Posted by Christine Schaefer The following interview highlights how 2014 Baldrige Executive Fellow Steven J. Kravet, M.D., M.B.A., F.A.C.P., has drawn on cross-sector learning from leaders of Baldrige Award-winning organizations to advance his health care organization’s performance. As head of Johns Hopkins Community Physicians, Kravet has created and launched a systematic communications plan to better connect and engage a diffuse workforce of approximately 1,600 physicians and staff members with the organization’s mission and strategy. Dr. Steven J. Kravet, President of Johns Hopkins Community Physicians, Baldrige Executive Fellow First, could you please tell us about Johns Hopkins Community Physicians and your leadership role? I am president of the organization, which has about 400 physicians and about 1,200 employees altogether and 40 practices across the greater Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., region providing primary care, specialty care, and hospital-based care. We are integrated into the Johns Hopkins Health System [of John Hopkins Medicine]; all of the physicians and all of the staff members of Johns Hopkins Community Physicians (JHCP) are employed by the health system. (Physicians affiliated with Johns Hopkins in private practice may teach in or have other relationships with the system, but the only physicians employed by it are either the full-time faculty members of the [Johns Hopkins] university or our physicians of JHCP.) I report to the president of the health system. I have a leadership team, including clinical, operational, quality, and finance leaders to oversee this organization. We’ve been in existence as an organization for over 30 years. I’ve been in this role for six years. I’ve been with Hopkins overall for 23 years. What was the value of the Baldrige Executive Fellows program for you as a leader? I had long been a fan of the Baldrige [Excellence] Framework. Having the opportunity to dive in deeply to the background and philosophy as well as the opportunity to see the framework in action was priceless. From the onset of the program, I was able to take elements back to my organization, which I am certain has paid back the cost of the program several times over already. Tell us about how you’ve applied learning from the Baldrige Fellows program in your work? Sure; some specific work that’s been under way is about enhancing the patient experience. We’ve worked on some principles of service excellence and employee engagement learned from the Ritz-Carlton and from K&N Management—two Baldrige Award winners to which I was exposed through the Baldrige Fellows program. We’ve enhanced our communications strategy—that was my capstone project—which is in some ways similar to what the Ritz-Carlton program is all about. And we’ve begun looking differently at staff development. We’ve also begun to talk about how visual displays of data could help us in our performance-improvement activities. Some of those things are mapped out as plans for the next several months. I’m hoping to take advantage of the generosity of the Baldrige Award winners to host members of my executive team to take a deeper dive into some of those elements. My entire executive team attended the Baldrige Quest for Excellence® conference [in April], which was great. It generated lots of conversations about the "art of what is possible"—the sense that Baldrige is something that is inspirational and achievable, with the right focus. Immersing the team for three or four days was a really valuable part of the experience. Our hope is to dive more deeply over the next several months. Would you please elaborate on how you’ve enhanced your organization’s communications strategy through your capstone project for the Baldrige Fellows program? Sure. I set out to create a more well-defined and structured communications strategy following two basic principles: One is the notion of a cycle of communications linked to strategic planning. The concept is to have bidirectional communications to help influence our strategic planning process and solicit input more purposefully from the front lines of the organization and also from the board of trustees and other levels of our organization, as we set out in our strategic planning. And we did that over the course of this year. The other cyclical component that is part of the capstone is to have a link to the mission and vision statements of Johns Hopkins Medicine and the strategic priorities. So what we’re doing is having themes that repeat over the course of the year. We have six strategic priorities at Johns Hopkins, and the goal is to have each of those strategic priorities reflected two times throughout the year as a component of our communications strategies. And then, in each of those months when we focus on one of those strategic priorities, we would have a multimedia modality approach toward communicating them. The reason for that has to do with an assessment we did where we discovered that people across the organization have very different desires for how they like to receive information. Some people like e-mails or newsletters, some people like staff meetings, and some people like to watch webinars. So what we’re doing is taking the theme of the month and spreading them across all of the media modalities so that everybody will have heard the same message. The newest form of communications is one I adopted from the Ritz-Carlton, which that organization calls a "daily report" or a "daily line-up." Our "Week in Focus" is a set of talking points that are scripted and balanced; those will be distributed to management throughout the organization, with an expectation that, at some level in the organization, they will be read aloud to a unit of employees. So once a week everybody is going to hear a set of talking points that are based on what members of the executive team think is most important to communicate. The purpose is to make sure everybody is hearing the same message. Would you please describe how the weekly communications are structured? The entire report is called The JHCP North Star; my capstone was entitled Galactic Communication Strategy: Bidirectional Communication to Improve Connection to Mission and Perceptions of Opinions Count in Johns Hopkins Community Physicians. The reason for the galactic reference is the notion that, just like our solar system creates a cycle of seasons, it’s valuable to have a cycle to communications. The "north star" reference is to the notion that we all need a guidepost, or a beacon, that helps give us direction—so we are linking everybody to the organization’s mission through this North Star strategy. The first