Imagine that your organization is identified as a role-model for the United States. After the well-earned celebration, would you sit on your laurels or look for new ways to continuously improve to find new best practices to adapt, implement, and share.

Bristol Tennessee Essential Services (BTES), a 2017 Baldrige Award recipient, never stopped on its journey of continuous improvement, and at the upcoming Quest for Excellence® Conference in April, Leslie Blevins, public relations and communications manager, will share some best practices in a session titled “Our Journey and Best Practices Identified Along the Way.”

In a recent exchange (captured below), Blevins described her upcoming presentation and her perspective on the Baldrige Framework.

What will participants learn at your conference session?

BTES has been on a journey of continuous improvement for over thirty years—and we’ve learned a lot! I’ll be sharing our journey during my session and talking about our biggest lessons learned. Participants will learn ideas on how to implement their values, create a focus for their entire organization, and manage customer inquiries, among other topics. We will also discuss BTES’s high workforce retention rates and performance appraisal process.

What are your top tips for using Baldrige resources?

One of the first things that we suggest to organizations is to become involved with your state or regional Baldrige-based program. (See Alliance for Performance Excellence.) We have seen the great value in sending employees each year to be on the Board of Examiners with our state program—the Tennessee Center for Performance Excellence. If a company is interested in Baldrige, having someone on its staff trained as an examiner is the first step. Second, for BTES,

The good thing about Baldrige is that it can work for any business at any stage. If you are just starting out with Baldrige, start with the Organizational Profile and work your way in. Don’t feel like you have to answer every single question the first time.

Third—and this is one of the things that we will discuss during my session—create a focus for your organization. We do a lot of things at BTES, and prior to us creating what we call our “Key Success Factors,” we didn’t have a way to tie everything together. (Think of that arrow graphic in the Baldrige Framework [Steps toward Mature Processes] that discusses integration—our arrows were pointing in every direction.) Once we created a focus around safety, reliability, and financial outcomes, we were able to quickly align our processes and integrate everything we do back to what is most important to us.

What’s happened at your organization since receiving the Baldrige Award?

We’ve continued to improve. We’ve continued striving towards excellence. The moment we think that we’ve hit the pinnacle is the moment we start rolling down the hill, so we keep pushing, keep improving. As we move along in our journey, we will continue to fill out a Baldrige application every year to use internally so that we never back up, never lose our momentum in moving forward, in getting better. Being the best and exceeding our customers’ expectations means that every day we’ve got to be better today than we were yesterday and better tomorrow than we are today.

Can you share an example of your success?

BTES continues to look at how we can improve our products and services. We currently offer Internet speeds of 10 Gigabits per second to our customers, which is available to every business and home in our service area. Our focus on improvement shows in our safety results, our continued decrease of electric outage minutes, and our superior financial and marketplace results, which have left over $70 million in our customers’ pockets over the last 40 years.

What do you think are a few key reasons that organizations in your sector can benefit from using the Baldrige Excellence Framework?

The Baldrige Framework asks really good questions. Answering those questions makes an organization take a hard look at what it is doing and why. Other utilities could benefit from using the Framework because it helps to standardize processes, put a focus on the organization’s customers, and ask for data to back up decision making. The Framework takes an organization from reacting to problems as they arise to being proactive in improvements.

The 6^th International Best Practice Competition was held in Abu Dhabi, UAE, 10-12 December 2018 as part of the Global Organisational Excellence Congress. The Congress, attended by 1,300 delegates, was hosted by the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce and Industry and supported by key partners, the Centre for Organisational Excellence Research, Asia Pacific Quality Organisation and the Global Benchmarking Network.

From 72 entries from 17 countries, 36 best practices from 31 organisations were presented to the audience and a judging panel through 8-minute presentations followed by 4 minutes of questions and answers. From these the top 10 were selected, and then the top 5 qualified to the final and gave presentations to another set of judges.

