At 08:44 AM 5/24/96 PDT, you wrote:
>I am looking for information along the lines of what kind of actions have
>been taken to make improvements and the RESULTS of the changes. Most of
>my focus is on management processes, not engineering or manufacturing. Of
>special interest is the area of linking strategic planning and the Malcolm
>Baldrige criteria. I have been monitoring the list for a couple of weeks
>and found something I have to reply to.
I think your multi-faceted approach is similar to the way I would approach
this type of challenge. Strategic Planning is where I would star as well
in terms of involving stakeholders in a "public" manner. I would only add
that in a situation where I am not personally familiar with those
stakeholders, I would want to spend a considerable amount of time meeting
them individually and in small groups so give myself an immersion into the
spectrum of values, attitudes, visions, beliefs, etc. that these people
will bring to my planning process. As much as possible, I like to strive
to eliminate the possibility of large surprises when I begin to hold SP
sessions. (Of course, surprises always occur, but the striving prepares
you for averting a few disasters along the way.)
In addition to the benchmarking, and Action Workouts, the use of
Information Modeling and Process Modeling can help to give you and your
colleagues another view of the same areas at a high level and moving down
to any level of granularity you feel is useful. In fact there is software
available to support in an integrated fashion those processes Strategic
Planning, Process Modeling, Data Modeling, through to systems design. One
that I know of is being used by the US military in a major re-engineering
of DoD operations.
I find that just as individuals have different learning styles, different
people respond to different ways of perceiving information. Your
multi-faceted approach gives you an array of presentation styles which
have a better chance of getting your discoveries across to your clients
than a single style.
Brock Vodden
--Brock Vodden Vodden Consulting Business Process Improvement "Where People and Systems Meet" brock.vodden@odyssey.on.ca
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>