section is "The Week in Focus" and communicates the most important points of the executive team. The next section has to do with employee engagement. What we’re doing in this section is linking in a structured way one of our eight core values or one of the engagement questions from the Gallup Q12 survey. There will be a different theme each week. We will share an example and explain that we want them to have a discussion on other examples in their particular unit. So, for instance, there might be a question about having all the right tools to do their jobs well; we’ll give them an example of what that means and ask them to have a discussion on how they’re ensuring in their unit that they have all the tools to do their job well. A sample JHCP North Star report; image used with permission The next section is about the patient experience; in that section, we go through a series of questions from our patient engagement surveys. We’ll ask how, in their role, they’re ensuring that patients are receiving patient-centered and excellent care. If the question is about access, for instance, we’ll give them an example about what patients might perceive about access, and we’ll ask them to have a conversation in their unit to talk about what they are doing in their unit to ensure access. The next week, the theme might be about patient communications skills or about wait times. So each week, we’ll have a different engagement theme for staff and a different patient-experience theme. The last section relates to strategic priorities. In each weekly communication, we’ll include one bullet with an example of a strategic priority at the Johns Hopkins Medicine level and one bullet with an example of a strategic priority of Johns Hopkins Community Physicians. For example, one strategic priority is about discovery, so we’ll share something going on about discovery at the Johns Hopkins Medicine level and something at the Johns Hopkins Community Physicians level. By the end of the month, there will be four examples for each, and those will be captured in a monthly newsletter. So even if employees miss a weekly report, they all have an opportunity to read the summary. Is there a common time and forum for the planned weekly discussions based on these communications at units across your organization, or does each group figure out what works for them? Closer to the latter: some units have weekly staff meetings; if they don’t, there might be a huddle. The expectation is that all employees will spend at least five minutes each week connecting to the [Johns Hopkins Medicine] mission. What challenges have you faced in developing and implementing this initiative, and how have you overcome them? Part of the challenge is that people are busy, and when we give them more things to do, they have to believe that this extra communication that we’re asking them to do is going to ultimately help them. It’s like saying to somebody, "I know this medicine tastes bad, but it will make you feel better in the end." There’s a lot of trust in that. We’re trying to get people to respect that this is an important strategy. I think one of the important parts is that we acknowledged that we had an opportunity to improve [employee] engagement. There was clearly a case for change that we wanted to address. In a series of surveys that we did in the beginning of planning this, we asked people how they wanted to receive communications; we also asked them how they wanted to shape the direction of the organization. So we were really trying to address the issue of how their opinions count all along the way. How is this all progressing, and how will you measure the impact? My goal was to launch the new tool by the end of the year. Our first four weeks of communicating with this new North Star communication tool will be complete by June. So we have the draft all done. We’ll refine it month by month. We’ll try to get some feedback from folks about the communication tool: Is it readable enough? Is it relevant? Is it something that we want to serve up for them to be read, or do we want to encourage more engagement through conversation? We’ll measure our success in relation to two specific elements of our workforce engagement survey—one is about employees’ connection to the organization’s mission, and the other is about employees’ feeling that their opinions count. Our 2013 results for those two survey questions had decreased significantly from the previous year. So the annual engagement survey administered by Gallup is one measure. How do you see the project evolving in the future? What we’re hoping to do overall with [the Baldrige framework] over the next year is to assign categories [of the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence Criteria] to each of the members of the executive team. Our hope is that over the next two or three years, our organization might be prepared to do a state [Baldrige-based program assessment/award] application.

This blog continues from part I. Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey How Manufacturers Use the Baldrige Criteria to Focus on the Future (continued) Baldrige Award recipient Lockheed Martin Missions and Fire Controls (MFC), a $7 billion dollar business, manufactures high-precision systems that protect the country and men and women in uniform; these systems "have to work the first time, every time, because lives depend on it," said Steven Sessions, then director of supplier quality, speaking at the 26th Annual Quest for Excellence Conference. He talked about how MFC used the Baldrige model to help improve and manage its supply chain, an effort that began when a senior MFC staff member became a Baldrige Executive Fellow and benchmarked other Baldrige Award recipients on how they handled supply chain management. "The global recession and budget pressures have probably never been more intense than they are right now. That, along with increased regulations, have really been a big hit to our businesses, and we’re trying to figure out how to account for that," said Sessions. "But as much as it affects us, it affects our suppliers—and some of them are very small—in a very big way. Because of that, the defense supply chain is a real focus area." From the Baldrige learning, MFC created a Supply Chain Engagement Model that maps to the Baldrige model, a process called Senior Leadership Engagement, and Characteristics of Supplier Excellence. "The Malcolm Baldrige Award that we got really helped open up . . . doors," Sessions added. "I’m not so sure that we would have had the gains that we’ve made over the last year had we not won the award because that brings with it interest from other companies that