Winner:

• Jollibee Foods Corporation, Philippines, We Listen and Learn from the VOICES of our CUSTOMERS to SPREAD Joy to the World

Runners-up of equal standing:

• Dubai Police, UAE, Productivity and Vehicle Availability within Vehicle Fleet Maintenance
• Arya Sasol Polymer Company, Iran, Sustainable Continuous Development of Safety Improvement Plan
• Dubai Electricity Water Authority, UAE, AFKARI Ideation Management System
• Abu Dhabi City Municipality, UAE, Building Data Management System for streamlining Building Data Delivery process and extracting Indoor details

Top 6 to 10 of equal standing:

• Municipal Government of Carmona, Philippines, From Seclusion to Inclusion: Carmona, Cavite’s Journey Towards Empowering the Persons with Disability in the Community through the Community-Based Inclusive Development Matrix
• Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore, Singapore, Accelerating Innovation in the Maritime Industry through the MPA Living Lab
• City of Fort Collins, USA, City of Fort Collins Climate Action Plan
• Department of Science and Technology Regional Office No. IX, Philippines, Laboratory On-line Referral System: An Innovation in Government Service Delivery
• Ambulatory Healthcare Services, UAE, Integrated Student e-health in the Public Schools of Abu Dhabi

Judges of qualifying rounds:

• Dr Martin Andrew, Director, Australian Organisation for Quality, Australia
• Shouqi Al Yousuf, Senior Business Excellence Consultant, Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce and Industry, UAE
• Dr. Zeyad El Kahlout, Senior Quality and Excellence Advisor, Dubai Government Excellence Program (DGEP), UAE
• Dale Weeks, President and Chief Executive Officer, Global Leadership and Benchmarking Associates, USA

The final was judged by:

• Dr Charles Aubrey, Chairman APQO International Advisory Panel, United States
• Russell Longmuir, CEO, EFQM, Belgium
• Patrick Lim, Director, Business & Service Excellence, Singapore Enterprise, Singapore
• Richard Cross Specialist in Talent Management, Leadership Development and Organisational Change, United Kingdom

The Best Practice Competition encourages organizations to share their best operational and managerial practices, processes, systems, and initiatives and learn from the experience of others. It provides an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of individuals and teams that have been responsible for creating and/or managing the introduction and deployment of best practices. The Best Practice Competition was founded by the Centre for Organisational Excellence Research, the developers of the Business Performance Improvement Resource. Videos of all 36 best practice presentations will be on the BPIR.com soon, sign up to the BPIR newsletter to receive updates.

The Global Organisational Excellence Congress brings together a number of prestigious international conferences/awards into one major event. The Congress is being hosted by the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce & Industry and will be held in Jumeirah at Etihad Towers Hotel, Abu Dhabi, 10-12 December 2018.

The Final Call for applications to three international awards closes on 9^th of November 2018. These award events provide you with an opportunity to give a presentation at the Congress on your organisation’s practices, network with other like-minded improvement-driven professionals, and achieve recognition for your excellent work!

• 6^th International Best Practice Competition: The Competition encourages organizations to share their best operational and managerial practices, processes, systems, and initiatives and learn from the experience of others. It provides an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of individuals and teams that have been responsible for creating and/or managing the introduction and deployment of best practices. To submit your entry please download an entry form.
• 2^nd Organisation-wide Innovation Award: This award recognises organisations that have embraced best practice learning and combined this learning with their own ideas and creativity to become highly innovative. The award recognises organisations that excel in inculcating an innovation culture throughout all facets of their operation from the leadership to employees and covering all stakeholders leading to innovative processes, products and services. To submit your entry please download an entry form.
• 6^th Global Benchmarking Awards: To recognise those organisations that have integrated benchmarking into their organisation’s strategy and processes in order to continuously learn and innovate. To submit your entry please download an entry form.

Have a think about what your organisation does well and submit an entry by the 9^th of November 2018.

Other awards being hosted at the Congress include the APQO’s ACE Teams Award Competition and the Global Performance Excellence Award – refer to these links for their application schedule.

Join the Global Organisational Excellence Congress Linked-In group

Chances are you have.

It is one of the hottest buzzwords of today, easily found in articles and in the news. The education and business fields are going crazy over it, books are written about it, and service designers, creative agencies, career coaches, trainers and facilitators are using it. Perhaps you’re already applying it in your work or everyday life, too?

