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Performance Excellence
The Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence empower your organization—no
matter its size or the types of educational programs and services you offer—to
reach your goals;
improve results; and
become more competitive by aligning your plans, processes, decisions, people,
actions, and results.
The Criteria give you the tools you need to examine all parts of your management system
and improve processes and results while keeping the whole organization in mind.
Purchase the Baldrige Education Criteria or see a sample (PDF) to learn about how to guide
your organization, improve performance, and achieve sustainable results.
They focus on common needs rather than on common procedures. This focus fosters
understanding, communication, sharing, alignment, and integration while supporting
innovative and diverse approaches.
The Education Criteria for Performance Excellence, Criteria for Performance Excellence
(Business/Nonprofit Criteria), and Health Care Criteria for Performance Excellence are all
built on the same seven-part framework. The framework is adaptable to the requirements of
all organizations. Using a common framework for all sectors of the economy fosters cross-
sector cooperation and the sharing of best practices. Recognizing that education
organizations may address these requirements differently from organizations in other
sectors, the Education Criteria translate the language and basic concepts of business and
organizational excellence into similarly important concepts in education excellence.
When you use these measures, you channel different activities in consistent directions with
less need for detailed procedures, centralized decision making, or overly complex process
management.
Measures are therefore both a communication tool and a way to deploy consistent
performance requirements. The resulting alignment ensures consistency of purpose across
your organization while supporting agility, innovation, and decentralized decision making.
When you use the Criteria, feedback between your processes and your results leads to
action-oriented cycles of improvement with four stages:
1. Designing and selecting effective processes, methods, and measures (approach)
2. Executing on your approach with consistency (deployment)
3. Assessing your progress and capturing new knowledge, including seeking
opportunities for innovation (learning)
4. Revising your plans based on assessment findings and organizational
performance, harmonizing processes and work-unit operations, and selecting better
process and results measures (integration)
When you assess your organization with the Criteria, you create a profile of strengths and
opportunities for improvement based on your responses to 17 performance-oriented
requirements (the Criteria items) on a continuum of process and performance maturity (the
scoring guidelines).
In this way, assessing your organization with the Criteria leads to actions that improve
performance in all areas. This useful management tool goes beyond most performance
reviews and applies to a wide range of strategies, management systems, and types of
organizations.
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