want to know how you’re doing business. . . . When you talk about the bottomline . . . for us it doesn’t get much better than this: We outperform the market. We outperform others in our industry. . . . When you get your supply chain working, . . . it helps your costs to come down. Baldrige was a big part of making that happen." Professional Development and Bringing the Learning Home The 2015 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Board of Examiners includes several experts from manufacturing who attend the training to hone their skills for their own manufacturing organization and for personal professional development. Baldrige examiner Eric Smith, a process control engineer for Caterpillar, said he uses the Baldrige Framework for continuing education. In a supplier development/quality role, Smith said Baldrige training provides additional skills as an auditor and highlights practices suppliers should follow to enable them to improve their organizations. "I use Criteria practices to offer advice on improvements that can be made to management processes that in turn should result in improved products delivered to my organization," he said; "The Criteria are aimed at senior leadership practices. This is the area that other standards/methodologies do not cover (such as ISO9000 standard).  Learning these practices provides me deeper insight to company operations when I perform audits on my suppliers. When I discover opportunities for improvement in an organization, I have been able to suggest changes in leadership practices that would be beneficial." Larry Kimbrough, supplier quality engineer for International Truck and Engine, said Baldrige training has taught him how to look at a process subjectively as it relates to meeting the Criteria. He added, "my organization does not hesitate to ask my advice when it comes to processes and quality issues. By use of the [Criteria] categories (voice of the customer, leadership, results, etc.) and evaluation, I am able to better assist my company when they come to me with process or quality issues." Robert Tabler, director of Operational Excellence, Global Equipment, Sandvik Mining, just completed his first year of training as a Baldrige examiner. He said his expectation is that training in the Criteria and his work as a Baldrige examiner "will be used to improve customer focus within my area of responsibility. I hope successes can then be expanded into other areas through sharing and communication." What’s the Competitive Advantage for Manufacturers? Can Baldrige Actually Save Them Time? "Baldrige does separate you from your competition in the eyes of the customer," said Du Fresne, citing client assessments that rated the company above the competition in seven of eight metrics and 40% of the market share with customers with whom it does business. Asked his opinion of why more manufacturers are not using the Baldrige Criteria to support their operations, Garvey said,  "A typical manufacturer always gives the excuse I don’t have time for this. I’ve got too many pressing issues. I have customers calling me all the time. I have employees calling out sick. I have equipment that may or may not be running properly. I’ve got creditors that I’ve got to take care of. . . . My response is you don’t have time not to do this. . . . You have to make time to do this. Because once you take the time to investigate and implement these Criteria, then the rest of your day becomes much freer. . . . Once you invest the time, then the return is orders of magnitude."

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey No one can deny that there are plenty of quality tools out there to improve performance—of a team, of a process, of a product—but to integrate those tools and know where to apply them for the good of the whole organization, so that learning can be applied and the system can most effectively use resources, that’s where the Baldrige Excellence Framework comes in. Whether you describe it as a blueprint or a map,  it is the framework that should guide how and where you apply quality tools. To borrow two quotes from recent interviews with quality experts, "The Baldrige framework is like the blueprint of a building, with ISO used for specific systems within the building such as electrical and air conditioning systems." (Ron Schulingkamp) "Baldrige is the overall organizing framework that can identify where there are problems. . . . Think of Baldrige like a map that will show the organization where . . . Six Sigma, Lean, and other tools should be deployed. . . . If an organization deploys [such tools] without an overall map as Baldrige, it would be like taking a trip in a car but not having a map to know the way." (Gene O’Dell) And here’s another expert from Quality magazine who writes about the Baldrige Criteria’s complementary nature with business process management (BPM) objectives. In "Aligning BPM with the Seven Categories of the Malcolm Baldrige Award," Forrest W. Breyfogle III, the founder and CEO of Smarter Solutions Inc, writes, "Most organizations use the Baldrige categories to build up a total performance map in order to rule out areas that require improvement. Along with this, organizations may also rely on tools, such as BPM, to devise operations and enhance organization processes." He describes BPM as a way to take control of processes, and aligning BPM with the "high-performing business processes" gained from using the Criteria can lead to "economic viability, efficient operations, conservation of natural resources, and social responsibility." "Therefore, it can be said that the success of BPM, along with other business process tools, can be improved . . . through the Baldrige Criteria," he writes. "The effective alignment could be a source of increasing improvement to even more advanced developments. Breakthrough progress gives organizations the highest competitive edge in all circumstances. . . . By relying on the Criteria, businesses are steps closer to attaining higher levels of productivity and profitability, better employee relations, improved market share, and customer loyalty." Breyfogle adds, "By taking the seven Baldrige categories into consideration, well-developed and balanced results can be expected. Any misalignment could mean that there is something wrong with the business processes or other areas in the organization, making things easier and more efficient for organizations to implement business and measure performance. . . . The Baldrige Criteria, therefore, serve as strong criteria to conduct self-assessments and benchmark an organization’s processes and methods with those companies rewarded by the Baldrige Award."

