, clearly defined stages:

1. planning, including design of processes, selection of measures, and deployment of requirements

2. executing plans

3. assessing progress and capturing new knowledge, taking into account internal and external results

4. revising plans based on assessment findings, learnings, new inputs, new requirements, and opportunities for innovation

The Criteria supportgoal-based diagnosis

• Using the Criteria, an organization can assess itself against the performance-oriented requirements.

• The assessment provides a profile of strengths and opportunities for improvement relative to the performance-oriented requirements and leads to actions that contribute to performance improvement in all areas

• This diagnostic assessment is a useful management tool that goes beyond most performance reviews and is applicable to a wide range of strategies, management systems, and types of organizations

For further information

• Visit the Baldrige National Quality Program website at the National Institute of Standards and Technology; see http://www.quality.nist.gov

• For an unofficial take on performance excellence within the U.S. Coast Guard, see http://lantpec.blogspot.com/.