As an examiner for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, what attributes do you look for to gauge operational excellence?
This question is in essence answered in my definition of operational excellence. I will add however that there are three key things we examiners look for, especially when we visit a finalist for the award. First and foremost, we try to ask questions of a high percentage of the workforce to help validate the degree to which the organization’s high performance work practices and approaches have been deployed. You can’t achieve a significant percentage of the award’s ‘approach / deployment points (55% of the total) if your key approaches are not deployed to a high percentage of the workforce. In other words, a high level of employee engagement is a prerequisite for pursuing operational and process excellence.. Secondly, we review lots of documentation and talk to more people to help validate the degree to which what was said on paper actually exists in the organization. Eleven core values serve as the foundation for the award and its criteria (things like fact-based management, visionary