Since its debut in 1969 when Simon Herbert introduced the model in the Science of the Artificial, Design Thinking has revolutionized business models, education systems, processes of innovation, product and service design and human mindsets.

One of the reasons for its popularity is that it is human-centered, putting users and customers at the center of creation in order to understand their problems, thus making products and services more user-friendly.

Design Thinking may seem like just a tool, but this is not the case. Design Thinking is more of a mindset or a process with several different stages, and each stage can be supported with different tools to help in the understanding-designing process.

Keeping in mind the stages of the model, we have collected some of the best Design Thinking tools to help you create real value for your customers and users.

Empathizing
The first stage of the Design Thinking process is to empathize with your users by collecting as much information about them as you can with different set of tools. This human-centered approach helps experts focus on the user instead of their own assumptions about a problem.

For collecting (raw) information:

• Google forms is used by many as go-to solution for creating free, unlimited surveys. You can choose from 6 different types of questions, and as a Google product, it works perfectly with Gmail or Spreadsheets.
• Typeform arrived to the survey-making world with a fresh and simple look and an easy-to use interface. As you type, the application automatically evaluates the question and puts it into the right format. The free version includes an unlimited number of surveys of 10 questions and 100 responses.

For organizing the information:

• Creatlr is an open platform for visual thinkers and designers. You can browse through more than 200+ templates from empathy maps and customer journey maps to stakeholder analysis. The free plan includes 5 projects with 5 collaborators, access to the community and template library with an option for adding your own tools as well.

Defining
Once you have gathered a lot of information about the users, their needs and problems in the empathizing stage, you can analyze and synthesize it in order to sift out the (real) problem to be solved. To understand problems better, it is useful to create personas and define roles so you can attach needs and problems to different set of users. Once you have this you can see what patterns emerge and summarize problems into one problem statement.

• Smaply provides a beautiful and detailed persona and stakeholder editor, journey maps and storyboards to analyze all the data on your users. Short videos are also provided on how to use each tool as effectively as possible. Smaply offers a 14-day trial, after which you can choose a plan. The basic plan gives you 3 projects with unlimited personas, stakeholder and journey maps and access to learning resources for 1 person.
• Userforge promises to help you create in-depth and realistic personas with less clicks than it takes in design software. To foster collaboration and fast decision making you can share personas by URL instead of by the slow process of invitation. The application is non-designer-friendly, meaning anyone can create usable personas without the designer mindset. And it is totally free.
• An all-in-one solution for persona identification: Pyoneer. This app has two main parts: problem definition and solution finding. The former consists of everything you would possibly need to map out your problem statement from personas to journey maps. The latter has concept, validation and kanban storyboards for seamless solution finding. The app is not yet fully available as of the publishing of this post, but you can get early access by signing up.

Ideation
This stage is about coming up with solutions based on the problem statement. At this point in the process you’re not concerned about finding the best solution but creating as many possible solutions as you can with the help of brainstorming and other ideation techniques.

• The open library of more than 400+ facilitation tools from SessionLab offers a wide variety of ideation methods. From brainwriting to 3-12-3 brainstorm, you can find the best methods to get ideas flowing in the team. It is free to use, and by signing up you can also save your favourites or add your own tools to the library.
• For collective brainstorming, idea collection and note-taking use Realtimeboard. Imagine it as a huge, endless online whiteboard for whatever task you need whether its brainstorming with colleagues or stakeholders, creating a mindmap of ideas, or user story boards. It’s all up to you. The free version offers 3 boards for three-person collaboration but can also be shared with guest viewers too. It also integrates with Slack.
• Ideaflip is a simple yet elegant tool for brainstorming sessions either with your team or alone. Anyone can add their ideas on post-it like notes to the virtual space. Ideaflip enables commenting and idea groping for easy and fast decision-making. If someone invites you to a board you don’t need to subscribe, but you can also create your own unlimited amount of boards and have 2 guests per board for 9 USD per month.

Prototyping
By this stage you will have a few solutions or features that you will want to test. Prototypes do not have to be too detailed, high-quality or actually even working yet. The idea is to create a prototype that is sufficiently able to display a specific feature or working mode.

