Baldrige Criterion

To many people, strategic planning is something meant only for big businesses, but it is equally applicable to any type of business entity or organization. Strategic planning is matching the strengths of an organization to available opportunities. To do this effectively, an organization need to collect, screen, and analyze information about its environment. The organization also needs to have a clear understanding of its strengths and weaknesses - and develop a clear mission, goals, and objectives (Wikipedia, n.d.). Acquiring this understanding often involves more work than expected. The organization must realistically assess its current state and device a plan of action to successfully make it better. So how does an organization gauge how well they are doing in term of matching their strengths to available opportunities? A self-assessment using the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence can help an organization achieve high performance and move toward performance excellence (Balbridge.com). Even if the organization isn’t ready to apply for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the Baldrige criteria are a framework for evaluating any organization’s processes, their impact on results, and its progress toward goals and objectives. The Baldrige criterion consists of seven key categories/indicators of success. One of these categories is strategic planning and it contains ten questions that are not routinely asked on how an organization can function more efficiently. In the case of University California, Berkeley’s and University of Colorado, Boulder’s campus-wide IT strategic plan, this paper will address some of these questions as they relate to Balbridge’s criteria for assessing strategic planning. The questions I will cover are: describe how the organization sets its strategic objectives into action plans, what the organization’s action plans are, and how the organization is able to project future performance on these key performance