Malcolm Baldrige Values and Concepts Part 11 – Systems Perspective

In this issue, I will share my experience acquired from the conglomerate and its operating companies. For the purpose of this article, I will articulate the Systems Perspective which is the last Values and Concepts in Malcolm Baldrige Criteria. As before, I will use case studies to show how some of the companies implement them.

To recap, below are the Eleven Core Values and Concepts of Baldrige Criteria:

I will deal with the one of the Value in bold letters in this article as below:

Articulated Systems Perspective

The Baldrige Criteria provide a model which is a systems perspective for managing organization and its key business and operation processes to achieve performance excellence. The seven Baldrige Categories and its Values and concepts 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 builds upon key business requirements, strategic objectives and action plans.

Alignment refers to key linkages among requirements between all stakeholders. It is well designed in the Baldrige 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 inter-dependently.

Case Study on Systems Perspective

This is the most challenging of all the eleven values and concepts. While most companies can operate its operation by units systematically, it still struggles to align all the business unit to a fully integrated manner. It has been a regular exercise try to pull all business unit together as a whole, maintaining it is requires persistency and perseverance of a leaders.

The Baldrige criteria form a unit model to assist in this integration effort. Its seven categories call for alignment between each other as well as across each others. However, companies lack understanding the these “build In” integration of criteria categories hence neglected a focus effort to strive for improvement in the adoption of the categories to suit its business.

Opportunity for Improvement

Taking the Baldrige criteria as a fully integrated system, regular assessment of each categories would provide an feedback to companies where it needs improvement and the level of achievement would indicate a priority ranking.

It is not attempted to score high in each categories but to strengthen the process and criteria requirement of each categories such that it build into the business systems. By doing so, it can sustain its effort to maintain a high standard of fulfillment of the criteria requirements.

In summary, a focus effort should be established by the leaders to constantly improvement the practices in the criteria requirements. Having understood all the Values and Concepts of Malcolm Baldrige, it should be taken as a strategic issue to improve the adoption of the criteria and assess its deployment regularly. This concludes my write up of all the Eleven Values and concepts of Baldrige Criteria.

source for Malcolm Baldrige criteria :http://www.quality.nist.gov/Criteria.htm