About the Baldrige Excellence

Framework
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The Baldrige Excellence Framework and its Criteria empowers your
organization to reach its goals, improve results, and become more
competitive. Purchase the Baldrige Excellence Framework booklet. Choose
the Baldrige Improvement Tool that is right for you.

A Systems Perspective
The Baldrige framework helps you manage all the components of your
organization as a unified whole, so that your plans, processes, measures,
and actions are consistent. The system's building blocks are the Criteria for
Performance Excellence, the core values and concepts, and the scoring
guidelines.

A Focus on Improvement
The purpose of the Baldrige framework is to help your organization improve
and achieve excellence. The questions in the Criteria help you explore how
you are accomplishing your organization's mission and key objectives in
seven critical areas:
1. Leadership
2. Strategy
3. Customers
4. Measurement, analysis, and knowledge management
5. Workforce
6. Operations

7. Results
The Baldrige framework is based on core values and concepts that represent
beliefs and behaviors found in high-performing organizations:
Systems perspective
Visionary leadership
Customer-focused excellence
Valuing people
Organizational learning and agility
Focus on success
Managing for innovation
Management by fact
Societal responsibility
Ethics and transparency
Delivering value and results
With the Baldrige framework, you evaluate and improve your processes
along four dimensions:
Approach: How do you accomplish your organizations work? How
effective are your key approaches?
Deployment: How consistently are your key processes used in
relevant parts of your organization?
Learning: How well have you evaluated and improved your key
approaches? How well have improvements been
shared within your organization?

 Integration: How well do your approaches align with your current and
future organizational needs? How well are processes and operations
harmonized across your organization?
You evaluate your results along four dimensions:
Levels: What is your current performance?
Trends: Are the results improving, staying the same, or getting
worse?
Comparisons: How does your performance compare with that of
other organizations, or with benchmarks or industry leaders?
Integration: Are you tracking results that are important to your
organization and that consider the expectations and needs of your key
stakeholders? Are you using the results in decision making?
As you answer the Criteria questions and assess your responses, you will
identify strengths and gapsfirst within the Criteria categories and then
among them. As you continue, you will begin to define the best ways to build
on your strengths, close gaps, and innovate. The free Self-Analysis
Worksheet can help you leverage your strengths and prioritize your
opportunities.

Adaptable to Your Organization

The Baldrige framework and Criteria for Performance Excellence do not
prescribe how you should structure your organization or its operations. In the
Baldrige Organizational Profile , you describe what is important to your
organization. The Criteria encourage you to use creative, adaptive, and
flexible approaches. You choose the improvement tools that are most
effective for your organization, assess your progress, and adapt accordingly.