This blog is the second in a two-part series. See the first part. Day 6: Take a strategic and systematic view of process improvement. Unfortunately, according to the 12 Days of PEX-MAS survey by the Process Excellence Network, a division of the International Quality and Productivity Center, process improvement can often be "pigeon-holed into delivering cost savings or efficiency gains rather than as an enabler of corporate strategy," with a perception that improvement can mean eliminating jobs. To combat this perception, survey respondents suggest "take a wider, more strategic and systematic view of how [employees’] work fits into corporate strategy. . . . Instead of coming from the perspective of ‘we want to do process excellence’ and then trying to link it to strategy, we need to look at the strategy targets and goals first. Then use whatever tools and techniques to best achieve these goals." The Baldrige Criteria are in agreement with this, not prescribing one tool or methodology to achieve success; rather, the Criteria serve as an overarching framework for improvement across an organization. Days 7/8: Define process excellence for what holds meaning for your organization. Survey respondents list several names that they use for "process excellence," including "operational excellence" and "continuous improvement." In the case of the Baldrige Criteria, many organizations such as the Tata Group and Turner Broadcasting Systems use the Criteria internally but rename elements and adapt language to match their own cultures. There even have been cases of "stealth" Baldrige reported— where organizations are using the Baldrige Criteria but calling their use something else to avoid any preconceived notions or anxiety about an improvement program. Day 9: Prioritize process within your organization. According to the survey, "There is a risk . . . that if process improvement only is associated with solving a specific problem at a specific point in time, that it becomes something that burns brightly initially but quickly burns itself out. . . . If you are able to show results, people want to know how it was achieved and they become interested." The Criteria have a strong focus on learning and feeding that learning back into improving processes. How you innovate is also important across all areas of an organization’s operations. Item 6.1, Work Process, goes into some detail on process performance, process improvement, and innovation management. (See the free 2015-2016 Criteria Category and Item Commentary.) Day 10: Involve all employees, including senior leaders, in process improvement initiatives. "If it’s always the process improvement experts who are leading process improvement, then it’s not building culture," according to the survey. The best models have every level of the organization involved in process improvement. This rings true for most high-performing organizations and all Baldrige Award recipients. For example, the senior leaders of 2014 Baldrige Award recipient PricewaterhouseCoopers Public Sector Practice (PwC PSP) monitor key metrics to control overall costs and work with their operations leaders and the practice’s Quality Management Group to make decisions. Team members continuously assess quality to prevent defects, service errors, and rework before dealing with clients. Such initiatives involve all levels of the organization. Days 11/12: Use and invest in technology to improve processes. There’s no question that technology has the potential to improve processes. According to the survey, "the technology that has emerged as a frontrunner for investment is big data and analytics technology," with over 33.8 percent of respondents indicating that they plan to invest in data analytics and big data technologies. In alignment with this, "big data" is called out as an emerging theme in the 2015-2016 Baldrige Criteria, too. "For all organizations, turning data into knowledge and knowledge into useful insights is the real challenge," according to the survey. Dr. Harry Hertz, Baldrige Program director emeritus, discusses the real challenge of big data by focusing on how organizations and governments will manage big data and how  they will properly and appropriately use them. Do you agree with these process excellence challenges and insights for your organization?

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon One of my regular Blogrige readers and harshest critics, my wife, complained that my recent posts have been too pedagogical and lacked my storytelling instincts. So this post is for her. Have you seen the recent commercial about buying a used car? It compares the experience to a dinner out and asks whether you ever worry about having to haggle over price at a restaurant. It then encourages you to shop at a specific used car dealer where you don’t have to bargain about price. Well, my wife and I recently bought a new mattress. So now you are asking what does that have to do with eating out or buying a used car. The answer is simple, my order of preference: eat out, buy a used car, buy a mattress. When you buy a used car, you can compare prices among dealers and even look up average prices for your make and model on the web. You also can look up the blue book value. You can walk into the negotiation as an educated consumer when the salesperson tells you that you are taking food out of the mouths of his or her young children with the price you want to pay. How do they ever stay in business? Fortunately, I buy a mattress even less frequently than I buy cars (run them to the end of their life is my philosophy).  Mattresses are not like cars. Every store is always having a half-off sale as the entry point. Tells you about the list price for starters. Then you are expected to bargain down from the half-off price. Comparison shopping — forget it. Every dealer has different names for the various mattresses from each major manufacturer. The salesperson who we eventually bought our mattress from, even showed us her commission on the mattress for the price we negotiated. Her kids were going hungry on that commission, but she needed the volume. (I hope she isn’t married to a car salesperson or I could be partially responsible for a whole family dying of starvation.) And the deal was so good that she needed her district manager’s approval, which he reluctantly gave according to her report back. So, I should have felt either great or guilty leaving the store. But, I felt neither. I felt like I had to go home and shower to return to normal. Who wins in these negotiations? Maybe the dealer (car or mattress) feels this is necessary to earn a decent return. I never feel good after the negotiation. Why does this practice pervade a few retail industries and not exist in others? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if these retailers used the Baldrige Excellence Framework? How would they answer questions in the Customers category? A few I would like to see answered are: How do you listen to potential customers to obtain actionable information? How do you build customer relationships? How do you manage customer relationships to manage and enhance your brand image, retain customers, and exceed their expectations? How do you determine customer requirements for product offerings and services? Did I get a fair deal on a good mattress? I wish I would ever know. Or better yet, I wish I didn’t have to think about it because I knew that I got a fair quality/price ratio. All I want is a fair transaction for the dealer and for me. Is that asking too much? How about you? And for those of you who are curious, I let my wife preview this post and she approved!

