Using the Baldrige Framework in Product Development

Recently, I became an evaluator for the Minnesota Council on Quality’s Minnesota Quality Award. Established in 1991, the Minnesota Quality Award is given to organizations that successfully complete a full assessment based on the Baldrige National Quality Program criteria. The Baldrige criteria used for the Minnesota Quality Award is updated every two years to incorporate new and improved ways that businesses are succeeding.

There are seven categories of requirements for Performance Excellence and they are all linked in a framework or "System". Use of the system, analysis and categories can be applied to Product Development for a good starting point for a continuous improvement plan.

The seven categories of the Baldrige criteria are:

1. Leadership
2. Strategic Planning
3. Customer Focus
4. Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management
5. Workforce Focus
6. Process Management
7. Results

The overarching context of these seven categories is your Organizational Profile, including Environment, Relationships, and Challenges. In your Organizational profile for Product Development, you will look at your operating environment and your key relationships with customers, suppliers, partners, and stakeholders. What are your core competencies and where do you look to others to complement your organization? How does your workforce engage internally and externally? These questions may provide insight to the effectiveness of your Business Management System that resides over all other processes.

The first category in Baldrige is Leadership. How do your leaders guide the Product Development organization, projects and strategies within the department? Describe how leaders communicate with your teams and to other departments. Also, look at how leaders encourage others and high performance overall.

The second category is Strategic Planning. This category examines how your organization develops strategic objectives and action plans. Analyzing your existing products and gaining feedback from customers should give you a good view at where you are at and where to go. You will be reviewing your core competencies to match future goals with organization needs/areas of development. Multi-generational Product Plans are one way to provide a visual portrait of product strategy. The strategy needs to be deployed once it is developed. Action plans and future projects should be outcomes of this. All of this requires continuous review to react to changes in your business, technical and organizational environments.

Customer Engagement is the third category. This is especially critical in Product Development to ensure you are getting the right product to the right customer at the right time. Serving the customer's needs and building relationships from engagement is critical to your product's success. Everyone in the organization should be focused on the customer and meeting their needs. Voice of Customer is a commonly used term that has lost relevant meaning due to the lack of engagement. Scope and Requirements need to be honed until an appropriate level of information is gathered to not only meet, but exceed customer expectations to stay ahead of the competition.

The fourth category is Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management. Metrics help you keep a microscope on your projects, products and organization. Ensuring that you are measuring and analyzing the appropriate metrics is critical to long term success. This also helps keep your engineers and design personnel sharp and focused on continuous improvement. Capturing, managing and sharing knowledge is becoming increasingly critical to flexibility in product design and project execution. We no longer have time to repeat the mistakes of yesterday or redo something within our project's time frame. Knowledge is the new "Gold Mine" of success.

Workforce Focus, the fifth category, is comprised of workforce engagement and environment. Your engineers, designers and technicians should be engaged at many levels to achieve organizational and personal success. Assessment of these personnel is important to keep individuals performing at high levels. As leaders it is also important to assess your workforce capabilities and capacities to complete projects and action items. You need to create an environment where your employees are safe and supported in their work climate.

Process Management is the sixth category and the one we see with the opportunity. How you organize, plan and proceed through Product Development is critical to the three R's: Right product, Right price, Right time. A stage-gate product development process with cross-functional/departmental involvement is key to helping everyone being on the same page at the same time. Again, continuous improvement, is critical to keeping the process relevant and fresh with changes in the market, competition, customers and your own organization.

The seventh and final category is Results. Summarize your product development performance results from internal and external perspective, including segmenting as necessary. Using data to drive customer-focused results is paramount to driving decisions and fixing what is wrong. There are many areas to review in this area of product development, including Financial, Timing, Workforce, Processes and Leadership. A balanced blend will help to keep the burden reasonable and the information valuable.

The Baldrige criteria are a great way to look at product development from a slightly different angle and apply proven assessment to drive improvements and success. Using the categories in simple analysis and through leadership focus can help drive incremental improvements for results in people, processes and projects. We will look at individual categories in the future and dive in on how details can be gleaned to hone the assessment for product development success.