THE MALCOLM BALDRIGE NATIONAL QUALITY AWARD

Since the 1998 announcement of the first Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award winners, the influence of the Award on the nations perception of TQM has grown at an astounding pace. Articles about the award appear nearly every month in magazines devoted to Quality, frequently in business magazines, and a cottage industry has flourished comprised of consultants who specialize in helping companies apply for the award. The award is given not to individuals, but to companies. Separate awards are made in each of three categories of business: manufacturing, service and small business. The major part of a companys application is its 75-page response to published award criteria. A company whose application gets a high score from a team of examiners will receive a site visit. A panel of judge makes the final award decisions. Although the number of companies applying for the award is considerable which is 76 in 1993, the several hundred thousand copies of the award criteria that have been requested dwarfs the number sent to companies who submitted applications. While people who simply want to know what all the fuss is about make some requests, great many copies are sent to companies who intend to use the criteria for assessing their progress toward TQM. Well they might, the criteria, 28 items divided among seven categories represent a concise blueprint for TQM. We admit we are prejudiced. R. Ullman has been a Baldrige award examiner, and R. Dunn has for several years been an examiner for the Connecticut Quality Improvement Award and under the auspices of the Connecticut Award, conducts workshops in the use of the criteria as TQM roadmap. Moreover, Ullman is a vice president of ITT Defense and electronics corporation, which uses the award criteria to objectively measure the corporations quality level. We may be biased but few will deny that the 28 items, presented in only 17 pages, capture all aspects of TQM in succinct and appraisal terms. The list of seven categories of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is shown in the next page. The 28 items, themselves, have several parts, called areas to address. On a quick understanding of these categories we will take few areas and discuss now.

The first area under 2.1 speaks to the criteria for selecting data that enter into the improvement of quality and operational performance. The applicant is asked to list the key types of data used and to note the role played by each type in improving quality and operational performance. The second area wants to know how the company assures the reliability, consistency and rapid access to data across all parts of the company. The third area asks the applicant to list the key methods and indicators by which the company evaluates and improves the scope and management of data. In this area, the applicant is expected to address the review and update of data, explain how the interval between data collection and access is shortened, and describe how access to data is broadened. The applicant also needs to discuss the way data enter into process improvement. Collectively, the three areas of item 2.1 permit companies to demonstrate the breadth and depth of their quality related data. Used for selfassessment, the item forces companies to think about the system they have for collecting and disseminating data and the connection between the data in the system and their quality objectives. Moreover, companies are channeled into evaluating the approach and deployment of their data system. Approach and deployment enter into most of the award items. A third dimension of the criteria, results enter into 11 of the 28 items. Each of the items has a value assigned to it. Examiners score each item on a scale of 0 percent to 100 percent, where 50 percent presents a sound, prevention-based, well-deployed, system that shows generally good results and trends. The examiners multiply the percentages by the values to arrive at a total score. The Award criteria offer some guidance to the assignment of percentage scores, but reasonably reliable scoring requires examiner training or the equivalent offered by various consultants. IN any case, the company using the Baldrige criteria can calculate a total score for itself if it cares to quantify the status of its quality system. We think it more important to go through the criteria with great care, documenting the many insights the self-assessors will gain. It is difficult to examine oneself against the Baldrige criteria and not see where one needs to improve. And that is what self-assessment is all about. THE SEVEN BALDRIGE AWARD CATEGORIES 1. LEADERSHIP 1. Senior Executive Leadership 2. Management for Quality 3. Public Responsibility and Corporate Citizenship

2. INFORMATION AND ANALYSIS 1. Scope and Management of Quality and Performance data and Information 2. Competitive comparisons and benchmarking 3. Analysis and uses of company level data 3. STRATEGIC QUALITY PLANNING 1. Strategic Quality and Company performance planning process 2. Quality and performance plans 4. HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT AND MANAGEMENT 1. Human resource planning and management 2. Employee involvement 3. Employee education and training 4. Employee performance and recognition 5. Employee well-being and satisfaction 5. MANAGEMENT OF PROCESS QUALITY 1. Design and introduction of Quality products and services 2. Process management: product and service production and delivery processes 3. Process management : Business processes and support services 4. Supplier quality 5. Quality assessment 6. QUALITY AND OPERATIONAL RESULTS 1. Product and service Quality results 2. Company operational results 3. Business process and support service results 4. Supplier Quality Results 7. CUSTOMER FOCUS AND SATISFACTION 1. Customer expectations: Current and Future 2. Customer relationship management 3. Commitment to Customers 4. Customer satisfaction determination 5. Customer satisfaction results 6. Customer satisfaction comparison The Baldrige criteria change a bit each year as the awards office at NIST, in collaboration with many others, improves the quality of its own product. Since the beginning, two things have remained constant: the seven categories and the three dimensions of approach, deployment and results. Curt Reimann, director of the awards office, speaking of the framework established at the beginning of the award said: " we defined everything necessary and sufficient to create and sustain a quality effort. What is the minimum number of components required for defining and sustaining a quality culture? Anything else we had seen in the field of quality could be subsumed under these seven categories. Moving one element would be