• Boords aims to be your complete storyboard toolbox. Their storyboard creator allows you to experiment with pictures and gifs, voiceover and action text or redraw existing frames. With the Animation tool you can actually make animation from your frames with sounds. Plus you can collaborate with anyone in real time. A basic plan includes 3 storyboards, 1 user and Boords branding for 12 USD per month.
• Mockingbird has a clean and user-friendly interface making it one of the best prototyping and wireframe applications. Features include drag and drop UI, linking together several mockups to make it interactive and smart text resizing. Sharing with direct links makes collaboration super easy. The basic plan costs 12 USD for 3 projects.
• Unlike Mockingbird and Broods, POP is a mobile application for turning your sketches into animations. It is very easy -just take snaps of your sketches or pictures and the app merges them into an interactive prototype. The best thing about POP is that it allows you to share your prototype and get feedback from users instantly. It is available for iOS and Android.

Testing
When testing the complete product or service, it often happens that data gained through testing will redefine the problem statement or several features, making Design Thinking a real iterative process. While nothing beats the ultimate experience of seeing your users interacting live with a prototype, there are various different tools you can use when you have to conduct user testing remotely. And if your prototype is a website, you can also benefit from website analytics and screen capture tools.

• UserTesting.com one of the best and biggest names in user testing applications. Pick users according to what you want to test whether it’s a website or mobile app. The platform records every move your testers make, so you can truly understand how they navigate and perform the tasks you assign to them. Try it out for free, and it is 49 USD per video session after that.
• Another great tool for testing is Hotjar. This all-in-one analytics and feedback tool enables you to collect data on your funnel conversions, see where people click and how they navigate on your site. They offer instant feedback from users and feedback polls to identify problems the user may be having. The basic plan is free and collects data from 2000 page views/day.
• Pingpong is a user-research platform where you can find tens of thousand of testers from all over the world. The platform will automatically set up the best testers for you. You can easily schedule interviews which can be recorded and later analyzed. They work on a credit-based approach: 1 credit = 30 minute interview = 75 Euro.

+1 Browse through more than 500+ design tools and resources on Public Design Vault ! You will find everything needed for design work from templates to sort cards, toolkits and podcasts. Make sure to check it out!

We hope that all of these tools will be useful and will support you in creating awesome, valuable and human-centered products and services for us and the world! If you happen to deliver workshops, make sure to check out our post on the best online tools for workshops, too!

The International Best Practice Competition encourages organizations to share their best operational and managerial practices, processes, systems, and initiatives and learn from the experience of others. It provides an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of individuals and teams that have been responsible for creating and/or managing the introduction and deployment of best practices.

To submit your Best Practice please visit http://www.bestpracticecompetition.com/entry-form where you can download an entry form. The 2^nd call for entries closes on 21^st of September 2018. Last year there were 65 entries with 28 qualifying to the Competition Event.

The 6th International Best Practice Competition will be held in Abu Dhabi, UAE, 10-12 December 2018 as part of the Global Organisational Excellence Congress courtesy of the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce & Industry.

The Congress will also include:

24^th Asia Pacific Quality Organisation International Conference

• ACE Team Awards Competition 2018
• 18^th Global Performance Excellence Award

12^th International Benchmarking Conference

• 6^th Global Benchmarking Awards

6^th International Best Practice Competition

• 2^nd Organisation-wide Innovation Award

Sheikh Khalifa Excellence Award’s Best Practice Sharing Conference

The other awards/competitions that will be held as part of the Congress are explained here https://www.globalorganisationalexcellencecongress.com/enter-a-competition

The winner of the International Best Practice Competition in 2017 was Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (Mumbai Refinery), India with a best practice titled ‘Employee Health Management System’. In 2015 the winners were Al Jazeera International Catering LLC, UAE with a best practice titled ‘Our Planet – Our Responsibility’. and Dubai Corporation for Ambulance Services (DCAS), UAE, with a best practice titled ‘Cultural Sensitivity Gives Birth to a Maternity Care’. For the full list of winners and their presentation videos click here.