Ever wonder what it takes to win a state-level Baldrige Award?
Here's a high-level overview of the key factors that helped Orange County Clerk of the Courts (OCCC) in Orlando win the Florida Governor's Sterling Award this year. The Sterling Award program is 15 years old, follows the same criteria, rules, and scoring as the National Baldrige Award, and is widely recognized as one of the best state programs.
There are six areas in which OCCC has dramatically improved in just a few years time and which, in my opinion, helped them win the Sterling Award. Those areas of strength are themes that cut across the seven Sterling categories of Leadership, Strategic Planning, Customer and Market Focus, Measurement, Analysis and Knowledge Management, Workforce Focus, Process Management, and Results.
- First, from the very beginning of their performance excellence journey, OCCC has had very strong support and active involvement from most of their senior and middle management, starting with the Clerk herself. The organization's Vision was clarified from the start and the management buy-in was widespread and clearly driven from the top.
- Second, a governance structure for the journey was developed and the management team was heavily involved in it. This provided the structure and methods to drive organized and prioritized change in the organization.
- Third, they replicated other organizations' best practices regarding a better strategic planning process and a proven methodology to deploy that strategy using aligned balanced scorecards down to the division level.
- Fourth, and related to the last improvement, they began scorecard performance reviews at all organizational levels to hold employees accountable for the action plans to improve measure-related performance gaps in the organization.
- Fifth, they developed a prioritization process for action plans in the organization based on the principles of Quality Function Deployment, taking into account customer focus, size of performance gap, and resources necessary to improve.
- Finally, but extremely importantly, OCCC developed methodologies to understand the voice of their external customers in order to set the right targets for their metrics and to prioritize their improvements.
OCCC is a great case study example to follow. They made huge improvements in their organizational culture and overall performance in a few years time by using the Sterling/Baldrige criteria as a holistic guide. Consequently, all of their stakeholders are reaping the benefits.
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