By Christine Schaefer At the end of this month, the staff of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program will lose a long-time staff member, Sandra Byrne, to retirement. The program’s education specialist by title, Sandra has long acted as an enthusiastic liaison to leaders of organizations in the education sector. She also has leveraged her sector expertise for biannual revisions to the Education Criteria for Performance Excellence and other publications. She has surmounted challenges in wide-ranging team and project assignments over the years, including stints on the program’s past management, training, outreach, and award process teams. As a member of the Baldrige Program’s Education Team in recent years, Sandra has led many processes associated with Baldrige examiner training and the Baldrige Award process, among other contributions. The following interview was designed to elicit some statements from Sandra that would, in effect, spotlight the spirit of her work in advancing the Baldrige Program’s mission to help organizations in every sector of the economy improve their performance. Sandra Byrne takes a break during Baldrige examiner training. How do you feel about retiring as you reflect on your long tenure on the staff of the Baldrige Program? It’s challenging to convey the depth of my feelings associated with leaving the Baldrige Program, to which I feel such attachment and commitment. It’s been an extraordinary 15+ years. And I’m leaving with greatly mixed feelings—excitement and apprehension, anticipation and cautiousness, happiness and sadness. There is so much to look forward to, yet so much to miss. I arrived at the Baldrige National Quality Program (as it was then known) in 1999 with some knowledge of the power of the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence. In the early 1990s, when I was working at the National Alliance of Business, I had researched school districts that were using the Criteria in their improvement efforts. So when I was offered an opportunity to join the Baldrige staff, I was thrilled! I knew I would be exposed to new knowledge and new people, but little did I anticipate how much I would learn—how many bright and wonderful people I would meet, get to know, and call "friend"; and how much I would grow, personally and professionally. Would you please share some of your career highs with the Baldrige Program? My greatest moments with the program are associated with seeing Baldrige in action, so to speak. For example, I’ve always been impressed—and deeply moved by—presentations made by the Baldrige Award recipients at the annual Quest for Excellence® conference and other venues. When I’ve heard (Baldrige Award recipient) leaders such as Rulon Stacy and JoAnn Sternke talk about Baldrige "saving lives" (in health care and in education, respectively), I am inspired and hopeful and proud. As another example, when I’ve been the program’s monitor on site visits (as part of the Baldrige Award process) and observed the interactions of the [examiner] team members with one another and with employees of the applicant organization, I’ve found it fulfilling to be in the presence of these remarkably dedicated people who "get it" and are making such huge, positive differences in the lives of so many people. I also recall fondly attending and presenting on Baldrige at many conferences around the country, where it’s always a great thrill to see the "Baldrige light" go on in somebody’s eyes. I especially appreciated attending a gathering in Missouri in recent years where the governor kicked off a two-day meeting by asking all of his state’s school districts to commit to implementing Baldrige processes. Knowing that an entire state’s worth of school districts were going to start or continue on a Baldrige improvement journey was beyond gratifying for me, especially given that I started my career as an elementary school teacher (lo, those many years ago!). Given your humility, I know you’re loath to "toot your own horn" about your individual achievements; however, would you please share at least one team or group achievement during your time with the Baldrige Program in which you take great pride? Alright; that seems fair. Within the walls of the Baldrige Program, I’m proud to have been part of the team that first addressed the challenge of our funding situation back in the 2012 transition year without a federal appropriation for the first time. We worked very hard for several weeks to come up with solutions to cut expenses, while increasing revenues. That work is still in progress, of course, but our team did a yeoman’s work to meet the initial challenge, and I’m very proud to have been a member. Now I’m going to lead a question with an observation that may embarrass you but that many of your coworkers consider central to your legacy: You have long been admired for your exceptional ability to connect people. You’ve always "warmed the room" as a facilitator for Baldrige examiner training and conference presenter, creating fertile ground for everyone’s learning. And you’re revered on our staff for voluntarily mentoring and otherwise supporting new and younger employees, as well as student interns. (Of course, I’m personally indebted to you for serving as a professional mentor for the past decade.) Through such voluntary roles, you have been credited by colleagues for strengthening teams of staff members and volunteers alike through a culture that fosters collaboration and high engagement. Could you please comment on that? Christine, you ARE embarrassing me! I will comment on that, but before I do, I must tell you how flattered I am by what you’ve said and let you know how gratified I’ve been when I’ve had those kinds of opportunities. I really enjoy meeting and getting to know people and then connecting them with others, especially when I’m sure there’s a reason for them to know one another. The "Baldrige Family," a term we use often, is composed of extraordinary people committed to bettering organizations to benefit others. Our examiners, who donate so much effort and time, should all receive a "good citizen" award. I’m privileged to have had opportunities to encourage their learning and development as examiners, all the while knowing that I’m learning more from them than they report they’re learning from me. The organizations that I’ve visited—all of whom are committed to ongoing improvement—it’s such an honor to see them "doing Baldrige." And when they tell me I’ve contributed to their having a positive experience, I’m that much more honored. Our boards and panels, with whom I’ve worked over the years, are committed, helpful, and willing to do whatever needs to be done. And my colleagues in the Baldrige Program are so conscientious, hard-working, and just plain smart: I’m proud to be a member of their cohort. The Baldrige Family does important, meaningful work that makes positive changes for individuals, organizations, and the country. I feel proud—and lucky—to have been part of it for all this time. Have you made plans for any Baldrige-related endeavors in the next few years? "What will you do?" That’s a question I’ve been getting a lot over the past several months—since the time I announced that I would be leaving the Baldrige Program. It’s a natural question—certainly the first thing I ask others when I hear about their impending retirement. The answer, to be honest, is that I’m not exactly sure what volunteer or other work I might do in retirement. I am open to serving in some capacity to assist efforts to keep growing the number of organizations (in education especially, as well as every sector) that benefit from the Baldrige framework for improvement. I see many related opportunities at this point, but I think I’m going to be quiet for a little while before sorting through them. Those who know me well probably suppose that my sitting quietly won’t last very long, but I’m looking forward to it while it lasts. Any parting thoughts you wish to share here? From the bottom of my heart, I want to thank everyone who has made my time with the Baldrige Program as significant as it has been. Your generosity of knowledge and spirit has helped me to learn and to grow and has touched me deeply. I will remember you with fondness and respect.  

