About the Baldrige Excellence Framework

Whether your organization is new, is growing, or has existed for many years, it faces daily and long-term challenges. It also has strengths that have served you well so far. The Baldrige Excellence Framework helps you identify and leverage your strengths and prepare to face your challenges. Purchase the Baldrige Excellence Framework booklet. Choose the Baldrige Improvement Tool that is right for you.

What Can Baldrige Do for My Organization?

The Baldrige Excellence Framework helps you address issues that are important to your organization:

• Understanding what it takes to be competitive and achieve long-term success in your environment
• Getting your leaders, managers, and workforce all on the same page
• Ensuring that your employees understand and can contribute to the drivers of your organization’s success
• Understanding, and meeting or exceeding, customer requirements and expectations
• Ensuring that your operations are efficient and lead to short- and long-term success

How Do I Know if Baldrige Is Right for My Organization?

Baldrige is adaptable to any organization’s needs. In the Organizational Profile, you describe what is important to your organization. You choose the improvement tools that are most effective for your organization, assess your progress, and adapt accordingly.

How Does Baldrige Work?

The Baldrige framework helps you manage all the components of your organization as a unified whole (called a systems perspective). 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 contributions
• 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 organization’s 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 gaps—first 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 Word can help you leverage your strengths and prioritize your opportunities.

National and Global Impact

Baldrige works with public and private sector partners to address critical national needs related to long-term success and sustainability, including cybersecurity risk management and excellence in U.S. communities.

Within the United States, state, regional, sector-specific, and organization-specific performance or business excellence programs use the Baldrige Framework and Criteria to help organizations improve their competitiveness and results. Globally, about 100 performance or business excellence programs exist; many use the Baldrige framework or a derivative as their organizational excellence model.

Getting Started

How Baldrige Works
Baldrige Excellence Builder
Self-Assessing Your Organization
Create an Organizational Profile
Baldrige Award

Resources

Purchase Baldrige Excellence Framework Business/Nonprofit, Education, Health Care
Self-Analysis Worksheet Word
Baldrige Excellence Builder
Baldrige Key Terms
Baldrige Improvement Tools
The Baldrige Criteria 101 Word

Related Links

How Baldrige Works
Baldrige Impacts
Self-Assessing Your Organization
Baldrige Products and Services
Baldrige Award
Baldrige Award Recipient Listing
Baldrige FAQs