like kicking the third leg of a stool. It would fall down. Nor would anything be gained by subsuming one element under another; it would be muted. We were trying to send seven clear messages to the community." MBNQA FOR SOFTWARE INDUSTRIES Plainly, the criteria for the Baldrige award are not specific to software. One can quite easily relate certain items to software development and engineering, but other requires some deeper thinking. Element 2.1 discussed earlier, is a simple case. Simply restrict the scope of the element to the types and use of data. Element 5.2 Process management: product and service production and delivery processes, can be easily translated into the processes associated with software development and testing. On the other hand, when assessing themselves with respect to element 1.1Senior executive leadership, companies other than software publishers have to consider how policies of the top rung of management have influenced their software quality system and how the members of that rung have personally involved themselves in the software end of the business. Alternatively, management of a software organization with in a larger one can think of their organization as a separate company. This doesnt change the interpretation of the criteria very much. "Senior executive leadership" becomes the management of the software department or division. "Strategic quality planning" reduces to the planning for the on-going software activities and the integration of key software quality requirements into the business needs of the company. All other categories and the items within them are simply restricted to software matters, including software support for customers or users. Deployment is limited to functions involved with software requirements modeling, analysis, design, construction, testing, qualification, configuration control, and customer support. Baldrige award schema (Fig. 1) shown depicts the relationships among the seven categories when restricted to self-assessment of a software organization within a company or a division of one. Management, the concern of category 1.0 drives the entire improvement process and through feedback continuous redirection. The actual system for improvement is treated by categories 2.0 through 5.0, wherein category 2.0, information and analysis, has the special position of serving as the foundation for the others. Category 6.0 deals with the direct measurable results of improvements. Feedback from category 6.0 is critical to the success of the process. The goal of the entire process is the topic of category 7.0 and the diagram highlights feedback from the measurable results of that category. The essential difference between the results of categories 6.0 and 7.0 is that the results of the former tell us if we are getting the progress we planned, while the results of the latter tell us if we planned the correct progress.

DEVELOPING A STRATEGY Strategies start with business matters. Some short scenarios: the company is not increasing its share of the market at the rate implied in the business plan. Sales are booming, more so than that of the competition, but customer complaints are booming at an even greater rate. The companys main software products are to use a euphemism-mature, and attempts to produce innovative products have made little headway in development. The main software product has the lions share of the market, but each release is tougher to produce than the last, raising doubts about the capability of adding features at a rate sufficient to stay ahead of the competition. A marked swing in the market place to Unix platforms requires revamping the entire product line, which unless the workforce is expanded, will slow down the rate of adding new product features. The size of staff is greater than needed to sustain the diminished business of military systems development, arousing fear of losing the best people through resignations when other staff are let go in a major downsizing move. PLOTTING THE COURSE Whatever the problems, and in the rapidly changing world of software there are always problems, they have to be prioritized. Business strategies dictate strategies for improving software quality systems. We know where our quality system stands-we have just undergone another iteration of our self-assessment process. Start by popping the top problem off the priority stack. As the main business problem lets hypothesize a workforce inadequate to support both the programming of new features and the maintenance required for changeover to a new software platform. One solution might be to increase productivity with out a loss of quality, or alternatively decrease the cost of quality to permit the expansion of the work force. Cost of quality objective is a good candidate for scrutiny. Looking at the last self-assessment, one recalls that the company was wanting in items 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3. This should prompt an analysis of the "caliber of staff". What most needs doing is usually driven by business factors and one can devise a strategy to remedy maters by taking into account the weaknesses identified in self assessment and the candidates for analysis implied. 1. BALDRIGE CRITERIA FOR THE FOUR PRIMARY SOFTWARE TQM OBJECTIVES
SI.NO 1. OBJECTIVE Customer/ User Satisfaction PERTINENT CRITERIA All of category 5

Items 6.1, 6.2 and 6.4 All of category 7 2. 3. Project Control Reduction of COQ All category of 5 Item 3.2 Items 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 Items 5.1 and 5.2 Items 6.1 and 6.2 4. Process for Continuous Improvement All of category 2 All of category 3

BALDRIGE COMPONENTS MEASUREMENTS We have made much of measurements and lets return to the subject because apart from business matters, measurements may have to be among the first strategic considerations. Companies that do not have more than a rudimentary software data and information system suffer a major handicap in trying to develop effective strategies. A company at the TQM entry level (composite score of less than 20 or 30 percent using the Baldrige criteria) desperately needs data. Regardless of specific business problems, work must begin on fashioning a data and information system. The business problems, however will help to define where data are most needed. If new releases are getting more difficult to produce, we need to know why: we need to measure the product component by component, know more about the kinds of defects, know the percentage attributable to configuration ambiguities. If we need to increase productivity to shift over to advanced areas, we need to know the percentage of time spent by out labor force on each development and maintenance activity. Now it is possible that anecdotal evidence is sufficient to explain the problem. For the new products that run into so much difficulty they are abandoned, we may know marketing specifications have been unable to stabilize development. But we may not know how far down in the development process changes have been propagating, with the result that we cannot come up with a process improvement that can meet marketing halfway.

To establish or improve measurement system where the word system means more than just an arbitrary set of collected data and the reports generated from them one starts by listing the data, analyses, and reports that relate to the problem at hand. Next one looks at the data currently gathered, the current analyses and current reports. Match the two and see what is missing or what is not needed. Than start building the system, bottom-up. TECHNOLOGIES INTERVENTION Self-assessment and analyses inherent in the quality process may reveal the need to upgrade technology, but to what? To know what technology one should aspire to, one needs to know what technology is available. Whether a technology is currently at industrial strength or still in the laboratory, it enters into both short term and long term goals. Many companies have developed the practice of using small pilot projects to try out technology that appears interesting. Even if the technology does not immediately get used in important projects, may never get used, experience with it adds to the company knowledge base. A high quality competitive, company keeps itself technically sharp by giving its people hands on experience in emerging technologies Software companies should comply with the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in order to compete globally. Companies have to interpret the award criteria correctly to accrue the benefits of managing process quality. MBNQA provides a framework for self-assessment, therefore companies should carry out this religiously to upgrade their processes continuously. Above all the customers should realize that the products and services comes out of MBNQA complying Organization.