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey Did you ever wonder who are the folks who judge applications for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award? What in their background brought them to this high honor, and what advice might they have for Baldrige Award applicants, potential applicants, and examiners? In an ongoing series in this Baldrige Program blog, we will be interviewing members of the Judges’ Panel of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award to share individual members’ insights and perspectives on the award process, their experiences, and the Baldrige framework and approach to organizational improvement in general. The primary role of the Judges’ Panel is to ensure the integrity of the Baldrige Award selection process. Based on a review of results of examiners’ scoring of written applications (the Independent and Consensus Review processes), judges vote on which applicants merit Site Visit Review (the third and final examination stage) to verify and clarify their excellent performance in all seven categories of the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence. The judges also review reports from site visit to recommend to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce which organizations to name as U.S. role models—Baldrige Award recipients. No judge participates in any discussion of an organization for which he/she has a real or perceived conflict of interest. Judges serve for a period of three years. Michael L. Dockery, a second-year judge Senior Manager, Memphis World Hub FedEx Express Corporation What experiences led you to the role of Baldrige Judge? I began volunteering on the national Board of Examiners in 2008. My experiences included serving as category lead on several examiner teams; serving as senior examiner and/or team lead for four years; and participating on three site visit teams, including site visit team lead in 2012. During my role as team lead, I received valuable training, coaching, and mentoring from fellow examiners and Baldrige staff throughout the process. The site visit experiences afforded me an opportunity to demonstrate analytical, team building, and leadership skills required to meet the process deliverables for all stakeholders. The developmental programs and knowledge sharing within the Baldrige community also gave me the confidence to take on the responsibility of Baldrige judge once the vetting process was completed. You have a great deal of experience in the service sector. How do you see the Baldrige Excellence Framework as valuable to organizations in that sector?  With an ongoing focus on service quality and marketplace competitiveness, I picture the Baldrige Excellence Framework being beneficial to organizations in the service sector and all sectors that are interested in focusing on the future while meeting current customer demands. I feel that it is important that service organizations invest in a framework that will allow them to respond or adapt rapidly to changing demands, as well as to other challenges in the global market. As the Baldrige framework is refined or updated, it continues to create value that can transform organizations by offering criteria that helps with marketplace competitiveness, an approach to performance excellence, cultural change, and innovation. In addition, the emphasis on a systematic, disciplined approach to process improvement may give organizations confidence to engage in intelligent risk-taking, enhance the strategic planning process, and identify measures for detecting potential blind spots. I am confident that the evolution of the Baldrige Excellence Framework, once fully deployed in the service sector, will be able to connect people, processes, and technology seamlessly for long-term value. How do you apply Baldrige principles/concepts to your own work experiences/employer? I regularly deploy all areas of the Criteria to process improvement initiatives and daily operations. When assessing process improvement opportunities, I take a holistic viewpoint and systems approach to evaluating how new processes may be implemented and the impact these processes could potentially have on the customer experience. The framework helps me to effectively manage multiple projects or tasks while addressing new, changing requirements by internal and external customers.  I have deployed the framework to all organizations I have led since being introduced to the Criteria and share key concepts with organizational employees during staff meetings and management development sessions. As a result, there are systematic, repeated approaches that translate into a culture of innovation, safety, and service excellence, which are core values for the company. By integrating the framework with the company’s quality programs and Lean processes, the leadership team and employees are able to implement or sustain core processes that deliver positive outcomes.  The framework also helps me create an environment of organizational learning and knowledge transfer, by involving all levels of the organization in the improvement process. The process dimensions of approach, deployment, learning, and integration are evident in the organizations I lead, and many of the Baldrige core values, such a visionary leadership, valuing people, and management by fact, are also commonplace. The framework has been instrumental in the company’s ability to refine processes, lead organizations through difficult challenges, and improve business results. As a judge, what are your hopes for the judging process? Or, in other words, as a judge, what would you like to tell applicants and potential applicants about the rigor of the process? I have a genuine appreciation for previous members who served on the Panel of Judges and the time commitment that is required to participate in the judging process.   Obviously, the focus is on providing outstanding customer service, remaining committed to the process, and identifying role-model organizations that have demonstrated best practices and proven processes that can be benchmarked across the industry. The applicants (former, current, and future) can feel confident that all panel members demonstrate a passion, commitment, and desire to protect the integrity of the process and provide all applicants the highest level of service required to deliver the expected value. The Baldrige staff and other stakeholders work extremely hard to ensure that a consistent process is executed to determine which organizations receive consideration for site visits. The same approach, rigor, and ethical standards are utilized by the judges’ panel to identify organizations with role-model best practices and to determine sector award winners. All members appointed to the Panel of Judges provide expert, diverse sector knowledge that is beneficial when evaluating the many processes that various organizations deploy that lead to positive performance results and outcomes. What encouragement/advice would you give examiners who are reviewing applications now? I would like to encourage all examiners to do their best, trust the process, and have fun. The experience provides a great opportunity for skill development, teamwork, mentorship, and systematic execution of core processes. I am excited to see the ongoing collaboration and willingness by experienced examiners to onboard new talent into the Baldrige community. See other blogs from the 2015 Judges’ Panel: Dr. Ken Davis, Laura Huston, Miriam N. Kmetzo, Dr. Sharon L. Muret-Wagstaff, Dr. Mike R. Sather, Ken Schiller, Dr. Sunil K. Sinha, Dr. John C. Timmerman, Roger M. Triplett, and Fonda L. Vera. Greg Gibson, a candidate for the 2015 panel, pending appointment, will also be interviewed for this series.

By Christine Schaefer Did you ever wonder who are the folks who judge applications for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award? What in their background brought them to this high honor, and what advice they may have for Baldrige Award applicants, potential applicants, and examiners? For an ongoing series of blogs on this site, we are interviewing all members of the Judges’ Panel of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award to share their individual insights and perspectives on the award process, their experiences, and the Baldrige framework and approach to organizational improvement in general. The primary role of the Judges’ Panel is to ensure the integrity of the Baldrige Award selection process. Based on a review of results of examiners’ scoring of written applications (the Independent and Consensus Review processes), judges vote on which applicants merit Site Visit Review (the third and final examination stage) to verify and clarify their excellent performance in all seven categories of the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence. The judges also review reports from site visit to recommend to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce which organizations to name as U.S. role models—Baldrige Award recipients. No judge participates in any discussion of an organization for which he/she has a real or perceived conflict of interest. Judges serve for a period of three years. Ken Schiller Second-Year Judge; Co-Owner, K&N Management (PDF), a small business that received the Baldrige Award in 2010. What experiences led you to the role of Baldrige judge? Being a small business [Baldrige Award] recipient in 2010 and then doing my best to be an ambassador for the Baldrige Program. You have a great deal of experience in the business sector, particularly in the service business industry. How do you see the Baldrige Excellence Framework as valuable to organizations in that sector/industry? The Baldrige framework is the most valuable performance excellence model for any organization in any industry. Our customers benefit from consistency in our products and services. We measure what is important to our customers and the company, identify trends, and use measures to continuously improve. This delights our customers and creates loyalty that allows us to outperform our competitors. Our team members are proud to work for an award-winning organization that focuses on excellence, quality, integrity, and relationships. How do you apply Baldrige principles/concepts to your current work experience, particularly in the organization you lead? K&N Management uses the Baldrige framework to align the actions of the company toward one common goal: to delight each guest that walks into our restaurant. Strategic planning continues to fuel our improvement efforts year after year. As a judge, what are your hopes for the judging process? In other words, as a judge what would you like to tell applicants and potential Baldrige Award applicants about the rigor of the process? It is not rocket science, but it is very rigorous and requires a high level of discipline. You can’t just dabble in it; you have to go "all in." A burning desire for continuous improvement is the key driver for success. What encouragement/advice would you give Baldrige examiners who are reviewing award applications now? What you are doing matters and will benefit our country by improving American organizations as well as stretching you to grow personally and professionally. See other blogs on the 2015 Judges’ Panel: Laura Huston (chair), Dr. Ken Davis, Michael Dockery, Miriam N. Kmetzo, Dr. Sharon L. Muret-Wagstaff, Dr. Mike R. Sather, Dr. Sunil K. Sinha, Dr. John C. Timmerman, Roger M. Triplett, and Fonda L. Vera. Greg Gibson, a candidate for the 2015 panel, pending appointment, will also be interviewed for this series.  

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey What do the American West, Six Sigma, cowboy ethics, commerce, and quality improvement have to do with one another? They are all elements of the story of Malcolm Baldrige, U.S. Secretary of Commerce under President Ronald Reagan; Baldrige was passionate about the American West and U.S. business. That passion continues to be honored today not only by a national program in his name but by state and sector Baldrige-based programs that spread the Baldrige process to local communities. But it’s Quality New Mexico, which uses as its slogan "the state of quality," that has a very personal connection to the Baldrige family. A recent article by Nigel Hey, "The Story of Mac Baldrige and Quality New Mexico," outlines how Mac Baldrige and his commitment to increase U.S. business productivity and customer satisfaction led to the birth of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program to support the competitiveness and sustainability of U.S. organizations, and how that national program took root in New Mexico. The story begins with Motorola’s 1981 initiative for a tenfold improvement in quality that included the development of Six Sigma and the manufacturer’s implementation of the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence. "To achieve the quality goal demanded by Six Sigma, Motorola required that suppliers start their own Baldrige-based quality programs," writes Hey. "One such supplier was AT&T, which created an internal Chairman’s Quality Award based strictly on the Baldrige Criteria and required each division to submit a Baldrige application covering its internal quality program." One of AT&T’s suppliers was Sandia National Laboratories, based in Albuquerque, NM. In 1991, at the invitation of U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, Motorola’s COO Chris Galvin spoke to business leaders in Las Cruces, NM, explaining that quality was "his company’s main weapon of defense against the onslaught of new foreign competitors." After site visits to Motorola headquarters and to a state Baldrige-based program helping organizations improve in Minnesota, New Mexican business leaders and Senator Bingaman became convinced that a Baldrige-based program in New Mexico could help state organizations stem the tide of lost business to foreign competition and increase job opportunities. In 1993, with the support of Sandia National Laboratories, Quality New Mexico was born, with the vision of turning New Mexico into a quality state. Read the full story here of how Baldrige expanded to New Mexico and the value it brought across the United States.

By Rick Kazman, Visiting Scientist, Research Technology & System Solutions The SEI has long advocated software architecture documentation as a software engineering best practice.  This type of documentation is not particularly revolutionary or different from standard practices in other engineering disciplines. For example, who would build a skyscraper without having an architect draw up plans first?  The specific value of software architecture documentation, however, has never been established empirically. This blog describes a research project we are conducting to measure and understand the value of software architecture documentation on complex software-reliant systems. Our research is creating architectural documentation for a major subsystem of Apache Hadoop, the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).  Hadoop is a software framework used by Amazon, Adobe, Yahoo!, Google, Hulu, Twitter, Facebook, and many other large e-commerce corporations. It supports data-intensive (e.g., petabytes of data) distributed applications with thousands of nodes.  The HDFS is a key piece of infrastructure that supports Hadoop by providing a distributed, high performance, high reliability file system. Although there are two other major components in Hadoop—MapReduce and Hadoop Common—we are initially focusing our efforts on HDFS since it is a manageable size and we have access to two of its lead architects. The HDFS software has virtually no architectural documentation, which expresses strategies and structures for predictably achieving system-wide quality attributes, such as modifiability, performance, availability, and portability. This project has thus become our "living laboratory" where we can change one variable (the existence of architectural documentation) and examine the effects of this change. We have enumerated a number of research hypotheses to test, including: product quality will improve because the fundamental design rules will be made explicit, more users and developers will become contributors and committers to HDFS because it will enable them to more easily learn the framework and thus make useful contributions, and process effectiveness will improve because more developers will be able to understand the system and work independently. We will measure the number of project features before and after the introduction of the documentation, where the "before" state becomes the control for our experiment. We believe the insights gained from this project will be valuable and generalizable because Hadoop exemplifies the types of systems in broad use within the commercial and defense domains.  For example, Facebook depends on Hadoop to manage the huge amount of data shared amongst its users.   Likewise, the DoD and Intelligence Community use Hadoop to leverage large-scale "core farms" for various "processing, exploitation, and dissemination" (PED) missions. If the existence of architectural documentation yields benefits (or not), we can better influence acquisition policies and development practices for related software-reliant systems. I along with my research team—Len Bass, Ipek Ozkaya, Bill Nichols, Bob Stoddard, and Peppo Valetto—have been assisting two of the HDFS’s architects in reconstructing, documenting, and distributing architectural documentation for the system. To do this, we initially employed reverse engineering tools including SonarJ and Lattix, to recover the architecture. This reverse engineering was only partially successful due to limitations with these tools. These tools are designed to help document the modular structure of the system, which crucially influences modifiability. In HDFS, however, performance and availability are the primary concerns and the tools offer no insight into the structures needed to achieve those attributes.  We have therefore undertaken considerable manual architectural reconstruction by interviewing the architects and carefully reading the code.  After we finish developing and distributing the Hadoop HDFS documentation, we will measure the quality of the code base and the nature of the project, including number of defects defect resolution time number of new features number of product downloads size (lines of code, number of code modules) number of contributors and committers These measurements will provide a time-series of snapshots of these measures as a baseline.  We will continue to track these measurements after the introduction of the (shared, publicly available, widely disseminated) architecture documentation to determine how the metrics change over time. We will also conduct qualitative analysis (via questionnaires) to understand how the documentation is being embraced and employed by architects and developers. We will examine the impact of the documentation on the developers’ interactions, specifically how it impacts their social network as represented by their email contributions to project mailing lists and comments made in their issue tracking system (Jira). Finally, we will interview key HDFS developers—both contributors and committers—after the introduction of the architecture documentation to gather some insights on their perspective about the usability and understandability of the HDFS code base. This project is a longitudinal study, which involves repeated observations of the same items over a period of time.  It will take time for the architectural documentation to become known and used, so the metrics we are collecting may not manifest themselves right away. Likewise, after the documentation is distributed, it may take a while for it to be assimilated into the Hadoop developer culture, after which point we will be able to measure whether it has made an impact. Within a year, however, we expect to report on the metrics we gathered, as well as qualitative results from surveys and interviews of HDFS developers. Based on this information we will produce a paper describing our methodology and results from creating the documentation.< Many of the systems that rely on Hadoop are highly complex, with millions of users and emergent behavior. Such systems have been previously characterized as ULS (Ultra Large Scale) systems. We hope our experiment in understanding the consequences of architectural documentation will advance the SEI’s research agenda into ULS systems.  We look forward to hearing about your experiences applying architectural documentation to software-reliant systems. Additional Resources: For more information about the SEI’s architecture documentation methods, please visitwww.sei.cmu.edu/architecture/start/documentation.cfm For more information about the SEI’s work in Ultra Large Scale Systems, please visit www.sei.cmu.edu/uls/index.cfmDownload the SEI technical report, Creating and Using Software Architecture Documentation Using Web-Based Tool Supportwww.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/04tn037.cfm?DCSext.abstractsource=SearchResultsDownload the SEI technical report, Architecture Reconstruction Guidelines, Third Editionwww.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/02tr034.cfmDownload the SEI technical report, Architecture Reconstruction Case Study www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/03tn008.cfmDownload our research study report, Ultra-Large-Scale Systems: The Software Challenge of the Futurewww.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/books/0978695607.cfm